Summer Days with Coo

Summer Days with Coo centres on Koichi Uehara, a schoolboy living in the suburbs of Tokyo who finds an unusual stone in a dried-up riverbed and takes it home. When the object comes into contact with water, it turns out to be a kappa, a creature from Japanese folklore, dormant underground for roughly three hundred years. Koichi names him Coo, and his family takes the small water sprite in. Life in the city does not suit Coo, who misses others of his kind, so he and Koichi set off one hot summer day to look for more kappa. Word of the discovery spreads, bringing unwelcome public attention.

The film was released in Japan in July 2007 and runs 138 minutes. Keiichi Hara directed and wrote the screenplay, with Yoshihiro Iwasaki and Yutaka Sugiyama producing. It was Hara's eighth directorial feature, following seven Crayon Shin-chan films, and precedes Colorful, Miss Hokusai, The Wonderland and Lonely Castle in the Mirror. The voice cast includes Kazato Tomizawa as Coo, Takahiro Yokokawa as Koichi, Naoki Tanaka and Tamaki Matsumoto as his parents, and Ken'ichi Nagira as Coo's father.

The film sits firmly in the fantasy drama territory of its director's later work. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.4 from around 2,400 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 7.8 from 148 votes. Both figures indicate a warmly received film with a modest but appreciative audience outside Japan.