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In this anime series, a family lives with a weird alien who looks vaguely like a cat, with whiskers and all. In every episode, the children ask for a wish, the alien grants it, and the wish turns into a big complicated adventure, but the wishes always get reversed when the sun sets.
Also, the alien is allergic to water. I remember in one episode it got very sick because a drop of water touched one of its whiskers.
This is Onegai! Samia-don, (AKA Please! Psammea-don, AKA おねがい!サミアどん)
A Japanese anime that was broadcast from 2 April 1985 to 4 February 1986 with a total of 78 episodes produced. This anime is based on the 1902 novel Five Children and It by English author Edith Nesbit.
The anime differs from the novel in revolving around four children rather than five. Three of the children (Cyril, Robert and Jane) are siblings while the fourth (Anne) is their friend and neighbor. The four children encounter the Psammead who, in the anime, is depicted as being yellow with a blue hat, and more of a grumpy and lazy being than mischievous.
I don't know a film like this, but the story sounds like Five children and It by E. Nesbit. The creature is called a Psammead, and they find it in a sand-pit.
Like Nesbit's The Railway Children, the story begins when a group of children move from London to the countryside of Kent. The five children – Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother, known as the Lamb – are playing in a gravel pit when they uncover a rather grumpy, ugly, and occasionally malevolent Psammead, a sand-fairy with ability to grant wishes. The Psammead persuades the children to take one wish each day to be shared among them, with the caveat that the wishes will turn to stone at sunset. This, apparently, used to be the rule in the Stone Age, when all that children wished for was food, the bones of which then became fossils. The five children's first wish is to be "as beautiful as the day". The wish ends at sunset and its effects simply vanish, leading the Psammead to observe that some wishes are too fanciful to be changed to stone.
