Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek

Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek premiered earlier this year in March at the Tokyo International Anime Fair, where it quietly picked up an award for Notable Entry in the General Category. In Korea, it received a Best Film Nomination at the Seoul Comics and Animation Festival. Later, it went on to win Best Short film at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.




This awesome-looking anime follows a group of eight masked teens as they engage in a deadly game of Hide and Seek with a group of bloodthirsty demons under the streets of Tokyo. The fast paced story follows Hikora and Yaimao, who've joined the sinister game in order to find their sister who disappeared during a previous game.

Packing a tremendous visual punch unlike anything you've seen before, Kakuenbo is completely 3-D animated, except that it doesn't look it — instead, the 3D is used to deliver what looks like extremely high-quality cel-animation. The lighting effects alone are worth the price. This dark, sinister film is the very first production effort from Yamatoworks, and we hope to see more from this exciting and imaginative studio.


The world of Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek is a grungy, dilapidated city that is a mix of old and new. Masses of wires connect broken-down yet towering traditional Japanese style buildings. The city is often grey and smoggy, but even on sunny days, the buildings are so tall that they block out the sunlight. Rumors spread about this town. They say that kids go there to play a strange game of hide-and-seek. The rumors also say that the children who go to play don't come back. It's said that the demons who live in the city take them away.

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