Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek

Kakurenbo is neither a manga nor an anime series; it's a short (about 25 minutes long), animated psychological horror movie. It was written and produced by Shuuhei Morita. The premise of the movie is a very deadly game of masked hide-and-seek.

Eight children sneak into an abandoned city to play hide-and-seek. They aren't playing against each other: the rule is that they have to outrun the oni (a type of Japanese demon that mostly resembles an ogre), who is "it". However, the oni is the winner of the last game played in the city; they look like a child, too. So one of the eight is an enemy in disguise. To make things worse, the city is also populated by four demons: the Liver Taker, the Oil Taker, the Blood Taker, and the Child Taker. These creatures come to life after the game begins and are on the oni's side, helping it collect the children for its ultimate purpose and the reason behind the tradition of the city's game in the first place.

The main character of Kakurenbo is Hikora, who is playing the game along with a friend in order to find out what happened to his sister, who disappered after playing in the last game. The other children include a small gang, who playing because their leader doesn't believe in the demons, and twins who never reveal their reasons for joining the game. (Or anything: their dialogue consists of a couple grunts during a fight. I guess the movie's budget for voice actors ran low?)

Despite how short it is (practically the length of a single anime episode!), Kakurenbo is one of my favorites: the animation is gorgeous, the story is interesting, and the monsters and the ending are super eerie. I actually bounced in place when I discovered it on my library's shelves and realized I could finally watch it again.

Kakurenbo was distributed with English dubs and subtitles by U.S. Manga Corps, a company that has sadly gone out of business, meaning that the DVD is out of print. So this is another time where a library comes in handy!