A haunted toy kidnaps kids at a demon amusement park. Saturday morning cartoon? Nope — pure nightmare fuel.
Akuma-kun and his friends go to the Makai Amusement Park to solve the child kidnapping case caused by an autonomous mysterious toy. An original work for the theater of the Toei Manga Festival, which is an animation of the original manga by Shigeru Mizuki.
Production
Toei Manga Festival's hyper-saturated 1990 aesthetic
Practical Effects
Hand-drawn yokai designs that aged like fine weird wine
Direction
Junichi Sato before Sailor Moon — already unhinged
Director
Junichi Sato
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Toei Manga Festival films were theatrical events where kids got multiple short anime — this was the horror slot parents regretted.
Shigeru Mizuki's original Akuma-kun manga ran alongside GeGeGe no Kitaro, sharing his obsession with yokai as misunderstood outsiders rather than pure evil.
JP
