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Sumikko Gurashi Gets 4th Anime Film This Fall

Fanworks announced on Friday that San-X's Sumikko Gurashi franchise is getting a fourth anime film that will open in Japan this fall. The franchise's orginal illustrator Yuri Yokomizo drew an illustration to celebrate the announcement.

Yoshihiko Inohara and Manami Honjō will return as narrators for the film at Fanworks. Asmik Ace, Inc. is distributing the film.

Sumikko Gurashi debuted in 2012 as slightly negative characters who like to stay in the corner of a room. The characters include "Shirokuma," a polar bear who is sensitive to cold; "Penguin?" (with a question mark in its name), a penguin who is unsure if it is actually a penguin; "Tonkatsu," a piece of pork cutlet that was left uneaten; "Neko," a shy cat; and "Tokage," who hides his nature as one of the last dinosaurs.

The first anime film, titled Sumikkogurashi – Good to be in the corner, opened in Japan in November 2019. The film eventually sold a total of 1.22 million tickets, and it earned 1.4 billion yen (about US$12.8 million) at the box office in Japan as of February 2020. The film won the award for Best Animation of the Year at the 29th Annual Japan Movie Critics Awards in June 2020.

Eiga Sumikko Gurashi: Aoi Tsukiyo no Mahō no Ko (The Magical Child of the Blue Moonlit Night), the second film, opened in Japan in November 2021, and sold about 200,000 tickets to earn about 250 million yen (about US$2.22 million that time) in its first three days.

Eiga Sumikko Gurashi: Tsugihagi Kōjo no Fushigi na Ko (The Mysterious Child of the Makeshift Factory), the franchise's third anime film, opened in Japan in November 2023, and sold 192,300 tickets for 242,553,320 yen (about US$1.63 million in current conversion) in its first three days.

The franchise had its first-ever television anime that premiered its first episode in October 2023. A puppet musical ran in Tokyo in August to September 2024.

Source: Press release