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San-X's Sumikko Gurashi Brand Gets New TV Anime Short Series

The official website for the upcoming fourth anime film of Yuri Yokomizo and San-X's Sumikko Gurashi franchise announced on Monday that the franchise will have a new short anime series titled Sumikko Gurashi: Koko ga Ochitsukun Desu (This Is Where I Relax). The one-minute shorts will premiere on the NTV network in the ZIP! morning variety program's new "ZIP! 1-Minute Anime" segment on April 4, with each episode streaming on TVer and YouTube for one week after the program's airing. Gaku Kinoshita is serving as the overall director and technical director of the shorts at Fanworks.

The shorts will feature a new character "Kedama (Pink Sweater)." ("Kedama" is the Japanese term for the fuzzy pills that form on wool sweaters.) The staff teases this character might have came off a pink sweater worn by an announcer at the ZIP! studio.

The fourth Sumikko Gurashi film will open in Japan this fall.

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.

Sources: Sumikko Gurashi film's website and X/Twitter account, Comic Natalie