A haze the color of a bruise hangs over the city in Kurayukaba, and every resident who walks into it seems to vanish without a trace.
What is Kurayukaba about?
Set in a retrofuturistic settlement built into a canyon, this short animated feature follows a low-level worker for the local rail authority who gets pulled into investigating a string of disappearances tied to the mysterious purple smoke drifting through the lower districts. As he digs past official explanations, he finds a city built on brittle infrastructure and buried compromises, where authorities are more interested in controlling the story than solving it. The mystery unfolds in a tightly wound 64 minutes, trading spectacle for atmosphere: steam-powered trains, narrow alleyways, and a sense that the ground itself might not be trustworthy. What starts as a missing-persons case widens into questions about who actually runs the city and what they are willing to hide to keep it running.
About the cast
Hakuzan Kanda voices the reluctant investigator at the center of the story, with Tomoyo Kurosawa, Yu Serizawa, and Raikou Sakamoto filling out a small ensemble of railway workers and city residents caught up in the search. The cast is compact by design, keeping the focus on a handful of characters rather than a sprawling city-wide roster.
Context & significance
Directed by Shigeyoshi Tsukahara and released in 2024, the film comes from the team behind the earlier Sonny Boy project and carries a similarly distinct visual identity, built around a steampunk-adjacent world of rail lines and industrial haze. At just over an hour, it's structured more like an extended mystery episode than a conventional feature, favoring mood and world-building over a sprawling plot.
Watching Kurayukaba on Ktime
The film is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing, letting the mystery of the vanishing residents play out entirely in Farsi. Reading through the details on this page is free; watching the film itself only requires a K-Time account login, on a service built around Farsi-language streaming for Iranian audiences abroad.