BODY: Red Riding Hood has swapped her basket for a magnifying glass. On Monday, the official site for the TV anime of Aito Aoyagi's Akazukin, Tabi no Tochuu de Shitai to Deau. β known in English as Red Riding Hood: A Detective Story β dropped a first key visual, a debut promotional video, and a fresh round of cast and staff announcements. The series premieres in January 2027 on Tokyo MX, BS-NTV and Yomiuri TV.
The newly revealed cast leans on familiar voices from across the medium. Takuya Satou (Super no Ura de Yani Suu Futari) plays Jill, with Atsushi Tamaru (Nanatsu no Maken ga Shihai suru) as Antonio and veteran Motoko Kumai (Cardcaptor Sakura) as Rodrigo. Koutarou Nishiyama voices Paolo, Sakiko Uran takes the role of Oyayubi-hime β Thumbelina, in other words β and Ryouko Shiraishi narrates.
Behind the camera, Itsurou Kawasaki is pulling triple duty as director, scriptwriter and sound director at studio BENTEN Film. Manami Minakata and Yuuko Yahiro handle character design, Jun Ichikawa composes the score with music production by Pony Canyon, and Izumi Hoki and Hiroshi Katou share art direction. Ryouta Tamura, Satoru Kiyomaru, Shunsuke Masuda and Yasuhiro Iwabuchi serve as animation directors, with Chie Yoshimura on color design and Daisuke Hiraki editing.
Aoyagi's comedy mystery novels launched under Futabasha in August 2020 and have run to four volumes, the most recent arriving in July 2025. The premise is exactly as grim-cute as the title suggests: a well-traveled Red Riding Hood keeps stumbling across corpses, and keeps solving the cases, with the Brothers Grimm's supporting cast rotating through as suspects and victims.
The insider take
From Tokyo, the interesting signal here is BENTEN Film. The studio is still a young name, and handing a full fairy-tale whodunnit to a compact production house while Kawasaki absorbs director, script and sound duties reads as a deliberately author-driven bet rather than a committee product. That is increasingly how Japan's mid-budget late-night slots work in 2027: smaller studios, tighter creative control, and literary source material that leans on dialogue and deduction instead of expensive action cuts. Futabasha's label has quietly become a reliable pipeline for exactly this kind of oddball genre hybrid, and a January slot across Tokyo MX, BS-NTV and Yomiuri TV suggests the committee expects word-of-mouth rather than an opening-week blitz.
Originally reported by News - MyAnimeList (English).