‘Gannibal’: How a Series About Eating Children Became Disney+’s Biggest Live-Action Hit in Japan

The hit horror-thriller series Gannibal, which centers on a remote village’s secret tradition of eating children alive, was always an unlikely choice as Disney‘s first big-budget, live-action streaming series produced in Japan, a country with deep ties to the House of Mouse’s classic, family-friendly brand. Production of the show’s first two seasons also ran significantly over schedule and over budget — but Disney’s big bet on the series appears to be paying off.

Gannibal has become Disney+’s most-viewed title in Japan since the launch of its second season on March 19, and it surpassed 1 million hours streamed within just nine days of release, a new record for the service in the country (in the U.S., Gannibal streams exclusively on Hulu).

“To be fully transparent, it did take us by surprise when this IP was first offered to us,” says Gaku Narita, Disney’s executive director of original content in Japan. “On the surface, it’s a very horrific story, and we initially had our doubts — until we started reading the source material, and then we couldn’t put it down.”

Gannibal is based on a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masaaki Ninomiya that ran from 2018 to 2021. The title is well known in Japan, but it has more of a cult following than the country’s blockbuster manga hits like YuYu Hakusho or City Hunter, both adapted into live-action spectacles by Netflix last year.

Gannibal follows Daigo Agawa (played by Yuya Yagira, who won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor award in 2004 when he was just 12 years old for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows), a young investigator reassigned from the city to serve as the sole police officer in Kuge, a small traditional village deep in the Japanese hinterland. Soon after Daigo’s arrival, with his wife and young daughter in tow, he learns that the village’s previous police officer mysteriously went missing. The local villagers are unpredictable to Daigo and his family, making welcoming gestures one day and then bristling with annoyance the next, coming up with vague pretexts for how the family has offended the community’s traditions with their big-city ways. When a corpse turns up in the nearby forest — ostensibly the victim of a boar attack — Daigo is brought into contact with the Goto family, Kuge’s most powerful and brutish clan, which boasts a lineage stretching back hundreds of years into the region’s past. Gradually, Daigo comes to learn of a superstitious folk tradition the Gotos have secretly kept alive into the present day — the sacrificial eating of a young child during the village’s annual traditional summer festival.

Much of the suspense of Gannibal‘s first season stemmed from Daigo’s cat-and-mouse game with the Gotos as he struggled to come to grips with their cultish practices and ascertain how much — if not all — of the village was involved. The second season goes deeper in exploring how the Gotos’ cannibalistic tradition came to be and the impossible compromises the family’s young patriarch, Keisuke Goto (played by Show Kasamatsu, the breakout Japanese lead of Max’s Tokyo Vice), has made to keep his family’s twisted traditions alive. For a show with such a ghoulish premise, the sense of mystery is sustained improbably long, and the character development goes impressively deep, resulting in an understanding of Keisuke Goto’s predicament, if not empathy for his horrific actions.

“What drew us into the project was the universal theme about family,” explains Narita. “The word we kept coming back to when discussing the essence of the show was ‘protect.’ It’s about protecting your family, of course, but also your values and your way of life. There were a lot of universal themes lying latent inside the material.”

Narita adds: “In a tumultuous world, where people are feeling divided and insecure for all kinds of reasons, we thought this theme would resonate — in Japan and overseas.”

Gannibal‘s core creative team is made up of rising young Japanese talent excited to break out of the quick, low-production-value mode of series creation common to the Japanese TV industry of the past several decades. Takamasa Oe, who was co-nominated with Ryusuke Hamaguchi for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2022 for Drive My Car, wrote all of Gannibal‘s adapted scripts. Producer Teruhisa Yamamoto, also Oscar-nominated for Drive My Car, is the show’s lead producer, while rising talent Shinzô Katayama directs nearly all of the episodes (Katayama apprenticed as an assistant director under Korea’s Bong Joon-ho early in his career, and he’s currently shooting The Human Vapor, Netflix’s biggest Japanese series project for 2026).

For each of Gannibal‘s seasons, Yamamoto estimates that Disney spent about three times the typical cost of a single season of live-action Japanese TV. Each season also took about six months to shoot — twice the norm in Japan.

“We surrounded Katayama with craftspeople and production personnel from the world of Japanese cinema, rather than TV because we wanted the series to have a movie-level production quality,” Yamamoto says. “That’s something very different for Japan.”

He adds that over 90 percent of the show was also shot on location. The location shoots spanned Japan’s Hyogo, Aichi, and Nagano prefectures, giving Gannibal a feeling of grounded realism despite its more fantastical elements.

Katayama says his priority for Gannibal‘s second season was to up the action as Daigo’s relationship with the Gotos transitions from intrigue to violent confrontation.

“I really thought a lot about how I could make this season really fun to watch,” Katayama says. “For example, there’s a lot more gun action, and in the series finale, there are some high-speed sequences that we used a lot of challenging techniques to achieve.”

The second season of Gannibal ends, where the story of Ninomiya’s original manga series concludes. The show’s creative team says they’ve begun discussing potential ideas to broaden the story but won’t proceed unless they get the author’s — and Disney’s — blessing.

“The story of Daigo and Keisuke comes to an end,” explains Oe. “When we talk about a possible next season, we have some ideas and feelings for new angles that we like for what could come next, but we would have to discuss all of that with Ninomiya, and we wouldn’t go forward without him.”

Yamamoto notes how momentum has been building across Japan’s content sector in recent years — the ever-growing global popularity of anime, the Oscars success of Drive My Car and Godzilla Minus One, and the smash-hit samurai series Shogun, which was produced by FX but starred a mostly Japanese cast.

The domestic Japanese TV industry is still adjusting to the recent incursions and investments of Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon’s Prime Video, which have begun to shake up the tired production models of the country’s insular traditional broadcasters.

“The premium streaming series is still something new here, and we’re all trying to figure out what budget and approach is suitable for this new era,” Yamamoto explains. “No one knows the answer to that question yet, so for Gannibal, we just pursued quality as much as possible.”

He adds: “This is a critical time for our industry. We want the world to notice us — and to know that they can rely on us to create great live-action TV shows, too.”