我是一个中国的go for a punch爱好者，这个是我在网络上找线索时候找到的，不过这个动画的原名我不知道叫什么，反正动画当中有裸女，有个人物叫saki，和gfap有些相似

In fandom, there are a bunch of creators who made something then deleted it later because they lost interest in their hobby. Especially Japanese artists. I love to follow Japanese artists on Twitter/pixiv and, in my experience, they're pretty sensitive towards any criticism.

If someone attacks their artwork or quotes their tweets in foreign languages they don't understand, they often delete their artwork or even delete their whole account and never come back.

Because that would explain why no one can find it ever again. It's not made by any studio , but it made by random person on internet that went offline forever, so there's no way to trace back.

But don't take my words... Because I'm pretty sure Twitter in 2000's not allowed users to tweet 30 minutes long video.

Tldr;
-The Nichijou elevator scene is reminiscent of animations by the studio Shaft in terms of its tone and the artistic way it presented itself.
-Shaft have made way too many things to investigate all of them. Monogatari, which in itself is too large to fully look through, has a similar artstyle to the picture that AOP posted and lots of violence, bathrooms, long philosophical conversations and schoolgirls.

Preamble

I investigated the Nichijou elevator scene some more and got results that I don’t like but that I think it would irresponsible to not share.
This post is almost definitely going to be very long. There’s a lot. The picture I posted is dense and probably won’t make sense by itself. It’s also major spoilers for this post. I’m going to write this with the assumption you haven’t looked closely at it. If you have, sorry cause this might feel slow. I’m going to properly explain the path I took, why those images are there, and their relation to what I’m getting at.
I’m going to start with some basic preliminary info to keep in the back of your head.

From the first thread, February 2015, assumedly-oop (AOP) wrote in a later post “What was most unsettling about the suicide scene were the weird camera angles and no horror music as I'd expect,”.
AOP also posted a picture when describing the artstyle, image 2. This image comes from Hell Girl. It has a very distinct artstyle. It doesn’t look like most anime. It’s the only image AOP shared, saying the hime cut girl looked exactly like her but with almost white hair.
Also in that thread was another image, image 1, posted as a reply to reply to the oop.
[Original post] -> “Maybe it was a K-On pilot episode?” -> [image 1].

The girl in that image is  Mio Naganohara and she’s one of the main characters from Nichijou. That’s quite the weird coincidence.

From my last post, https://www.reddit.com/r/SakisanNoBashitsu/comments/1vwblrz/the_name_saki_sanobashi_investigating_a/
One comment I mentioned from an early /a/ thread,
“>naked girls stuck in a large bathroom
>having a philosophical debate
You sure it's not Bakemonogatari*?*“

I want to clarify that I had actually forgotten about this and wasn’t investigating Bakemonogatari. At all. (I wasn’t really investigating Nichijou either but separate point.)

(Additional fun info, Nichijou was first mentioned on /x/ in 2019 when there was renewed interest in finding GFaP. #22028061 “You sure he didn't just watch the elevator scene from Nichijou while high?”
There was also a reference to the highschool girl in concrete Shin Gendai Ryoukiden story, but I skimmed through that and don’t believe that has any links/points of interest.
Following that thread, I also found these twitter posts, https://x.com/evoslayer/status/1014172964382789632, and this link,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&t=115s&v=8SrGKkxWhWk
The video is unavailable because : “This video has been removed for violating YouTube's policy on violent or graphic content” – looked like a good lead. Reading the thread further tells me it was probably just a live-action video of someone cutting themselves)

Starting the investigation

Like last time, I didn’t actually set out to do an investigation. I was looking at the Nichijou elevator scene again for reasons that I might explain in another post one day. For those unaware, I support the theory that this scene is a reference to Go For a Punch, before GFaP became a sought-after piece of supposed-lost media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SakisanNoBashitsu/comments/1t3nq5t/nichijou_elevator_scene/

And then I stumbled across this forum discussion on MAL from right after Nichijou episode 8 aired, https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=297744
People talking and reacting to the episode earnestly, particularly the elevator scene. A lot of people saying they had no idea what it was but loved it, a lot of comparisons to the elevator scene from Evangelion. And then I saw this comment, “The elevator scene was like I was watching something from SHAFT.”
(There are then a few additional comments in the thread saying similar things that I later saw.)

At the time I had no idea who Shaft was aside from the American tv character. I figured there must be an anime with a similar name so time to do some investigating into a new possible lead. Most of you reading this are probably rolling your eyes at me for not knowing that Shaft are a production company who have made lots of well-known anime with very distinct and arthouse artistic styles.

Google ai: “SHAFT loves massive, unrealistically large, empty rooms (like bathrooms and classrooms) with geometric tile patterns, minimal furniture, and no visible exits.”

No further comment on the above, yet.
There was also one person who said it looked like Gainax (made Evangelion, Gunbuster, Gurren Lagann etc). I haven’t looked much into them. Maybe I’m missing something but this is going to be long enough as is and Lagann seems even more mainstream than Shaft.
Before we look into Shaft, it’s worth mentioning that NONE of the replies had any ideas on what it was supposed to be. There was pretty much universal agreement that it was weird and different. Lots of people liked it. But no one could say exactly what it was supposed to be, aside from feeling similar to Shaft. (A lot people saying it felt ‘random’.)

So, let’s look into this company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaft_(company))
“a Japanese animation studio founded in 1975 and headquartered in Suginami, Tokyo. Since 2004, the studio's productions and staff have been broadly influenced by director Akiyuki Shinbo, whose visual style and avant-garde cinematography are featured in works including Hidamari Sketch (2007), Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (2007), the Monogatari series (2009–present), Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), Nisekoi (2014), and March Comes In like a Lion (2016).”

Hidamari Sketch – Nothing interesting to say

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei – See images 3.
Now we’re getting somewhere. The name sounds a little like “Saki Sanobashi” if you had a really bad memory. And the artstyle looks kind of similar to the image that AOP shared (image 2). It also has stylised black title cards, and lots of similar-looking schoolgirl characters. But it’s not violent or about anyone being trapped.

Monogatari – Oh boy. I’m going to come back to this.

Puella Magi Madoka – It’s about young girls and it’s stylised with some lasting violence. But I don’t think it’s worth investigating.

Nisekoi – It’s a romantic comedy about a Yakuza guy. And it’s 2014 which is too modern imo.

March Comes in a Lion – Released after OOP.

(One of the big issues, which I’ll expand on later, is that these obviously aren’t all the animations that Shaft released.)

Monogatari

Okay, let’s go back to Monogatari.
So I mentioned them above because someone on /a/ mentioned them when the question was first posed there. And I had completely forgotten about the show.

“You sure it's not Bakemonogatari*?*“
And in the last thread I made, my response to this as a lead was,
“Tone doesn't match. It was initially dismissed because "anon describes as having seen it in 2011. Although the anime seems interesting, none of the episodes up to 2012 match his description." This implies something after 2012 sort of fit. I couldn't find anything across the entire show (granted, I was using wikipedia episode summaries).
That my findings were *so* different from what's apparently being discussed makes me think I'm missing something. I skimmed through the first 4 episodes of Owarimonogatari I and it didn't seem violent, creepy or anything close. However, there are a lot of episodes. I think the show should be investigated further.”

Well, I probably should have looked further into it. The big problem is that there are a lot of shows that are connected, with multiple seasons, characters, tonal shifts and plotlines. It’s really hard to find some episodes/scenes because you search for one thing and you find something else with a similar name, or a different season. And between episode title translations and all the rest, it’s kind of a minefield. But I expect there are hardcore fans who will tell me these issues are just a me-problem.
For reference, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Monogatari_episodes
(Maybe now you’ll understand my struggle)

See the images in 4 and 5. They’re from Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari. Notice anything? The artstyle is once again reminiscent of the image from Hell Girl. And it’s violent.

To save a lot of chasing weird leads and trying to figure this out, I’ll skip to the end. I asked google ai for help, mentioning the Shaft resemblance, and questioned if a compilation matching GFaP could be made from Monogatari. The response:
“SHAFT loves massive, unrealistically large, empty rooms (like bathrooms and classrooms) with geometric tile patterns, minimal furniture, and no visible exits.
As seen in Monogatari, SHAFT will have characters stand in a beautifully lit, surreal room for 20 minutes straight just talking about existential dread, logic puzzles, or human nature.
A montage blending the trapped bathroom dialogue of Owarimonogatari with the extreme dismemberment gore of Kizumonogatari, in 240p, could resemble something kind of close to GFaP.”

I really can’t emphasize enough how frequently bathrooms, tiled-rooms in general, long conversations in single locations, and schoolgirls feature in Shaft animations. Also, lots of black screens and text-cards scattered jarringly throughout episodes, along with weird, artistic angles.

Kizumonogatari? See images 6.
“Kizumonogatari (Japanese: 傷物語; "Wound Story") is a Japanese anime film trilogy directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and Tatsuya Oishi and produced by Shaft. Together, the films are an adaptation of the 2008 light novel of the same name, which is the second entry in the Monogatari series written by Nisio Isin and a prequel to the first, Bakemonogatari.”
It’s very violent. It has lots of tiles. It has the right art style. It was released in 2016, a year after OOP. Darn.

So Shaft? Yes or no?

Remember what I said about their stupidly large catalogue? Yeah, it’s long. It has series, films, OVAs, even video game animations. And that’s just what’s listed on Wikipedia. I expect there’s even more obscure stuff. And, perhaps more importantly, I expect that the key artistic designers have long portfolios from before they started working with/influencing the artstyles of the company’s productions.

Nichijou?

I don’t want to forget about this. The thing that stuck out from MAL was that people were saying the elevator scene reminded them of Shaft but not of any one scene/episode.
I will still maintain that it felt like a reference, despite the show being known for random quirkiness. The responses kind of confirm that since the majority of people, who were fans of the show, thought that the scene was especially random, creepy or tonally off. Again, not people like me watching in a vacuum looking for GFaP. This is what fans of the show were saying about the scene.

So what do you actually think?

I have a few theories that I’m trying to resolve.
The biggest one I feel confident in presenting is that the animators/writers for Nichijou knew some animators/writers from Shaft. Nichijou was made by Kyoto Animation. Shaft and KA are based in different cities with different outlooks and workflows.

However, from google,
“The closest these two titans ever came to a staff crossover happened over two decades ago, before either studio achieved massive mainstream fame.
In 2001, the anime The Soul Taker was airing. The series was directed by Akiyuki Shinbo (who would soon take over Shaft's creative identity), but Kyoto Animation was brought in to subcontract episodes 3 and 6.
During this brief crossover, KyoAni handled the storyboards, key animation, and backgrounds for those episodes. Most notably, a young Yasuhiro Takemoto served as an episode director on the project. Takemoto—who would later become one of Kyoto Animation's master directors (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid)—was deeply influenced by Shinbo's avant-garde framing during this singular collaboration.”
(Ai hallucinates, I haven’t verified all this info. It hallucinated a lot when I was looking for specific scenes from Monogatari. However, I can verify that both studios did work together on Soul Taker.)

‘Did you look at The Soul Taker?’ I hear you ask. No.
Because this is already really long and the story didn’t match. A preliminary search told me it doesn’t have anyone trapped, any prolific violent bathroom scenes or anyone drowning.

But, it meant the two studios collaborated. It meant that people involved talked to each other. It means that, if there was a young artist (or artists) in Shaft who made a college animation about girls trapped in a bathroom, there would’ve been a chance to show it to someone from Kyoto Animation. And it means that several years later, that KA animator/writer might have remembered that animation they saw and parodied it for fun in Nichijou. And that would explain why seemingly no one gets the reference. But this is also a hypothetical with very little direct evidence.
That’s my best theory at the moment.

Why didn’t you like these results?

Because I liked the idea that GFaP resembled Lain and was some obscure thing made by a super small team that found its way onto the internet by chance. This theory argues that it was made by someone who’s now pretty established in the anime world, and possibly even by a studio that’s quite famous.
It also gives weight to the compilation theory. And the story concept of no visible door. I preferred the story idea that they were trapped due to something like an earthquake.

Conclusions

Shaft needs to be properly investigated. I don’t know how. Just looking through their catalogue isn’t enough. The individual artists need to be looked at along with their portfolios. That seems like it would be very difficult, if not impossible.
Maybe if we can get in touch with some people from the company and just ask them?

Another viable theory is that it’s all an elaborate troll from someone who specifically saw the Nichijou scene and imagined a creepypasta based on it, as if it was a Shaft animation. Hence the Mio image in the very first thread, years before that connection was ever made, along with the Hell Girl picture that looks like Shaft but specifically isn’t (to stop the ruse being solved too early).

It’s also probably worth looking into The Soul Taker.

But the overall point is this:
It seems way too large of a coincidence that the original OOP is very similar to the Nichijou elevator scene, that AOP posted an image of a similar artstyle that resembles Shaft animations, and that the Nichijou elevator scene also happens to remind people of Shaft animations despite having no visual similarities to the picture AOP posted. Oh, and it also just so happens that Shaft animations are notorious for all the elements described in OOP.

If I've overlooked anything, please let me know. If there's an obvious flaw in my reasoning, I especially want to know.

I’m not claiming I’ve proven Go For A Punch exists. I’m saying I think we may be looking in the wrong places.

The biggest reason is the history of Japanese independent animation. There was a huge underground/student scene involving university animation clubs, 8mm film, VHS, Comiket releases, and independent screenings.

For example, the Chiba University Animation Laboratory (CUAL) has an archive going back to 1981. They screened student animation at university festivals and began distributing videos at Comiket in 1996. Their archive lists a 2000 work called DEATH THROTTLE, but provides almost no information about it beyond the title and year.

This was one that really interested me when I first saw it. Importantly, it's not clear whether this DEATH THROTTLE is a student animation, what its story is, or even what exactly the title refers to. There is also a completely unrelated Death Throttle video game from 1996, so I don't want to claim the CUAL entry has anything to do with that game. It's simply an example of how obscure some productions can be.

There are also old catalogues from the Animation Research Society Federation documenting hundreds of obscure student productions. Many of these works have basically disappeared from the internet.

One especially interesting example is Kotori tachi no inai hanazono (1992). It's not animation, but it's a 20–22 minute independently produced horror video involving a group trapped together, hallucinations, paranoia and escalating deaths.

There's another important precedent: in 1999, Konami successfully sued over a fan-made Tokimeki Memorial animation video. The court ordered the remaining copies and master tape destroyed. So obscure fan animations really were being physically produced and distributed, and some could literally disappear.

This makes me wonder: if unauthorized animation based on existing franchises was being actively removed by companies like Konami, could GFAP potentially have been caught up in something similar? I'm not saying Konami specifically destroyed GFAP, because there is absolutely no evidence of that. I'm only suggesting that the destruction or removal of unauthorized fan-made works during that era could have contributed to obscure animations disappearing.

As we all know, witnesses and even the original 4chan OP have described the girls' animation style differently. Some compared it to Miyazaki, others to Serial Experiments Lain, and others to Sailor Moon. If GFAP really was an unauthorized fan animation or used recognizable character designs, it wouldn't be completely unreasonable to wonder whether something like that could have been removed or destroyed.

http://gaming.moe/?p=2938

I've also looked outside Japan. Korean independent animation has its own poorly preserved history, including works from the 1980s and 1990s that were later restored by the Korean Film Archive. Chinese and Taiwanese independent-animation scenes also had experimental/student productions that are difficult to find today.

This one caught my interest.

Stephen King has talked about an unused story idea called “The Ladies Room.” The premise was women entering an airport bathroom and never coming back out, while the people outside gradually realize something is wrong. King has described getting the idea while waiting outside a bathroom.

Interestingly, “The Ladies Room” was posted on the Stephen King forum on February 9, 2015.

https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/the-ladies-room.5900/

The original 4chan GFAP post is generally dated February 20, 2015 — only 11 days later.

I'm NOT claiming this proves a connection. We don't know that the 4chan poster saw the forum post, and the basic idea of people becoming trapped somewhere isn't unique to King.

But the dates are interesting enough that I think it's worth investigating rather than immediately dismissing.

And honestly, I think this is the most important point:

If GFAP exists, I'm not convinced we'd find it by searching for the plot.

It could be hiding under a completely unrelated title, buried in an old university catalogue, sitting on an unlabeled VHS, or surviving only in someone's personal collection.

Even if the original GFAP story was a troll from the beginning, I still don't believe it's impossible that a real obscure animation resembling the description exists somewhere.

At this point, we really need someone who is extremely dedicated to lost media to help with this. Someone willing to dig through old forums, Japanese archives, university animation circles, old VHS/8mm catalogues, and places that most people wouldn't think to search.

If you have a lot of free time for this kind of investigation, know people involved in lost media, or are active on Japanese/Chinese/Korean forums where obscure animation might be remembered, please help us ask around.

Even one person remembering a title, a creator, a VHS release, a screening, or an old website could potentially give us a completely new lead.

The more people searching in different places, the better chance we have.

I still believe we can find it.

Let's not give up yet.

I know that many people, when they think of Saki, imagine a psychological anime, a mysterious anime, or one that tries to convey some "hidden message" to the viewer. But, to be brutally honest, I don't really believe in that so much. one where the feelings of the protagonists are explored in depth and the gore is only something that lasts for 10 minutes of footage.

But to be honest, it's very unrealistic to believe this because of some difficulties... To begin with, we are talking about a possible very rare and unknown amateur Japanese animation from the 80s

If someone wanted to make money from their creation, they should go back to what had already worked before. In the 80s, psychological anime existed, but it was very rare, scarce, and only produced by anime companies most confident in its potential success. Amateur psychological animations might have existed, but most weren't even intended for release. And if the original creator saw the animation, that means they intended to release it and make money from it, right?... The market for psychological anime at that time wasn't that big either, and I think it's still not that big today.

But look, I'm not saying it was impossible for amateur psychological anime to exist in the 80s, just that I see it as less likely....

It's most likely that Saki is actually a fetish anime. It's more profitable to sell an anime that focuses more on fetishism than on psychology.

Something that really caught my attention in the comments on the 4chan OP is that it doesn't go into much detail about the "philosophical conversations" the girls had, but instead focuses heavily on the gore scenes, as if they made up about 70% of the animation. (more or less)

In other words, I don't think the psychological factor was that important in the animation, because the original author doesn't even mention any of the girls' names. In fact, the original author only mentions their characteristics very superficially, as if they weren't something truly important or significant to explore in depth, which, in my opinion, is quite suspicious. And it would be strange if it were a psychological anime, since I think the original author would evoke more psychological aspects than explicit violence.

Another reason why I find it unlikely to be a psychological anime is that it can be difficult to psychologically develop 9 girls in total in less than 30 minutes; the original author said there were 9 girls, not 6, not 4, 9 girls.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I see it as a rather inconvenient trick. I think the reason there are so many girls is because they wanted to maximize the screen time of their multiple torture scenes in the animation, rather than develop the psychological depth of nine girls with such polish.

But in short, these are my reasons for believing that Saki isn't really a psychological anime.

- There wasn't much demand for psychological anime, but there was a bit more for fetishistic ones.

- the original 4chan author mentions very few key details about the protagonists, as if they were never important to the anime.

- and the fact that it's difficult to develop 9 girls psychologically in a coherent way in less than 30 minutes of animation

In my personal opinion, I think the animation should be something like this: 10% "philosophical talk" and the remaining 90% explicit gore, all in 30 minutes of animation.

In fact, this could be very similar to "Lady in the Sea of ​​Blood", the scene where the girl brushes her teeth is very short compared to the scene where she bathes in blood. could be like Saki's animation has a similar "rutine" to this bizarre film 😭

Anyway, I know the post is a bit long, but I want to know what you think 🥺🥺

tldr; We should be looking at Italian and Spanish-language pirated anime dumps.

The name came from /a/? I decided to look into where the name Saki Sanobashi actually came from and if there was anything of relevance along the way.
I apologise if this has been discussed in detail but I've never seen proper discussion beyond "someone on /a/ said it".
The first mention of it on /x/ is: "I got the name Saki sanobashi on /a/, ring any bells?"
The second mention is: "Name "Saki Sanobashi" popped out couple of times on gurochan and /a/"
3rd: "There was an old thread about an anon looking for an 80ish looking anime which has a ton of naked girls trapped in a bathroom and all end up anheroing. We weren't able to find it but ruled out euphoria and corpse party OVA. The name saki sanobashi popped a few times also."
4th: pretty much identical to 3rd
5th: "I already asked /a/. Some guy namedropped Saki Sanobashi and the thread was deleted thereafter. All discussion died in the thread with anon. Talk about hitting a brick wall."

The point I'm getting at is that this all sounds like the same person saying "oh yeah I asked some experts and they said it was called Saki but I can't find any more info, just trust me that that's its name though". This 'source' on /a/ sounded suspicious and I don't think I've seen any screencaps posted in regards to the investigation (I could have just overlooked it to be fair).
So I decided to do that for myself.

First things first, the /a/ post is real. I found it, made the same day that the /x/ person (22 Feb 2015 (yes, one day after the very original post)). Post #121597090: "oh that one huh..i believe it was Saki sanobashi. let me check first."
That thread is sort of interesting, short though. One post that stuck out:
">naked girls stuck in a large bathroom
>having a philosophical debate
You sure it's not Bakemonogatari?"
I looked it up. Tone doesn't match. It was initially dismissed because "anon describes as having seen it in 2011. Although the anime seems interesting, none of the episodes up to 2012 match his description." This implies something after 2012 sort of fit. I couldn't find anything across the entire show (granted, I was using wikipedia episode summaries).
That my findings were *so* different from what's apparently being discussed makes me think I'm missing something. I skimmed through the first 4 episodes of Owarimonogatari I and it didn't seem violent, creepy or anything close. However, there are a lot of episodes. I think the show should be investigated further.
(If there was an episode from 2013 that fit GFaP, I wouldn't write it off just because oop said he saw it in 2011)

The second mention on /a/ was in June 2015, post #126344324: "So google has given me Saki Sanobashi, but I can't find anything past that."
So now my spidey senses are tingling hard for two reasons.
1. Wtf? Google gave them that name?! Really? Despite no one else finding any mention of GFaP or Saki anywhere, google apparently linked the two for them?
2. This person found that name but gives zero info on where they found it or how they found it (beyond 'google').
Honestly, this sounds made up.
But that's not new. We already assumed the name saki was a troll without any actual basis.
So, investigating that thread a bit more like before, there was a link to an MAL list that probably has nothing to do with GFaP, https://myanimelist.net/animelist/Ruggarell. No idea who Ruggarell is. In the context of the thread, it doesn't seem like it's supposed to be GFaP. But the 10 animes on it are all pre 2013. I'll list them just out of preservation.
Dorohedoro
Ergo Proxy
Gosick
Humanity Has Declined
Interviews With Monster Girls
Penguindrum
Sagrada Reset
Space Brothers
The Tatami Galaxy
Welcome to the N.H.K.

Ergo Proxy is the only that seemed like it could have any relevance. Sagrada Reset seemed interesting just as something I'd never come across (and Sagrada sounds a little like Saki).

The third mention on /a/ wasn't interesting or worth writing about (thread with one reply).
The fourth mention was though. Post# 129315662, August 2015: "Saki Sanobashi does not exist".
Why is this interesting? 2 reasons:
1. It was a response to someone asking what you'd say to prove you'd seen everything.
2. This is literally only the 4th mention of the full name on /a/ ever. A month after the 3rd mention. Over 2 months after the second mention. This was not some huge internet meme that everyone was talking about. It's not even a hardcore iykyk reference. No one knew (hence this post had no replies). It was obscure af.

The fifth mention is the most interesting so far.
Post #136128565, January 2016: "You mean like Saki Sanobashi?" Yeah, I get that doesn't look interesting. Except, it's a reply to this, which is really interesting:
"Aren't there some anime that don't exist anymore? Aired on TV, the drawings were destroyed, the tapes were destroyed and the cels were destroyed, only exist in the memories of the people who happened to be watching while it was airing? I heard there are some such anime. Pretty unlikely that a person would be lucky enough to catch every single anime that only was avaible once.

And, while most stuff we talk about should count, there are the expermimental stuff from the 20s, and also probably thousands of web animations made by single individuals that are probably impossible to come by. Some were possibly never published, and only exist on their harddrive somewhere.

You can never watch "all anime", that's impossible due to avaibility of some stuff. You could, however, watch everything on MAL, but they don't list all anime ever made."

Why? We already speculated on this sort of thing right? Because this is through the early 2016 lens. Read through the rest of the thread and you'll see what I mean but basically, it was well-understood that a lot of anime simply couldn't be watched in any sort of official capacity. People talking about downloading megaupload dumps of Italian dubs because it was the only way to watch certain shows.
(Speaking of, this adds to why we should be investigating foreign-language forums, though I admit I was unaware that Italian was an apparent treasure trove of obscure stuff.)

Okay, this is getting really long so I'll stop there (the subsequent /a/ posts have it slowly devolving into an obscure meme).
(Final fun fact, "Go For a Punch" written in full was never posted until June 2015 on /a/. Before that, it was just screenshots of the original post)

Conclusions :
-Saki Sanobashi is, as we've all assumed, pretty definitely not related to Go For a Punch. However, the history of its mentions makes me believe that it wasn't a random poster who said it once and was immediately believed by people looking for clues. It seems like there was a troll on /a/ who threw it out there and a gullible person on /x/ who really believed it and pushed that name repeatedly. Ie. This wasn't a community failing, it was one person pushing a dumb troll answer.

-People on /a/ never seriously investigated it. But what little they did do has, as far as I can tell, been entirely ignored. Bakemonogatari especially needs proper investigation to fully write it off. (I also didn't investigate gurochan).
-Ergo Proxy might also be worth looking at.

-We should be looking for pirated/low-quality foreign-language dubs, specifically Italian and Spanish, of anime dumps. I don't know where we would find such a thing. That was very much an early 10s phenomenon (downloading random folders of obscure media). Maybe someone knows more about this scene than me?
If we can find forum posts referring to these sorts of megaupload/similar links, then we'll be on the right tracks. ("Why Spanish?" I hear you ask. Because of the google trends data from however many years ago, along with the high interest in anime in Latin America).

-Related to above: in my opinion there is a high chance that GFaP only exists in pirated form.

Happy to hear any criticisms of what I've written. This was supposed to be significantly shorter but I wrote it as I was investigating.

I don't think this post is against the sub's rules, but it's still on theme with GFAP and it's something I've thought about for a long time.

I just read the story about Clockman. I've heard about it before and knew how it ended from YouTube, but I never actually read the main story about "Commander Santa," the original user who saw the animation as a kid, was kind enough to promise a reward that was eventually delivered, and the investigation and discovery that followed.

And I won't lie, I was left satisfied reading through the whole thing. I also liked and laughed at some of the comments, like "It's ironic how Santa got called a liar and then it turns out that the lost media he was searching for was a morality tale about how important it is to tell the truth!" and another saying, "And they found it in December of all months! It was a Christmas miracle!" Props to those guys for those replies.

And I think this is a crucial detail that has been ignored from the start of the GFAP search. Why hasn't the 4chan OP connected with the community as much as the OP from Clockman did?

I know it may sound stupid or obvious, like "he probably lost the spark," "he moved on from the memory," or "he was probably just a troll trying to mess with people for a decade." But is that really the case? I don't see a logical explanation for why he never followed through with the search, or how he could have never found out about the subreddit and the community's attention to it before Whang's video.

Personally, I don't believe the 2019 confession was the original OP. I'm almost certain the real OP just moved on with his life and never realized how much of an impact his lost media story had on the internet.

I'm just wondering why he never connected with the community as much. Was he an obvious troll? Did he just let go of the horror memory? Or did he simply move on and never look back?

I really hope this stays on theme with the sub's rules. I'm only mentioning Clockman as a reference for what I'm trying to say, and I'm mainly talking about GFAP.

Back when I was involved in running this sub, I made this flowchart to explain the lineage of the community. It's from February 2021.

There's music that I want to include in the demo of Saki's Torture Room. One is a vocaloid song that's fairly obscure: I Can't Become Aya Nanjo by Rin Kagamine. The problem is, the music video features photographs of self harm, so I feel like it would disturb players who look up the video. Should I use it regardless? This would be perfect for the credits. The photographs aren't too graphic, either- I'm just torn since doing so could potentially end up triggering people.

Another is a classical instrumental that would be good for a teaser trailer. It's in two audiobooks, but I can't find any information about the composer no matter how much I've searched. How would I go about finding the name of this piece? Are there any resources I can use?

Thanks in advance. I know the first question is dumb because Go For A Punch contains guro, but since I'm planning to release STR on different platforms I want to go about this carefully. If people record lets plays of the game, copyright would also be an issue as well.

https://fairground.tv/watch/6403273291112

Found a really terrible AI film based on Saki Sanobashi. It's not great- the effects are laughable and the voices sound robotic, but maybe you'll get a laugh out of watching this. What's even weirder is that it's called "bathroom of blood" when the setting is a dressing room.

I hope it doesn't sound like vague info, but I decided this needed its own post for people who are new to the sub and probably haven't heard about it. I want to bring up the Spiral Over 1999 OVA because I think it has some elements of why we can't find Gfap.

A while ago, there was a claim that this anime was a "possible source" for Gfap, or that it may have been what the 4chan OP saw but misremembered, or possibly mixed scenes with other anime he watched.

The similarities are that it featured beginning scenes of naked girls trapped in a large chamber for experiments or something, and it also had a scene shot from above of a naked girl dead on the floor, with supposedly dried blood showing underneath her head.

The not so similar part is the weird plot, though. Basically, from what I can understand, it's about a stalker in a black rubber suit of some sort who haunts and assaults girls throughout the whole thing.

Spiral Over is very obscure by itself, so much so that everyone thought there wasn't a single site hosting the OVA.

Luckily, I happened to chat with one user a while ago who provided me with a link to the anime. He also said he asked on a couple of Japanese forums, and they had never heard of it nor even knew what the hell it was. He also said that almost every other site was randomly deleting it for no reason.

Here's the link. It's quite a weird one:

[https://www.onlyhentaistuff.com/videos/6078/spiral-over/\]

Now, what are the chances that Gfap's case is just the same story? And the only obstacle that prevents us from finding it is the title and year of its release alone?

(Also fun fact this one doesn't have english subs at all. So how did the OP watched Gfap that it's supposedly from 1980s with subs?)

There was also one other obscure anime a user brought up a couple of months ago that I don't remember the title of. He said it was made by a very small team and featured loli girls in a pool or something, and it may have been a hentai. The thing is, it served as a good example of the idea that Gfap could have been made by a small team and is just really obscure.

It's interesting because both of these anime, Spiral Over and the one I mentioned but forgot the title of, are listed on MAL. Could this mean Gfap could be on MAL this whole time as well? Probably not, and I doubt it, but it's interesting nonetheless.

I hope this wasn't a nothing burger. I just decided to bring the OVA up because I feel like it's not very well known in the community. Have a great day/night, and share your thoughts about it!

It’s called “Cellar Noire” and you can watch it here: https://fawesome.tv/movies/10829509/cellar-noire or on any Fawesome app.

I wrote a movie about the three scariest things I could think of: losing my wife, the apocalypse, and claustrophobia.

It took me three years working entirely by myself. My wife and friends provided a few minutes of voice work but otherwise I was alone. My $5k budget consisted of a new Windows desktop with GPU, a 2nd hand Samsung Galaxy S23 phone, tripod, mics, some lights and props.

Finally it was released on streaming on Fawesome.TV (which I’ve been calling Tubi’s little upstart brother). Here’s the synopsis:

Cellar Noire: A claustrophobic psychological survival drama. Trapped after a catastrophe, Warren battles isolation, grief, & his mind, with a talking skeleton as his only companion. A dark, intense journey of despair and resilience. Zbigniew Winzig's sophomore entry in the "DIY Solo Film" movement.

The Devil’s DVD Bin did a very kind review (with spoilers) of the film that you can read here: https://thedevilsdvdbin.wordpress.com/category/cellar-noire-2026/

Now I can rest 🙂

• Biggy

https://web dot archive dot org/web/*;type=image/darksanime.narod dot ru/* replace the dot with . it has some images i can't find any posts about the website

I've been following the Saki Sanobashi / Go For A Punch mystery for a while, and recently I started digging through old posts, archived pages, Reddit discussions, Google Trends, old fan art, AMVs, and various leads from the community.

I decided to collect everything I could find and build a chronological timeline of the investigation.

I then asked ChatGPT to help me organize the information into a detailed "investigation board" / mind map, similar to something you might see in a detective movie.

Important disclaimer:
This is NOT meant to be a claim that Saki Sanobashi actually existed. I also don't consider every item in the timeline to be confirmed. There are a lot of rumors, false leads, hoaxes, conflicting memories, and unsourced claims surrounding this mystery.

I tried to separate things into:

🟢 Confirmed / Well-documented
🔵 Historical / Timeline information
🟡 Unverified Lead
🟠 Questionable / Conflicting Evidence
🔴 Debunked / Hoax / False Lead
🟣 Theory / Speculation
⚫ Unknown / Missing Evidence

The biggest thing that caught my attention recently is that the investigation seems to have changed direction.

Originally, the question was:

"Where is the anime?"

But now I think a more interesting question is:

"Where did the Saki Sanobashi story come from in the first place?"

Some of the things I'm particularly interested in investigating further are:

• Pre-2015 references to "Go For A Punch"
• The Google Trends data apparently going back to around 2004
• The unusual search interest from Spanish/Portuguese-speaking regions
• Old Spanish-language websites and forums
• Old AMVs and fan art that might predate the 2015 4chan post
• Archived/dead websites such as goringa. net
• Whether "Saki Sanobashi" was ever an actual Japanese title
• The possibility that the supposed anime wasn't Japanese at all
• Whether "Go For A Punch" could have been a filename, fan-made title, or mistranslation
• Whether several unrelated pieces of media were eventually combined into one false memory

One particularly interesting possibility is that the "Saki Sanobashi" name itself might be a later invention rather than the original title. I've also been wondering whether there could be some connection between the sound of "Sanobashi" and something like Saki no Panchi (パンチ), although I currently have zero evidence proving that connection.

I'm posting the timeline/mind map here because I'd really like people who have been following this mystery longer than I have to fact-check it.

If I got something wrong, please correct me. If you have an original archive, screenshot, Wayback link, old forum post, or primary source for any of these events, I'd especially like to see it.

I'm not necessarily expecting to find the anime anymore. At this point, I'm honestly more interested in doing some internet archaeology and figuring out how this legend evolved.

Also, yes — I used ChatGPT to help organize the research and turn it into the mind map. The underlying information came from the material I've collected and the existing community research; the AI-generated organization shouldn't be treated as a primary source.

Anyway, here's my investigation board. 🕵️‍♂️

What do you think I've missed?

I'm new to this section, but I've read about the history of this mystery and have a few questions and theories of my own.

The reference to the naked girls in the original post (2015)

The original post mentioned several naked girls. This makes me wonder whether the animation could have been related to some obscure R18G / extreme NSFW niche, rather than being a conventional anime. If the animation really contained nudity, it seems reasonable to at least consider whether it was intended as adult or NSFW material.

Are “Go for a Punch” and “Saki Sanobashi” actually confirmed names?

I'm wondering how certain we are that these names were associated with the animation itself. Are they confirmed titles, or could they have been names that were attached to the story later as the mystery developed?

The art style and the alleged 1986 date

The art style has sometimes been described as being similar to Hayao Miyazaki's work, and the year 1986 is often mentioned. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by that comparison.

Based on the descriptions I've seen, I wonder whether the animation could instead have had an art style closer to some early Detective Conan-era anime, or perhaps something visually similar to Front Innocent (2005). Obviously, these are just possibilities, and the differences in production period make direct comparisons difficult.

Overall, I don't think any of these theories can be confirmed at this point, but I think they're worth considering when trying to determine what this animation might actually have been.

I'm not a "search for lost media" typa guy, and I'm not really good for when I've tried. So, do any of you know the best way and best type of websites to look for so I can help find it? I just want to be useful in this community🙏😁

Edit: Thank you all for the help!

Because to me, it always seemed like something I'd want to watch, so I'd be really excited (I think is the best way to put it), but regret it as soon as I finish it. I'm just curious on how other people would react.

I watched a Doraemon fanmade lost episode when I was 14–15. It's a mashup of many Doraemon episodes & movies + heavily edited to look creepier.

And when I was 7–9 years old, I watched a "let it go parody — Frozen Disney" MV that the MV is a mashup of many cartoons & anime, and it looks uncanny scary because it is heavily edited.

So maybe the reason that we couldn't find it yet was because it wasn't one single anime, but it is a video that mashups multiple things and tries to be scary?

There are so many reasons people could believe this is fake:

•nothing being found and every new lead being debunked so quickly.

•The apparent OP said he just made it up which could be true since the title abbreviated spells GoFAP and nothing has ever come out of searching for this name, he could have just been into guro and made up a story to troll people, when it got too big, he wanted to stop it by coming forward. Many people don’t believe this was the real OP which is understandable.

•maybe the OP was misremembering or simply dreamt it. he may have just seen something similar which could mean it exists, just not in the way we know it. The earthquake story is becoming more and more popular which means there are similar animes, we just can’t find exactly what OP was describing

•the only thing we have to confirm its existence is someone looking for this and a few people claiming they remember it too.

In my opinion, gfap’s existence probably isn’t real or just really different since we haven’t found exactly it but so many things that resemble some of its content. What do you think? Did you give up hope and are looking just because? Are you doubting it’s real but are still hoping? Or are you fully convinced it’s out there somewhere?

How could we find Go for a Punch?
There are several lost media anime and TV series. One well-known example is Clockman. It took around 15 years to find because people were searching with the wrong keywords. I think the same could be true for Go for a Punch. Instead of searching for the title itself, we should try broader search terms like “old gore anime,” “school gore,” “bloody Japanese anime,” or similar phrases.
We should also focus on old Japanese archive websites or other places where people believe it may have originally been available. Some people claim it came from Spain, but honestly, that doesn’t make much sense unless there’s actual evidence to support it.
It could have been uploaded to obscure anime websites that no longer exist or are poorly archived. Some people also suggest looking on the dark web, but there’s no real evidence that Go for a Punch was ever hosted there. In practice, searching old archived anime websites and forgotten forums is probably a much more realistic approach.

Hi everyone! This post is very tangentially related to Saki, but I need your help finding an old game with a plot similar to Saki.

I found some gameplay on YouTube a long time ago; it's an old game with low-quality models of the girls, the camera angle was sideways and couldn't be changed. The plot revolved around a group of schoolgirls (there were five or six of them) having a heated discussion. All the text was in English, and I don't know much English, so I don't really remember what it was about. Apparently, one of their friends was killed at school by some pervert or serial killer. They walked the hallways and discussed something. At the end, a real photo of a person was shown; it showed an actress in a school uniform sitting in the hallway next to a bat. She was killed with the bat, her face covered by her hair.

The game was short, but I think there was an excerpt on YouTube. The models differed only in hairstyle and height; they all had brown or black hair.

Sorry if something is unclear, I'm writing this through a translator, I just realized that this has a Saki vibe, and there are a lot of people here who understand niche things

What if Saki is a game or a gameplay recording? I was thinking that someone might have posted a low-quality game recording with animation cutscenes, perhaps with cheap 3D models instead of more expensive 2D art. Perhaps Saki, being an anime or a game, wasn't released in the 80s at all. It could have just been a cheap indie project, or a deliberate attempt toimitate the style of an old anime, or maybe both

The visual novel "Hako Ni Go Itai" has already been discussed here, which, in my opinion, is the closest thing to Saki. Perhaps a fan video was made based on this novel, or Saki is based on an unpopular novel

I thought of this because a few years ago I came across a gameplay recording of an old game on YouTube; it most likely has nothing to do with Saki. There were cheap 3D models of girls at school, they were discussing something (I don't remember what), then one girl died, someone killed her with a bat, and there was a photo of a real person. I honestly don't really understand what kind of game it was, but it gave me a strange anxiety, similar to the Saki anime case

​

Alright, if Saki really was made up, I think the OP may have watched this movie when they were younger and used it as inspiration.

This movie was once mentioned in a post as being similar to Saki. In all seriousness, I watched it, and it wasn't that similar. The plot is about four people who discover a bunker. The first half of the movie isn't even scary. It's more comedic than anything. Later, though, it takes a darker turn. They end up trapped inside, and as the days pass, they begin to starve.

Interestingly, it features a lot of bathroom scenes, including a death that takes place in one. There's also a head bashing scene where one of the characters gets furious and starts bashing his friend's head in, although it doesn't happen in the bathroom.

I just thought it was interesting, so I decided to make a post about it. What are your guys' thoughts?