Gegege no Kitaro live action movies

Another brief movie review due to my fascination with Japanese demons and ghosts. Gegege no Kitaro (which just means Kitaro from the Gegege Forest) is a very popular manga series here in Japan. It is credited with reviving interest in Yokai (demons) across Japan. It has been turned into an animated series no less than 5 times. I knew about it, but for some odd reason I never really looked into it. It looks like it could easily become one of my favorite series (so don’t be surprised if you hear more about it in the future). Unfortunately, because it does rely pretty heavily on Japanese culture, it has never been brought over to the states. Kodansha apparently translated the first three volumes of the manga as part of their Bilingual Manga Project, but now they are out of print and really hard to find. So I suppose it’s not really that surprising that I didn’t know too much about this series.

Kitaro is a demon who tries to prevent other demons from causing too much trouble in the human world. He’s one of the good demons, who simply wants us all to coexist peacefully. Kitaro has a number of friends who join him on his various adventues, including his father (whose body has decayed to just an eyeball), a cat girl, a rat man, a wall, and a flying white cloth.  They go up against various demons and have a bunch of interesting weapons at their disposal.  It's a lot of fun.

While we were looking for the last movie I talked about, we saw that there were a couple Gegege movies and decided to check them out. The first movie, simply called Gegege no Kitaro (released in 2007), had English subtitles, which we unfortunately didn’t realize until about three-fourths of the way through the film. The story revolves around the search and fight for a magical stone of great power which was removed from its protected shrine and ends up in the hands of humans. Kitaro gets involved trying to protect a high school girl and her little brother while trying to find what their father did with the stone. It was a really fun movie and I really enjoyed all of the demons that showed up throughout the film. The film wasn’t perfect by any means. Some of the special effects are really lame (especially Neko Masume’s transformation, ick). The little kid actor isn’t very good and thankfully in many scenes he is just required to sit around and look sad. But it does a good job of introducing the characters and the world of the demons. And it has kitsune, so that’s an automatic winner in my book. If you like demons and monsters and realize that you are watching a movie made for a younger audience that didn’t have an enormous budget you will probably enjoy it. Also there is an awesome demon dance party at the end, and who doesn’t love that?

The second movie (released in 2008) is called Gegege no Kitaro and the Thousand Year Curse Song. A young girl is cursed and Kitaro and friends try to help break her curse and deal with the greater evil behind it all. Sadly, no English subtitles this time. Unlike the first movie, this one doesn’t really try to set up the world and the characters for the audience. It really jumps right in, so if you are unfamiliar with the series this might not be the best place to go for your first taste. I would imagine they had a bigger budget this time around as many things are greatly improved. Neko Masume’s entire costume looks better and she doesn’t get any awkward transformation scenes like last time. Kitaro only has one eye, and the empty socket of the other one is almost always covered by his hair. In the first movie they completely ignored this and you could frequently see his other eye when the wind blew his hair or even when he turned his head quickly. This time the wig was much thicker and I don’t think I ever saw his other eye. They even threw in a bit with him looking at a bunch of glass eyes to kind of ret con the eye you could see in the last movie and bring it closer to cannon in that regard. This movie had less demons than the first one, but the ones that it did feature were pretty well done (I could have done without the poop slinging deer demon thing, though). We still had a small dance party, although this one was just tanuki and Neko Masume. The music was really good in this movie too, very dynamic and exciting. The action scenes were also much better choreographed.

For all their faults I really enjoyed both movies. Unfortunately, neither movie was released in America. You can probably find places to buy them online, but you’ll need a region two or region free DVD player to watch them and they probably won’t be cheap. If you do decide you want to check them out, I recommend heading to the Gegege no Kitaro Wikipedia page first and checking out the character bios. Unfortunately, there isn’t a plot synopsis for the movies on the page (the second movie isn’t even listed), so you’ll have to muddle through the plot of the second (subtitle-less) one on your own.



*Small Spoiler Alert*




Eric was upset that in both movies Kitaro doesn’t actually beat either of the final monsters. He gets help in both movies from much stronger demons who seem to come in as a sort of deus ex machina. I actually liked that as it showed that Kitaro is NOT the strongest in the demon world. He is fighting a really hard battle against really steep odds and fights anyway. Others recognize his efforts and join him and his cause. It gave a sense of depth to the demon world for me, showing how vast and potentially powerful the demons are.