(Short and Sour)
I’m just going to refer to this series as Kitaro just to make things easier for me. Kitaro is a manga series from the 1960s by beloved author Shigeru Mizuki. His depictions of yokai are famous in Japan and statues of them are all over Japan too. Kirato has been adapted many times into anime and other media (even had a live-action film) the last anime outing was in 2008 with a film. I was completely in the dark about the series and had only watched the live-action films before, so I was pretty much blind going in.
The story is about a boy named Kitaro who is a yokai who takes requests from humans on help regarding other yokai, going as far as eliminating the yokai causing the issue (to be fair if there is a yokai just killing loads of people, Kitaro is like the yokai police). The show goes with a yokai of the week kind of flow for most of the time with having a few arcs in-between, some arcs are bigger than the others of course. The new character added in this new season is Mana and she has her own arc too. You’ve got other supporting characters like Ratman and Catchick or Wally Wall (he is basically a walking talking concrete wall) which have their own thing going like Ratman always tries to make money with some get rich quick scheme and Catchick is a tsundere like character who likes Kitaro.
Wally is a mother****ing wall…
Anyway that’s all I’ll say on the story and characters. Animation’s fine, its Toei so expect bare minimal effort from them. Kitaro is slightly better than the average that they put out (I’m looking at you One Piece, how the giants have fallen). OST is fine, endings are okay not much else to say on that. Love the classic opening.
I am currently enjoying the series greatly, of course some weeks are better than others and I kind of feel the series should have really just ended as a major arc has just finished. But whatever, I’ll keep watching till it finishes and hopefully give a final verdict on the latter half of the series.
7/10
