Though unknown in America, Kitarō is one of Japan's most beloved fictional characters. He started life in a 1959 manga series by Shigeru Mizuki. This was adapted into the anime GeGeGe no Kitarō in 1968 and followed by another anime adaptation in 1971, followed by another in 1985 and others 1996, 2007, and 2008.
Kitarō is a yōkai (demon) boy with only one eye, and has various adventures involving the conflict between his fellow yōkai and humans. Many of these involve him getting transformed into various creatures, as the next few posts on this blog demonstrate...
One of Mizuki's manga stories features Kitarō being transformed into a gigantic sea monster (I think it's supposed to be a whale, but why is it covered in hair?). This story was adapted multiple times by the various anime over the decades.
Let's start with the 1968 series, episode 5, "Large Sea Creature." This is in black and white and I've combined the transformation with the reversion scene from the next episode.
Next comes a version of the same scene from episode 67 of the 80s series, "Large Sea Creatures of the Jungle":
The last version is from the 1996 animated movie, "The Great Sea Beast," which takes considerable liberties with the original story. But it does preserve the transformation and reversion:
Lastly, here are scans from the original manga, showing Kitaro's original sea monster metamorphosis and his reversion.
3 comments:
I can't help it, but that hooded figure with the whiskers looks oddly familiar. Was one of the older shows broadcasted in germany at some point?
That's certainly a possibility--perhaps one of the more recent versions of the show has aired there.
Well, if there was, it must have been the adaption from 1985.
I remember that german television was fond of anime before they were popular. Like Calimero and Ribbon no Kishi (Known as "Choppy und die Prinzessin (=Choppy and the princess) here. Though most were anime adaptions of well known stories, like Alices Adventures in wonderland, Pinnochio, Snow White and the likes. We still got some obscure shows.
In any case, after a long search I came up empty handed. Must have been my immagination.
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