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.
