Category: Hakaba Kitarou

Like expected, this episode feels nothing like a standard final episode. There’s no aftermath, or anything that hints at a closure of the series (heck, Caroline and her father are completely gone now), and instead this episode brings us back to the essence of this series: Kitarou and Nezumi Otoko trying to make money, other people dying because of it, and Kitarou’s father cleaning up the mess a bit.

It wasn’t the best episode of the series, but most definitely not the worst. Nezumi Otoko makes some kind of youth-serum out of his whiskers, while Kitarou sells the manga-artist of last week and others some kind of special holidays to the underworld (of course, with one-way tickets). I’m still surprised at the ease at which this series is able to kill off its characters, with as little melodrama as possible. In the first case, an old mafia-boss gets rescued by the medicine, and grows younger again (with whiskers added). He then gets greedy and starts searching after Nezumi Otoko. When he tries to capture him (in a locked safe, of all things), Nezumi Otoko releases his usual gasses and takes back his whiskers, killing off the guy.

In the case of the manga-artist, he gets brought to the underworld, where he sees the remaining scenes that were in the OP. As he tries to get back, he realizes that another guy has taken his place, and he’s turned into a ghost. What I really liked about this episode is that things aren’t as they seemed. The guy or ghost who took over the mangaka’s place suddenly finds out what kind of a busy life his counterpart was leading, and he wasn’t used to the pressure at all. His wife then drags him and orders him to work until his death. Nice wife, isn’t it? Meanwhile, in the underworld, the real mangaka is quietly enjoying the local wonders, along with all a bunch of other people who were tricked by Kitarou. In the meantime, Kitarou as usua notes how hard it is to work and gain money in the human world.

So it’s finally over. This series really has served its purpose in making me appreciate Noitamina even more. That timeslot is really perfect for showcasing all kinds of short series with original ideas and premises. And the fact that it’s been the most popular late-night timeslot for years only makes this better. There’s going to be a good chance that I’ll be blogging the upcoming Library wars, that’ll be taking over this timeslot, but I’ll leave that final decision to when the series actually airs.

Quite an interesting set-up for the finale. Mostly because I have no idea what’s going to happen. This episode was basically another story on its own, yet it did leave various threads open (for example what happened to Kitarou his father, a newly introduced girl named Caroline and her father?). On one hand these threads will most likely be resolved in the next episode, but on the other hand that these threads alone are by far not enough to fill one episode, so the creators still must have some trump cards left.

In any case, this episode was definitely a Hakaba Kitarou-style build-up episode, simply because like the other two, it wasn’t as exciting as the other episodes. It basically tells the tale of a powerful Youkai who has settled into the house of a manga-artist so that he and his henchmen can take the first steps to conquer the world or something similar. He also has a daughter, whom Kitarou has fallen in love with. The entire thing eventually gets solved when Kitarou’s father gets eaten by this Youkai, and Kitarou’s father in his turn wrecks the brains of the guy like he did with many before. It was really too straightforward to be a regular Kitarou-episode.

The great thing about this episode was that I had no idea what it was building up to. One great point about this series is its unpredictability. You will have no idea what’s going to happen next, apart from Kitarou surviving and the “bad guys” losing. Everything in between, you’ll be completely in the dark. Because of this, I’m really glad that Noitamina has continued its tradition of staying away from the very overused high-school girls, and focused on creative series instead. Not to say that all series with high-school girls are bad (there are quite a few very good series that feature high-school girls), but I’d much rather see series experiment and try out new things than to stay with the “tried and true”-formula.

This episode was about the smiling guy that we saw in the OP. He turned out to be a vampire who can hypnotize his victims by playing the guitar. He has put a local politician on his possible-victims-list, and he recruits Nezumi Otoko for this, while the politician hires Kitarou to get rid of said vampire. Yet again it’s an episode where Kitarou hardly does anything, as quite quickly the Vampire injects him with a strange drug that liquefies the guy’s flesh and separates it from his bones.

It was another very solid episode for this show, with lots of twists, as Kitarou’s father tried to get his son back together. It’s especially interesting when we say him hiding in Kitarou’s skull, being an eye on legs and all. For the first time, Nezumi Otoko also plays the role of good guy, as he too gets scared of the things that the vampire can do. The best thing about this episode, though, was the same refreshing scriptwriting of this series. It’s hard to explain what’s different, but I think it’s how the creators manage to keep a semi-serious tone throughout the entire episode.

It’s a shame that there are only two episodes left, and I’m quite curious as to how the creators were planning to end this series. Kitarou is still in liquid-form at the end of this episode, so his father will probably spend the next episode to try and get him back on his bones. According to the OP, we still miss the scenes with the three-eyed priest, the scene with the armed generals that shows up very briefly in the OP, the scene with the strange guy in the middle of a field of rocks, and the strange flashlight creature. It’s not really the things you’d expect for a big climax, but then again this series has never really listened to the general guidelines of anime. 😛

Now this is what I call a good horror-story! Twisted, full of plot twists, and most of all: creative. This definitely was one of the best episodes of this series along with episode one. You just have to think of Kitarou’s hand getting cut off and taking on a mind of its own. 😛

Basically, two men set out to check out the rumours on a haunted building where an acquaintance of them is about to live. Obviously, any ghosts or people pretending to be ghosts have to be removed from this house, but unfortunately this “ghost” turned out to be Kitarou. What follows is a really interesting battle, where both parties try to get each other out of the house. You’ve got to love how Kitarou likes to play with his victims.

One thing I also liked about this episode is how the first half perfectly builds up the mood for the second half, by already hinting at how strange the house is that the two guys have settled in. Especially with the creature with four legs, no head and five arms who suddenly appeared from out of nowhere. Actually, Kitarou works best as a character when he doesn’t play the role of the main character, and only appears once in a while in his usual, mysterious form. But I can understand the need for episode four and six, as they’ve really served their purpose in fleshing out his character, and giving it a bit of development.

I must say, this series is a master of surprises and twists. It really feels refreshing from the usual anime. If you’re looking for something different then Hakaba Kitarou is definitely recommended, because there are very few series that combine mystery and horror with comedy. 😛

I originally believed that this entire episode would be devoted to getting rid of the water-spirit. Well, turns out it didn’t. The only thing that was really needed for the story of this episode is that Nezumi Otoko captured Kitarou’s father and put him in a jar. The water-spirit story gets wrapped up nicely after only five minutes, it first swallows up Kiterou’s clone, after which a newly introduced character drenches it in gasoline and ignites it.

I think this also means that two recurring characters have now been killed off for good, because we don’t see any signs of bad Kitarou and Mizuki returning. In fact, Kitarou doesn’t even seem to remember that the one who took care of him for years is gone now. All he seems to care about is his father, apparently.

In any case, this newly introduced character turns out to live two doors next to Nezumi Otoko. In between, there lives a “beautiful”(*ahem*) woman who both of them fall in love with. Ever since last episode Nezumi Otoko has been blackmailing Kitarou with his father. Because of this, he ends up delivering a love-letter for both Nezumi Otoko and this character (who turns out to be a werewolf, by the way). Then it turns out that the woman is going to be moving out, and Kitarou throws away the love-letters while Nezumi Otoko and the werewolf know nothing about this.

When they find out, they decide to take revenge for this by putting Kitarou in a coffin and dumping this coffin into sea. At least, that was their plan. Instead, Kitarou’s father escapes and enters Nezumi Otoko’s body to confuse him, while Kitarou escapes. The empty coffin then gets dumped into the sea, and then it’s time for Kitarou to play a prank on them. He uses his connection from the underworld to deliver the coffin back to Nezumi Otoko and the werewolf. When they decide to take a trip to the underworld, to check out what went wrong, they instead are taken into a hallucination into an old train that went out of service decades ago.

This part actually drew an interesting parallel to Mononoke, or the Bake Neko arc, to be exact. There we see the mayor jump out of the train and get devoured by the Mononoke. So when the werewolf jumped out of the train as well, I thought he was gone as well, especially when a loud bump followed. Instead, he just landed on a very unfortunate rock outside and got knocked unconscious.

I really must say that the dialogue for Hakaba Kitarou feels refreshing. The bad guys all have a personality and don’t feel stereotyped, and in the meantime the good guys can be considered the bad guys as well, depending on how you look at it. This is one of the reason why I like experimental anime so much. It just feels delightfully different from usual. One of the others is Mahou Shoujotai, of course. 😛

It seems that the final stories of Hakaba Kitarou will consist out of two episodes, as this episode yet again ended with a cliff-hanger. This episode was mostly unspectacular, and al it did was set the tables right for the second episode. I’ve got no worries, as episode five showed that this series can turn the entire tables with its second episode.

And there is a lot of potential in this story. Basically, in order to earn some money, Kitarou ends up collecting money from a water-spirit who hasn’t paid back its loan for fifteen years. Kitarou, as mischievous as he is, starts messing around with the spirit after paralyzing it with a special powder. The water-spirit in exchange escapes, and engulfs the entire world with water in order to take revenge on Kitarou. He then gets saved by Nezumi Otoko on a hot-air balloon, for the price of his father.

One thing that I did realize with this episode is that Kitarou’s character simply is boring if he isn’t sadistic. But I guess it does have a certain charm. Kitarou is a nice example of an anti-hero, and it’s a bit different from all those noble heroes who want to save the world and stuff. In any case, I’m curious for the next episode. We’re already past the halfway-point of this series, so it’d better have an excellent second half in store!

How awesome. I now fully understand why the previous episode felt so bad and weird. The entire fifth episode was dedicated to explaining the things that happened there, and it provided a wonderful conclusion to a story that started off so horrible. After watching this episode, I completely forgive this series for the disappointments of the previous episode. I’ve said before that I’m a huge mystery-fan, and Hakaba Kitarou knows exactly how to handle it!

The best thing of the episode would of course be the fact that this episode shows a totally new side of the bad Kitarou. It seems that he too was used by Nezumi Otoko. If I understood this correctly, all Nezumi Otoko was after was the part of his head that Neko Musume bit off, but you can only get your hands on it if she’s in hell. However, because of this, bad Kitarou would need a way to return from hell, and that’s why he needed Kitarou’s jacket, which basically was his link to the spirit-world. He got it in the ruckus that he caused when he set off that mouse on Neko Musume during her performance.

In the process, something went wrong, though. I couldn’t pick up exactly what happened, but bad Kitarou ended up on one of the side-paths on his way to hell, and got separated from Neko Musume. Only because of the real Kitarou’s father, he managed to get out of there, into the real hell. Unfortunately, my Japanese isn’t good enough to pick up why Nezumi Otoko ended up on television this episode either, however it was clear that Nezumi Otoko manipulated bad Kitarou to everything, and he betrayed him at one point.

Thankfully, Neko Musume also remains in Hell, even though she did have the option to return. Kitarou may have also been a bit too emo in his lovesickness, but the climax of this episode worked out pretty well because of this, when Neko Musume refused to meet him. Also, it was pretty hilarious to see how Bad Kitarou shaved his head in the end when he turned good. It’s quite impressive that the creators made him go through so much development in just one episode, and actually got away with it. ^^;

Well, that was disappointing. This most definitely was the worst episode of Hakaba Kitarou yet when it half-degrades into a dating-sim series between Kitarou and Neko. What the heck were the creators thinking, turning this series into a cheesy love-drama? When Kitarou fell in love, he totally ruined his own evil anti-hero that I liked so much in the first three episodes.

Thankfully, the cat’s dead now, so thankfully she won’t ruin the series much further, though the preview for the next episode shows Kitarou being angsty and love-sick. And now I realize how this series has one major problem: it doesn’t build up carefully. It does have the shock-value, though this episode showed that building-up is not its strongest point, and that’s really needed to make a love-relationship interesting. Right now, it feels like we’ve temporarily gone down a cheap romantic comedy.

I should have known to be careful with this series when the director only did Kamisama Kazoku before. That series to had some interesting twists, but the romance really felt horribly annoying at times. And the romance is one thing, but I also spotted numerous Deus ex Machinas and badly explained plot-holes during the climax. Writers: what happened?!

Please, Kitarou, go back to horror!

The story for this week was rather bizarre… Remember the little plant that grew from Dracula’s dead body in the previous episode? Well, Nezumi Otoko uses his breath to knock a famous singer unconscious and plants this plant into his right arm. After a while, the plant starts to grow and it consumes its host. In the meantime, the famous singer met Mizuki. Yeah, who else would believe that there’s a demonic plant, growing on your arm?

In any case, the singer turns into a rather strange kind of tree-stump, and soon even loses the ability to speak. Nezumi Otoko then kidnaps the stump and moves into a secluded house, somewhere far away, using the money he stole from Kitarou in the previous episode. ^^; The stump then grows into a tree, and one very large fruit appears. Nezumi Otoko hoped that this would be the reincarnation of his late master, but instead it hatched a small version of said singer. The episode ends with Nezumi Otoko fleeing, the tree burning, and Kitarou, the small singer and a third youkai who just showed up having tea…

Still, I would be lying if I said that I don’t enjoy these kinds of stories. This series manages to combine a quirky feeling with horror-stories, and the result works out pretty well, and this series is really fun to watch.

I think we also saw the beginning of Catgirl in this episode (or Neko Musume, as Gegege no Kitarou named her). She’s just a normal girl right now, but I doubt that remain the same. Especially since Kitarou has fallen in love with the girl because she can sing so well. I doubt that he’d leave her alone. He was really cute in this episode as well. 😛 What’s also interesting is how Mizuki returned back from hell, to keep an eye on Kitarou. Indeed it would be the best for someone to keep an eye on such a demonic child as Kitarou.

Another thing I like about this series is how all the victims so far have been grown-up men. Usually, an anime would portray some kind of really cute girl in peril at this point, but the fact that Kitarou uses businessmen gives a nice twist to things, especially since they’re portrayed so much away from stereotypes as in this series.