As mentioned when I did a knee jerk look at spring anime a few months back, there was yet another adaptation of Shigeru Mizuki’s kid’s horror comic this year. Of course it being a show based on one of the most important and influential manga, and aimed at a mainstream audience, it was ignored by fansub groups until recently.
Quick recap of the concept of the show, good yokai (a spirit-monster of Japanese Folk Lore) fight bad yokai to protect humankind. Though often the reason the bad yokai pursue humans is human ignorance of the spirit world.
Isamu Tanonaka returns as Kitaro’s eye-ball father, Medama Oyaji. Tanonaka has portrayed him in every incarnation of Kitaro in film, including the recent live action film. Minami Takayama, the voice of Detective Conan, takes the lead role of Kitaro.
Which is probably why when I watched it Detective Conan sprang to mind, not just because of Takayama’s voice, the clean look of the show and pacing felt very Conan-like too. And there’s an element to the next episode previews that has echoes of early Conan episodes.
However it does feel a little too clean and modern. I think I preferred the first black and white episode of the 60s series that was fansubbed a year or so back. It’s an unfortunate truth that Toei’s animation quality has in general fallen from the great heights it had in that decade. Which is not to say this was terribly animated, it just felt it had more visual cues that came from the typical Toei look in 2007 than from Mizuki. But that probably doesn’t matter to it’s target audience of kids new to the series. The first episode felt like a good, fun horror show for kids that draws on folklore and complete with a moral to respect for cultural history. I’m not sure I’ll make a point of watching it regularly, I’d prefer to see more of the original series, but it’s good that English language anime fandom has paid attention to this character once again.