Gegege no Kitato (2018) – 02

One of the things that’s kind of interesting about Gegege no Kitaro is that through all its many anime incarnations (and there have been six already in series) it’s aways changing.  While the essential nature of the story remains the same, details morph – and that’s above and beyond the attempts to contemporize it (last week scummy Youtubers, this week the idol mafia).  The characters themselves change, and with rare exceptions (like the one version where Kitaro was in his late teens) these changes tend to pretty subtle.

That was certainly true in the introduction of fan (and doujin) favorite Neko Musume this week.  She’s tended to be more abjectly crushing on Kitaro (and close to his size) but in the 2018 version, she’s several years older and a flat-out tsundere (if that was an attempt to be trendy, it would have fit better in the 2000’s version).  As such she not surprisingly sees Mana as an adversary (though the converse certainly isn’t the case).  And Mana has just saved Kitaro from the mysterious arrow we saw fired at the end of the first episode (which had a pentagram carved into the nock) by carrying him home (where she’s promptly abandoned).

The youkai of the week this time is a Miyage-nyudo, whose seal is released by Nezumi-otoko’s piss.  Ratman has always been one of the more outlandish characters in this bunch, and he certainly doesn’t disappoint here – using the gold the youkai gives him to buy out an idol broker (at Miyage-nyudo’s instruction).  The whole world domination plot is fun, but the fireworks in the episode come from Neko Musume (“Catchick” – seriously, CR?), who shows her claws in more ways than one.

All in all, this take on Gegege no Kitaro feels pretty fresh and lively, and I suspect I’ll stick with it at least for viewing purposes.  Blogging is a much higher bar given how intense my work schedule is about to become and how many series are on the schedule this season but we’ll see what happens.

3D Kanojo: Real Girl – 02

Real Girl remains a rather sweet and likeable romance take – not too slick or sophisticated in any way, but attractively guileless.  It’s basically impossibly to make an anime about a chaste otaku without it being seen as a self-insert to a certain extent (even if it’s a shoujo), but 3D Kanojo doesn’t play that angle too broadly.  As a result it comes off more as affectionate satire rather than snarky meta-humor.

There’s a lot of lying going on here, that’s for sure – and pretty much all of it by Iroha.  That makes her kind of interesting, especially as most of her lies come off making her look worse rather than better.  Is she really moving in six months?  Is the doctor she’s seeing really treating her for asthma, or does she actually have a serious illness – was the statement that this was a lie itself a lie?  Six months, doctor, serious illness – hmm…

Poor Hikari-kun is hopelessly – and believably – in over his head here.  Any girlfriend situation would have him mystified but when his is a compulsive fabricator, he just doesn’t know what to think.  The whole teenaged boy rejecting a chance to have sex thing is certainly a cliche in anime by now, but here it kind of fits Hikari’s character – he’s decent enough to want to spare Iroha from giving up her virginity to prove a point, and scared enough to use his “otaku pride” in chastity as an excuse to back out.

As with many shows this season, my blogging decision with 3D Kanojo is going to come down to time management – but I do like it.  The whole mahou shoujo figurine thing was cute (though it wouldn’t have killed Hikari to give Yuuto some credit), and it quite emblematic of what I think this series’ true nature is.  It’s no masterpiece, but anime can always use more romcoms that come from that sort of place.