Cute Creeps From Pop Culture: GeGeGe!!!

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

GeGeGe!!!

Thanks to Hino for pointing out that the long rumored and anticipated live action movie version of my beloved Gegege No Kitaro is due to debut this spring! Check out the two wicked trailers on the official Gegege no Kitarô site. The screenplay was written by Daisuke Habara, based on the super-awesome manga by Shigeru Mizuki, and it's directed by Katsuhide Motoki (Free & Easy series, Drugstore Girl). For those of you who need to catch up, Kitaro is a young half-yokai (goblin/spectre/monster) who lost his parents at birth. His father's soul lives in one of his eyeballs. Raised within the yokai clan, Kitaro keeps tabs on human society, and fights evil yokai monsters-- protecting virtuous human beings from these threats from the other world.

For some reason, the filmakers have invented a human love interest for Kitaro. A high school girl named Mika is rescued by the uncanny Kitaro and gradually falls for him. Her character has been created specially for the film, although Kitaro did have a human girlfriend by the name of Yumeko-chan in the third animated TV series broadcast on the Fuji network from 1985 to 1988. Not that I'm complaining!

"Horror and humor have been on intimate terms at least since the time of Elisabethan and Jacobean drama. Shakespeare's darkest tragedies were leavened with a gallows wit..."

-David J. Skal The Monster Show

"Even as we deny that our flesh must decay, however, we surround ourselves with fictional images of the very fate we strive to hear nothing about. They are everywhere: in books, films, and TV, in advertising, in toys and games for all ages, in children's breakfast food. No American child (even one lucky enough to escape Count Chocula) can grow up without learning what a vampire is..."

-Walter Kendrick The Thrill Of Fear

"... through expressions such as the comical Hyakkiyagyõ emaki, an inversion occurs, and that which should not be gazed upon is rendered visible-- and gazed upon with pleasure. The unseen (unseeable) is transformed into spectacle; the mysterious spirits of untamed nature are transmuted into familiar everyday objects; terror turns into humor; pandemonium becomes parade."

- Michael Dylan Foster Pandemonium and Parade

"The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection)... but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists."

-Stephen King Danse Macabre

"No one will ever love a story the way a kid loves a story, whether told in a novel or as a ghost tale furtively whispered around a campfire. That's because no adult has an imagination quite like that of a child, where monsters might be real and lurking just under the bed."

-Monica S. Kuebler Rue Morgue