They're unrelated to the 2007 live-action Kitaro movie starring Eiji Wentz. Instead, they're live-action drama starring the 2007 anime's voice actors, making no attempt to disguise the fact that most of them are the wrong gender, age and indeed species. The only character with special effects is Eyeball Dad, done briefly as a CGI puppet. Otherwise, Kitarou himself (supposedly a young boy) is played by an actress in her forties. Yobuko (a sort of one-legged scarecrow) is just Sara Nakayama in a hat. Haruna Ikezawa looks glamorous in a long pink wig, whereas her anime character (Amabie) normally resembles a green goldfish with a chicken's head.

Characters' names appear on-screen when they're introduced, since otherwise you'd never guess who everyone's meant to be. Unfortunately, this won't help unless you can read kanji.

It's completely mental... and yet it works. I enjoyed it. Minami Takayama is far more convincing as Kitarou than Eiji Wentz was in the GeGeGe live-action film that came out the same year. It doesn't matter that she's female. She's got the voice perfectly (as you'd expect), but in addition I bought her physique and physicality.

Everyone inhabits their roles well. The acting's mostly good, despite the peculiar circumstances. Hiromi Konno made me laugh with a hackneyed Neko-Musume character beat. Wataru Takagi looks odd in that yellow bedsheet, but he's gloriously and utterly Rat-Man as soon as he opens his mouth. His ramen-eating make me laugh, but what's more the closing credits outtakes reveal that the actress opposite him in that scene couldn't stop corpsing either.

Table manners are often questionable. One character eats a daifuku that she finds on the ground.

Plotting is minimal. Ep.1 involves the disappearance of Eyeball Dad (he's fine) and ep.2 involves Kawa-uso's little brother trying to defeat Kitarou (which fails but Kitarou's broad-minded about it). That doesn't matter, since it's fun just seeing these people in Kyoto together. Mind you, there seems to be some mildly intriguing spaceloop stuff in ep.1.

I'd recommend these, if you've watched some of the 2007 Kitarou anime first. It's a laugh. I'd have never thought to make these specials. They look wrong, yet they're often startlingly right. I can't get over how well Minami Takayama embodies Kitarou, while I'd cast both Hiromi Konno (as Neko-Musume) and Wataru Takagi (as Rat-Man) again in a live-action adaptation. They're an interesting time capsule (e.g. Amabie's only from the 2007 series) and I could even imagine rewatching these, if I was looking for something casual to fill a spare half-hour. They're comfortable and fun.