This film marked the 40th anniversary of GeGeGe no Kitarou in anime and I think it was the franchise's tenth animated movie, but it was their first full-length feature film and their first with an original storyline. Its predecessors had all been under an hour (sometimes only 20 minutes, or shorter) and taken from a manga story arc. Also, it's based on the 2007 series, which for me is the first properly good one.

It's quite fun. I enjoyed it. A schoolgirl is being wiped from existence, including from her family's memories, and she'll say she hates herself. Giant silver hands can pull you into a mirror. Characters can surprise you about whether they're really sympathetic or villainous... which of course brings us to Nezumi-Otoko. He's the best thing in the film. He's woman-chasing, crooked and smelly. He can weaponise his farts, which Kitaro can recognise immediately and distinguish from other farts.

"What's that smell?"

"Nezumi-Otoko!" replies Kitaro happily, from his sense of smell alone. That's how well they know each other.

Nezumi-Otoko is amazing. He gives this franchise another level. Always has, always will. He can be semi-heroic, villainous or even both simultaneously, in the same horrifying story beat. You'll never know what's coming from him. He spends quite a lot of this film trying to look noble, because he wants to impress a girl he fancies. He might, though, get a spade and bury you alive.

This film was in production for two years, twice as long as most anime films. The producers were pushing the boat out to make it an event. Additional things they did include:

(a) a five-minute celebratory short, starring all the different Kitarou, Neko-Musume and Nezumi-Otoko versions from the various series. The producers even used the authentic voice actors for each version of Kitaro. (Previous versions of Neko-Musume and Nezumi-Otoko are only glimpsed briefly and don't speak.) It's quite amusing. Mind you, the boys always look basically the same, whereas Neko-Musume's character design keeps being reworked (and yet nothing here looks as different as her 2018 grown-up incarnation).

(b) the film had six different versions, one for each major region of Japan. The differences are only in a six-minute stretch that features Neko-Musume doing various part-time jobs, but even so there had never before been a Japanese film (live-action or otherwise) releasing so many versions simultaneously. Neko-Musume's a hard worker. If you watch all the different versions, she cosplays as a snow woman, an apprentice geisha and an Okinawan Shiisaa lion-dog. Sometimes she's even mildly sexy (Chinese dress, cheerleader outfit). We even see Doala, the slightly creepy mascot of my wife's favourite baseball team, the Chuunichi Dragons.

This film is a child-friendly cartoon, but it's also good, solid GeGeGe with creepy and scary bits. I enjoyed it. Nothing wrong with it at all. The emotional beats work and the action scenes are cool. Our heroes fight to save nice people, while the baddies are weird and can rewrite what you believe to be reality. Nezumi-Otoko is great, just by being his usual dodgy self. I'm sure the film's producers were pleased with the results of their work, and rightly so.