GeGeGe no Kitarou is a big deal. Everyone in Japan knows him. There's been Kitarou anime, manga, etc. for over sixty years. (It's older than Doctor Who.) It's weird, it's spooky and it's supernatural. This was Kitarou's first anime and it hurts me to say this... but it's boring. I'm a fan of Mizuki Shigeru's stories and this is the only adaptation to come out while he was still creating the original manga. Unfortunately, though, it's a 1968 anime and the industry was kind of rubbish back then. The ideas are great and the yokai are iconic, but the scripts don't add up to anything. They start, then stop 25 minutes later. In between, they sort of potter. I exaggerate, a bit, but these episodes aren't wedded to any particular direction and aren't character-driven.

The title character is Kitarou, a one-eyed immortal yokai boy. Melt him, drown him, chop him up and sell him in supermarkets as canned meat... sorry, he'll be back. However, he's dramatically static. He functions as an anime hero, but he's happy with his supernatural unlife and doesn't want or need anything.

Rat-Man (aka. Nezumi no Otoko) is the most interesting thing about this series. He's a money-grubbing scumbag and often villainous... and hence is more dynamic dramatically than Kitarou, despite never learning or changing. Also, amazingly, he's Kitarou's inseparable best friend. They're always together. He's in every episode, sometimes taking the protagonist role from Kitarou himself. This is the most pared-back Kitarou anime series in terms of regular cast, with hardly anyone to pull our attention from this very odd main duo.

There's also Eyeball Dad (aka. Medama no Oyaji), a talking eyeball on tiny legs. He lives in Kitarou's hair and talks in an extremely high voice.

...and that's it. There aren't even any female regulars. Cat Girl (aka. Neko Musume) is a one-off, only seen in ep.20. (She's a slightly sinister little girl with fangs who'd happily kill strangers for Lord Enma.) There's also no ordinary human who befriends Kitarou and joins the ongoing cast, which is a common trope in later adaptations. Sand-Throwing Hag (sunakake-babaa), Child-Crying Old Man (konaki-jijii), Ittan Momen and even Nurikabe gradually become regular fixtures in the background, but we's basically watching the rather static adventures of Kitarou, Rat-Man and Eyeball Dad.

Mind you, those support regulars are at least being faithful to themselves. Sand-Throwing Hag throws lots of sand, etc. Ittan Momen strangles a tanuki to death in ep.21.

It can be interesting to see the 1968 versions of familiar GeGeGe storylines. We meet the franchise's two iconic villains, Backbeard and Nurarihyon. Vampire Elite gets a two-parter (eps.15-16) and remains one of my favourite fictional vampires, because he's so odd. (He plays a hypnotic guitar Spanish-style and has a face you wouldn't associate with vampires, in fact being modelled after a mangaka friend of Mizuki's.) Sara-Kozou's song gets stolen (ep.34), etc. These aren't the best versions you'll see of these stories, but they have the most direct line to the source material.

The oddest episode is ep.58, starring Shigeru Mizuki himself. We see his missing arm, which he lost in the war in an Allied air raid. He meets his creations. That was surprisingly good. Also, the anime film's quite good. It's a compilation of eps.5-6 and it turns Kitarou into a kaijuu.

Don't watch this series. It's disappointing compared with later adaptations of the same manga and even with other anime from the same year, e.g. Youkai Ningen Bem. There are hundreds and hundreds of episodes from other Kitarou anime, if you have the itch. This original has one of the best performances of the famous theme song and I like the black-and-white animation, but... no. It doesn't understand storytelling. It fills 25 minutes and is quirky and mildly watchable, but its narratives lack direction. Stuff just sort of happens. Kitarou is content with his unlife, while Rat-Man never changes. Watch another GeGeGe series instead.