First season is good
Second, superfluous pad
Third, a masterpiece
For those who cannot count syllables:
This review covers the entire “Fruits Basket” remake.
As most of us know, there was an excellent and widely loved “Fruits Basket” series that appeared in 2001. Its lone real shortcoming was that it appeared before the manga was complete, so it couldn’t reveal how everything turns out.
The story was the kind of shojo that appeals to a much wider audience. The characters were compelling, the plot moved forward at the right speed, and even though it was incomplete it led to a satisfactory ending.
The original series did not, apparently, find favor with Takaya Natsuki, author of the original manga, who was in some measure involved in the three-season remake that’s the subject of this review. The chief production connection to the original is the presence of much of the original voice cast in the English dub, which is nice.
My initial thought upon viewing the remake was how the changes were pretty much limited to style – the characters are more moe, the “leeks” had become “chives” for no apparent reason, and the little androgynous blond character had acquired a German accent and a few German words. The places that could have benefited from the advances in anime making were largely unchanged. Kyo’s transformation, for instance, was little better in this series than in the original.
I have not read the manga, and if this remake represents the manga better than the original did, I’m glad of that. Because in the remake a good and interesting story in which we care about the characters is diluted by padding, a kind of flailing in which there’s an attempt to make this into a high school romantic comedy with zodiac animals and such. It’s as if the story was approached as something that could be hammered into a kind of anime version of a “Twilight”-ish drama. That might be good for the producers’ bank accounts, but it’s crap storytelling. The thing runs a total of 63 episodes, which is at least 11 episodes too long. And it was dissonant, like the first year I watched anime and alternated between “Elfin Lied” and “UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.”
It would have been better to have made a second season, picking up from the first, once the manga finished in 2006 – it’s not as if five years awaiting a sequel is unheard of in anime. That failing, the producers might better have remade the original series, changing it only to the extent that improvements in technology allowed it to be better on that basis and that basis alone, and added a second season to complete the story. Then, if they wanted, they could have done “Fruits Basket Fumoffu” or something, where the zodiacs are always getting hugged and there could have been aerial views of the brightly colored explosions and ho ho ho for those who are into it, without messing up the drama of the show. There were cute parts – the scenes with the editor and the school play – that were genuinely funny, but this isn’t a funny show. (And if they’d collected a dollar for every anime trope and cliché used in the otherwise unremarkable OPs and EDs, they would have been able to finance that sidebar series, with enough left over to improve the production values in the main show.)
To say nothing of the endless, repetitive back stories. We got it first time around: It sucked to be a kid in this family; apparently, it sucked to be a kid in Japan, period. No need to devote a half dozen episodes to how it sucked to be this kid, and this one, and this one. It’s less fun than the Endless Eight was. Then there was the soapy soliloquy at the beginning of second season, ep. 22, when Shinji, oops, Yucky, was going on about how Tohru was like a mommy to him (to which his friend said what sounded like, “Even though she’s Irish?” but on third listening I guess it was, “even though she’s our age?”) and how he wanted something more. I half expected him to burst forward in a chorus of “I gotta be me.” This kind of thing happens when they’ve lost control of the story and try to get it back by taking it way too seriously. Truth is, they could lost most of the second season with no loss to the narrative.
“Fruits Basket” is one of the enduring classics in anime. As such, it shouldn’t be messed with lightly, any more than “Neon Genesis Evangelion” should be redone as a rom-com. If it were to be remade, it should have been done with that near-sacred status in mind, with the goal of the heights to which it could further soar, instead of how many high school tropes could be crammed into it, how much it could be homogenized with all the 5/10 shows that come and go without leaving a ripple.
THEN CAME SEASON THREE, “FRUITS BASKET: THE FINAL”
And oh, my God. Perhaps as a reward for enduring the aimless second season, the third season is one of the finest series of anime I have ever seen or can imagine. It is gripping, moving, tense, heart-wrenching, uplifting, terrifying – pick your superlative and there’s something in this short season that fits it. Talk about a roller coaster!
(It also demonstrates that, with a very small exception, all that high school stuff had no bearing or effect on the outcome. It was as out of place as it seemed.)
That third season also does something very well that anime usually does poorly if at all: Usually, if there’s an ending it takes place about 10 frames before the end of the show, leaving the viewer thinking, “and then what?” They hold hands and there’s fireworks, the end. (“Toradora,” I’m looking at you.) Not here. “Fruits Basket: The Final” devotes several episodes – more than necessary, really – to letting us know what happened then. It might be an apology for all the pointless high school stuff, but those producing the show seem to have realized that the audience has come to care about the characters and would like to know that they’re safe, if in fact they’re safe. We get to find out how it turned out writ large, not just at one point in time. It acknowledges that the “Fruits Basket” story is special, that it has a revered place in anime’s enormous body of work.
That’s good, though even the ending may be just a little bit stretched out, as if everyone involved didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to leave these remarkable characters behind. And who can blame them? We don’t want to be done with them, either. We want them to come over for a cup of coffee. We want to do what we can to help them along to happiness. Not many anime (or stories in other media) bring us to that place.
After watching a series that’s become important to us we often express a wish: for a different outcome, for a plot hole (or many plot holes) to get filled, most often, for a second season. I’ll do that now. I fervently wish (with no reason to think it will ever happen) that they go back and recut the whole show. That they take the vast majority of the high school stuff, the parts that have nothing to do with the story, and make them into a sidebar series. At least that they remove them from the main story, which loses its pace and just wallows around because of them. The pacing of parts of the series is just right, but in the second season it and much else goes terribly wrong.
If they were to do that, the remake of “Fruits Basket” would be just right, a perfect successor to and completion of the 2001 masterpiece.
