Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is named the prequel of Jujutsu Kaisen, yet fulfills a different role. Instead of shedding light on “how we got here”, it's a movie worth of buildup for the character Yuta, a Jujutsu sorcerer who is in the same class as the second years Maki, Inumaki, and Panda, and for one of the major villains in the main story, both characters promised to show up later in the show. A completely cannon movie that works as a plug-in to the main franchise, it contains substance that most shounen movies do not have. Furthermore, adapted by MAPPA, and with the same writing team and directors as the cannon story, It was sure to succeed the manga variant, yet surprisingly it didn’t.
Jujutsu Kaisen 0 adapts the manga counterpart almost identically, albeit a couple extra scenes which were handled well. While this is a strange thing to criticize it for, the manga for Jujutsu Kaisen 0 was not formatted amazingly for a screen adaptation. It jumped around quite a bit, and really only focused on developing the characters Yuta and Geto, great development, but the surrounding story clunky and weird. The story was cut and paste, chapters taking place after large periods of time, and little substance aside from pure focus on Yuta. Half the scenes were under 2 minutes and were literally just jabbed together, containing at least 5 substantial time skips and 3 missions in its 1h 45 minute runtime. I was expecting MAPPA to add quite a lot more flesh and development to the movie, like scenes with the other characters, or more background information and buildup(like they did with jujutsu kaisen’s main story), but not much was changed. They added a few character cameo’s, a couple of extra fights, and cool animation, but nothing really substantially speaking.
Yet, I still recommend, the source materials' strength bleeding into its final product and saving the rather weak story. While the presentation of the source material was done rather strangely, the character development, and the subtle things that anime studio’s can do competed to a manga were ever present. The animation was constantly great, and the music was rather decent. The direction left more to be desired, and the final fight felt shallow, but the core story was a good one. It was not written like a shounen movie add-on until the final fight(which was like 50% filler) and the story outclasses in writing quality, most to just about all of what is currently adapted of JJK.
I do recommend, but know that it is far from a narrative masterpiece.
(Also, Regal I want my money back. I was never given the limited edition, promotional movie booklet, the whole reason I watched it so early and at the movies)
