Jujutsu Kaisen is not one of those shows. The moment I watched episode 1, back when it aired, I could tell that I was going to watch a really fun piece of shounen and put the series aside so that I could marathon it all in one sitting on a rainy day once all of the episodes had aired, and as somebody that recently finished marathoning the show, thank God I did, because Jujutsu Kaisen is one of the most consistently fun action anime that I’ve had the pleasure of watching, thanks in large part due to the insanely high quality animation that is surprisingly consistent throughout the show.
Action is one of the most popular genres when it comes to works getting adapted to animated medium’s, which is unfortunate because it’s also the one that requires the most amount of work to get right. If you want to watch cute anime girl’s doing nothing then you don’t really have to actually animate much. Just use a popular manga with some attractive character designs as the storyboard for your show, provide the characters with the appropriate lip flaps, and there you go, a perfectly serviceable “animated” show. Now, obviously this low bar for entry doesn’t mean that you can’t have insanely attractive shows where supposedly “nothing happens”, just look at most of what Kyoto Animation has made as an example, but action, unlike scenes where characters just talk shite, has a high focus on movement. A lot of fights in TV anime, even the best TV anime, sacrifice the movement in a fight or two, in order to provide really high levels of animation to the parts of the show that really deserve it. Jujutsu Kaisen, on the other hand, decided fuck it let’s make every fight look amazing because apparently Mappa realised that all the Yaoi money from Yuri on Ice and Attack on Titan wasn’t going to spend itself so they might as well put it to use here. Consistency is key when it comes to Jujutsu Kaisen’s aesthetic appeal, and this is really what impressed me the most from a visual perspective in this show.
Now, that being said, pretty visuals mean nothing if you don’t like the story that they’re being used to tell – TRUST ME, but fortunately for Jujutsu Kaisen, this also wasn’t a place where I had an issue. While the story itself wasn’t exactly anything special or new, for instance, if you replaced the word jujutsu sorcery with something generic like jutsu, or nen, or chi, or even something as blunt as magic than the synopsis suddenly starts to sound a lot more generic, this narrative was used an excuse for the show to thrust as many, insanely likable characters on the screen as possible. Every single character in this show is as likeable as they need to be, and that’s because they’re all full of personality, helped in no small part by the fact that Jujutsu Kaisen seemed to learn from My Hero Academia’s mistake of introducing way too many characters way too quickly, and rightly limited the class of the Jujutsu school to around 3 per year. This means that a closer look at characters with a cool character design will lead to viewers finding an equally cool character underneath that fits well into the show’s overall personality. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the series of shorts after each episode which helped give the side characters with little screen time in the show itself a moment to express their personality to the viewer, to the point where even a throwaway witch character that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things still has a bunch of random knowledge revealed to the viewer by the end of the series 24 episode run time. Things like this are unnecessary and underappreciated, but add an immense amount of joy to the act of simply watching the characters on screen interact with each other in the main show.
Having characters with this much personality led to one of my personal favourite fights I’ve seen from a Shonen in recent years, where Yuji and Todo ended up fighting Hanami. This fight has one clear purpose within the narrative, and that’s to establish a friendship with Yuji and Todo. Yuji’s generically shounen, happy go lucky nature and Todo’s brutish, simple personality are a match that are clearly meant to either be used for a friendship or a rivalry, best demonstrated in how prior to the two taking on the special grade cursed spirit, they were fighting each other. While talking in this fight, the show was able to establish one simple fact, that Todo views Yuji as a friend, and wants to help mentor him so that he can get stronger. So obviously, when the two are fighting Hanami, that is what they do. And then the show does that.
As simple as that explanation sounds, having this major shift in how the characters interact with each other take place while the two are engaged in a serious battle, helped provide weight to a new character dynamic that was established instantly, instead of developed over the course of an arc or two, as these events often are. Hearing the pair referring to each other by ‘My Besto Friendo’ provided genuine hype to the fight, but more than that, the fight provided genuine weight to their friendship. This fight is a perfect showcase of how action can be used to develop a story, instead of a story being used to provide action, and I for one, view this as a great sign for things to come.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that the show is perfect, and while my main criticism for the show is something that I personally only consider as a nit-pick for this season, it is not a good sign for things to come, and it is something that I am genuinely worried about with regards to any potential future instalments in this franchise. And that’s the fact that the villains never die. Every time they’re about to be defeated once and for all, the show provides a bullshit asspull as to why they were able to get away, which is fine for establishing them as villains, who maybe weren’t revealing everything that they had up their sleave, but by the end of the last episode it really got on my nerves. There’s a different between a character that can’t die and one that won’t die. A character that can’t die, no matter how much the heroes throw at them is a genuine threat to be wary of. A character that won’t die, because the writer doesn’t want to kill them off yet is annoying because it halts any potential progress in the show’s story, in a cheap and annoying way, especially if the hero had already beaten them in the fight.
Whether this is just a nit-pick or a sign of things to come is something that I’ll have to wait and see about as a beta male anime-only viewer, but as somebody that rarely has an opinion that coincides with popular consensus in the anime community let me just say believe the hype.
This Review is actually the script to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag6M-POe3zQ&t=12s
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