Jujutsu Kaisen Season One Review
Anime is so fast now, you guys.
See, BACK IN MY DAY, Anime seasons were like 40 episodes long, and it took roughly 80 episodes for things to… happen. Dragon Ball Z was pretty big when I was young. Naruto and Bleach were on the scene. I loved them all, but in each one, story-lines dragged on across multiple seasons. Tournament arcs took years. Dark days, indeed…
But now sh*t is fast. Jujutsu Kaisen is proof of that. But let me back up. Main character Yuji Itadori is a high schooler who goes to Occult Club so he doesn’t have to stay late at school. Then some evil curse monsters turn up, Yuji swallows a finger, as people do, and gets amazing curse fighting powers. He teams up with Megumi Fushigorou and Nobara Kugisaki at the special Curse-fighting high school, and we’re off to the races.
This show has a lot of your typical Shonen Anime goodness: enormous fight scenes, characters with exactly one strange character quirk each, a rock and roll soundtrack, a complete disregard for physics, and a talking panda that fights monsters. And on all of those fronts, Jujutsu Kaisen delivers. The characters are fun and interesting, particularly teacher/troll Gojo and Sukuna, the ancient curse that Yuji finds himself on the wrong side of.
Unfortunately, the show also comes with some of the baggage that weighs down a lot of Shonen anime, like long monologues that just seem pointless (“Do you think the soul is part of the heart? It’s the other way around! Your body is just the shape of your soul which is a reflection of the truest ideal of the heart of the gallbladder”) and slow character growth. A lot is happening in this show (intrigue, betrayal, resurrection, vengeance, and intramural baseball) but there’s not much in the way of emotional development for most of the characters. In these ways, I think My Hero Academia is a better model for the new version of Shonen anime: still fast, but more focused on personal stakes.
That said, I burned through Jujutsu Kaisen’s first season, and I’m looking forward to seeing more, even as I hope it can grow. 3.5 Cursed Fingers out of 5.