ANIME: Jujutsu Kaisen

SCORE: 5.5/10

If you are even somewhat in the anime or nerd space you will for sure have heard of Jujutsu Kaisen. You probably have a friend who really likes Jujutsu Kaisen. They probably even own JJK merch. You’ve probably seen dumb clips of the show on Twitter, Tik Tok, or YouTube. And almost certainly, you’ve been recommended to watch Jujutsu Kaisen. If you are to take ANYTHING away from this review it is one thing.

DO NOT RECOMMEND Jujutsu Kaisen to people.

If you enjoy the show and like it, that’s fine. While I have my own extreme opinions about curating one’s media literacy I don’t care enough to say you shouldn’t watch something you enjoy. I don’t care if you watch it. However, recommending JJK to me or others is just such a clear sign of how uncritical of an opinion you have. You should either know it’s trash or be aware that your opinion might not be very critical. There are very few shows that I have seen that I can say are even remotely close to as unoriginal as JJK. In my 86 review I state that unoriginality isn’t a bad thing as long as it goes off to do its own thing. Inspiration is one thing but what JJK does is more or less straight copying. When I first heard of the show and simply heard the word “jutsu” in the show I jokingly said “wow it must be a Naruto copy.” God I wish I was wrong. And sure, while saying something is copying Naruto, one of the most influential anime/manga ever, isn’t very interesting and Naruto has also copied from many things itself…

JJK blatantly steals EVERYTHING it can from Naruto.

I then started to realize who the people that were recommending JJK to me. The main two groups were either people who had never seen Naruto or people who ONLY watch things like Naruto. And don’t get me wrong, I like Naruto. I had a huge Naruto AMV phase and have tons of obscure Naruto knowledge. But, Naruto is incredibly flawed and we excuse it mainly because of how influential on the modern shounen genre it is. The incredible highs of Naruto exist in the vast space of its own mediocrity. In comparisopn to JJK, Naruto has plenty of incredible highs even if most of the show isn’t great. JJK has none of those highs.

It only makes sense now that people who like JJK are people who either have never experienced this genre of show before and are wowed by the gimmicks they are seeing for the first time. Or, they ONLY like watching this one thing over and over again just with different character names. I think the absolute worst part of the show is that it doesn’t choose to just steal from Naruto but many other shows in the most random of moments. I’ll go over some of those things in a bit but let me just go over the premise for those who haven’t seen Naruto.

Premise:

HEY! Do you like seeing YOUNG ANIME BOYS with DEMONS inside of their bodies? Well then you can thank Naruto for pushing that trend and JJK for just ripping it right off. Again let me clarify that I am fully aware that Naruto did not invent this or many other trends I may mention, but it is very clear that JJK is basing its identity off Naruto which popularized many of these things. Yes, Yuji has the most POWERFUL of demons inside of him aka Sukuna. He even has a kinda orange aesthetic to match! I was actually shocked watching the first episode that it was actually just this straight up of a rip off. But even at this point I could already tell something was off.

One of the main points about Naruto having a demon inside of him was that it forced him to be isolated from very early on in his life. It can more or less represent some form of burden of responsibility from Minato being transferred to him and unfairly ostracizes him as a monster. In JJK, Yuji is a very normal boy who just happens to be super strong. His grandpa dies with very cliché last words and then he gets a demon inside of him. And while sure there are many JJK sorcerers who want Yuji dead, it PALES in comparison to what Naruto experiences in Naruto Part 1. Part of Naruto’s arc is learning to work with others and accept himself as not a monster to some extent. And despite it being a very messy thing that takes quite literally most of the series for him to get over, it serves a very important purpose to the foundation of the show. So now, let me beg the question of “Is it fine to take something like this and just change it?””

Absolutely, as long as you know what you are doing. 

In my 86 review I talk about how 86 blatantly takes from a ton of things but combines and changes all of them to create this incredibly intimate story about the human cost of war and what being dehumanized can look like. What JJK does with this is basically just copying and pasting but only the first half of the document. There is NO advancement on the boy with the demon inside of him trope. In fact I could argue it’s a regression even just from Naruto. I’m going to lightly spoil things but JJK’s larger narrative is predictable since it’s been done before that the only thing I could spoil are the smaller moments and minutia. JJK tries to take from Naruto without understanding what Naruto as a narrative is doing. Gege has no clue what he’s doing.

Plagiarism:

I will not front, all good artists steal. However, when you steal something from another piece of media, it HAS to serve a purpose otherwise it is just plagiarism. I’m even okay with people stealing lines ALMOST word for word as long as it serves a new purpose and has very thoughtfully been processed and implemented into their story. And absolutely no matter what, you need to IMPROVE on the work otherwise people like me will just say “just watch X show instead.” Because if you aren’t saying anything new or doing it better…

What is the fucking point of making art.

And honestly, while I’m aware this may be a bit harsh, it feels fucking gross to even call JJK art. Like going back to the whole boy with a demon thing, it takes all the way up until the end of SEASON 2 for them to say the exact same thing about Yuji as they say about Naruto. The whole “I’m a monster (murderer in the case of JJK)” has been seen before. I’m glad they changed the one word because I would have gone ballistic otherwise. If you are wondering if at this point in the show if they have done anything with the demon boy trope in comparison to Naruto I’ll just let you know that no they haven’t. In fact, they have done less. DESPITE BEING A SHOW THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE FAST THE THEMATIC PACING MOVES AT A SNAIL PACE ARGUABLY BACKWARDS AT TIMES. I’ll get into pacing issues later but it is impressive people can like this show when it says literally nothing for nearly half a season and the only thing it does say is something I’ve heard before.

The other parts of plagiarism in the show related to Naruto are very obvious but I’ll just go over them. The two main guys and one main girl group dynamic with squads of three isn’t exclusive to Naruto but when everything else in the show is copying Naruto, yes it is just copying Naruto. Especially considering that Megumi comes from an elite clan that has great influence over the ninja I mean jujutsu world. Then there is Gojo who is just a modification of Kakashi’s design but at the very least he has pretty blue eyes this time and is an idiot. Could go into more detail about the Naruto specific stuff (like the pointless shitty reincarnation in season 2 LOL) but also want to mention other minor cases of plagiarism. Gojo’s I am the strongest thing more or less functions as All Might’s “Symbol of Hope” and the demons wanting him to take him down is more or less what happens in My Hero Academia. Junpei saying “Yu…ji” was just stolen from Full Metal Alchemist except in that specific moment. And more or less how powers and cursed energy work is based off nen from Hunter x Hunter but so are a lot of things so I’ll give it a pass on that. It also makes a very random Evangelion reference with Mechamaru which serves no purpose and it’s always weird to me when shows do that when they very clearly aren’t on the same level. Yes, I will be that guy who says “how DARE JJK even reference Evangelion you don’t DESERVE to do that.”

But what’s more important than anything else about JJK’s plagiarism is it’s inability to say anything new as a story. You could copy all the minor details you want from every show but as long as you say something new and worthwhile as a story I can give you a pass. But the worst part about JJK is it’s not even just repeating Naruto, it’s saying less.

Storytelling/Pacing:

I feel like everyone else is afraid to say it so I’m just gonna.

Gege Akutami has ZERO talent for storytelling.

Obviously it is not absolute zero and Gege has plenty of talent for writing action and doing character designs. But, it is alarming how lifeless JJK feels because of how it’s told. Gege honestly believes that “oh yeah so good writing means having consequences then I’LL SHOW YOU CONSEQUENCES!” as he proceeds to kill off over half the cast. It’s crazy how vapidly uninteresting the show is because the show always has to have a fight into someone dying every few episodes. I feel nothing for these deaths because I was never given the time to feel for these characters. But don’t get me wrong there were times I had fun with JJK. It’s the kinda trashy junk food show that you aren’t proud of watching even if it can feel good for a moment. And honestly I was usually laughing AT the show rather than with it. In a show that has pretty good (stolen) ideas on paper, there is not a single moment for them to breathe.

Unironically, this is what a lot of people ask for in media and only now do they realize that oh wait it’s actually bad (see the MCU). Most people don’t like spending time developing characters or building up on thematic aspects of the show slowly. They want a spectacle that ends in an emotional crescendo to come out of thin air. And bar having an insane budget and a mastery of the craft, that is something very rare. It’s a reason why a lot of people like Ghibli films because they are capable of doing that. Now sure many Ghibli films are overrated but what Miyazaki does is genuinely impressive so many people believe that it is replicable in any story in any medium. But let me just make something SUPER clear.

Most storytellers ARE NOT MIYAZAKI. That’s just not how storytelling works.

That may surprise some of you but I also want to say that Miyazaki also has many flaws as a filmmaker. I am also using Ghibli as a lens for all of this because it’s something more accessible to the average anime fan and that’s generally what JJK tries to appeal towards. But what’s important to note about the Ghibli model is that Ghibli films usually lack incredibly compelling characters. I’m considering ranting about my controversial opinion on Ghibli films but I’ll withhold it for now. I would say spare Princess Mononoke, Ghibli films are constructed to be mainly about a world and about an idea. And this is generally the approach that JJK takes with that. There’s just one problem with that.

JJK is a long form piece of media.

Whether you want to refer to it as a manga or as an anime, JJK goes on for longer than a film. So while in films we may forgive a lack of impactful character moments, in a long form piece of media they are the lifeblood of the material. Without the big character moments, long form media feels very empty. The whole point of taking a long time to build something or someone up is because it REQUIRES a long time to do so. If not you’re just wasting people’s time as you struggle to write your fuckin story. I think a great example of something I reviewed that is even shorter than JJK as of right now is Mob Psycho 100. It could never be a movie because it needs to give time for Mob’s character to breathe. We need to see all the facets of who he is and what he struggles with. To not have the moments where Mob feels weak or lost would be to gut the entire story of its purpose. Which is exactly what JJK does.

So let me go over what Gege has done. He has taken Naruto, a show which requires time and attention to detail for its characters to truly shine, and placed it in a more film/Ghibli-esque framework in order to have it feel exciting and wondrous. And good god does it not work. Not only do the character moments fall flat but the world feels incredibly empty. Going back to my 86 review, I talk about how the reason a world feels very vibrant and interesting is often because the characters that inhabit said world are greatly impacted by it. With JJK there is not a single character like that besides Geto (who is completely tossed aside for some worse storytelling trope but we will get to that in a bit) who feels connected to the world. I would argue that Maki and the Zenin clan (stolen idea but it’s stolen a lot) are somewhat attached to the world but they are so far on the side line I think they’re waiting in the parking lot right now. With how little the characters matter in JJK they begin to feel very detached from the world they exist in and the stakes of the narrative. Rather than having characters with goals and ideals that want to navigate the world, we have characters where more often than not the world HAPPENS to them. Which don’t get me wrong, can work but only if you do it VERY intentionally and requires a lot of wisdom and finesse to pull it off (see Evangelion). What Gege does is equivalent to a 5 year old saying:

“OH YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE COOL IS IF WE HAD A DEMON AND HE WAS AN OCTOPUS WITH FISH POWERS AND THEN AND THEN THAT GUY I ALREADY KILLED OFF COMES BACK AND GOES BAM BAM BAM ON HIM BUT THEN HE HAS TO GO TALK TO HIS SON AND ITS LIKE… WOAH DAD AND SON TALK… AND THEN HE DIES AGAIN… AND THEN MEGUMI STILL GETS BITCH SLAPPED.”

I’ve never seen a show with such little respect for its characters. Even Chainsaw Man, a show whose characters mostly serve for Denji’s growth, at least have a point in all of it. Most of JJK’s characters exist to watch the spectacle go on and feel both powerless and pointless. I don’t care what any of the characters want because they are either not gonna be able to achieve it or they are gonna die in the next few episodes. It’s pathetic how predictable the show becomes once you realize how incapable Gege is as a writer. At best Gege is someone you would want on time as character designer and an artist much like the Toriyamas and Nomuras of the world. Unfortunately, many people only care for style over substance even with their characters.

Characters:

Like most popular shounen, JJK has very good character designs and concepts. In terms of doing the groundwork for the show’s characters JJK gets a gold star from me on most fronts. I mean sure maybe we got a little bit of a lot of plagiarism here and there but if I didn’t take points off from Chainsaw Man or 86 I won’t take them off from JJK. Most of the characters have a distinct look, personality, and identity when they are initially introduced. They are fun and have pretty good dialogue between each other. There’s just one problem with all of that.

This is where the characterization of 95% of characters ends until they die.

Like most popular shounen, one of the biggest flaws JJK runs into is cast bloat. You only have so much screen time to give out to everyone. But as a mangaka, you are rewarded for having a big cast because it allows you to give every single fan someone to latch onto if they don’t like the protag. It’s a good marketing strategy even if it’s bad for storytelling. This is why shows like My Hero, Naruto, Attack on Titan generally struggle to be successful in the long run is because trying to have an audience have an emotional attachment to 20+ characters is really fuckin hard. Unless you’re making a Trails-type game series that is legitimately over 500+ hours long and still ongoing, I would argue it’s a bad idea. Which is why then many of these characters get fucked over and made into plot devices. 

It’s why these types of shounen anime can seem so promising at first and yet consistently disappoint. They are fundamentally designed to be that way. Creating a bunch of interesting characters utilizing beloved archetypes while failing to ultimately develop the characters into something further is just a mainstay in modern anime. It’s frankly a huge disappointment and why I often highly encourage shows to focus on only a few characters (the six character sweet spot will be something I’ll talk about at some point.) Seeing people fall for the same tropes over and over again just reminds me that maybe we aren’t making progress as a society. And what’s shocking is how much worse some of the characters actually are. 

Megumi Fushiguro is one of the most botched characters in the entire show. While he only partially embodies the character archetype of “The Rival” very much similar to Sasuke, he never serves that purpose. The whole point of a Rival character is to make the protagonist question their way of life by posing an alternative to it which at moments can end up being more fruitful than the protagonist’s. The Rival is supposed to be a foil the protagonist, not someone who gets constantly one upped for the sake of showing LOOK AT HOW STRONG YUJI IS. LIKE CMON EVERY TIME MY MAN FUSHIGURO IS ON SCREEN HE IS GETTING HIS ASS HANDED TO HIM. If anything, Mahito is more of a foil to Yuji and that’s really sad to say. A chaotic evil demon with very little direction being a foil to your protagonist just goes to show how empty Yuji is. Yuji’s whole “I want to protect people so they can live a full life” is bland and only ever challenged when a character dies. Which to be fair is more often than most shows but not my point LOL. The show is disgustingly predictable with how it has the story revolve around Yuji and ultimately devolves into a torture porn of trying to make Yuji feel terrible for what Sukuna does and the loss he experiences around him. The audience doesn’t get to feel what Yuji feels.

And then there’s the Gojo problem. Look, at the end of the day I am aware he’s hot as fuck but I cannot let a singular hot character ruin something I’m a part of this isn’t my dating life. With the rise of isekai light novel anime being pushed to the forefront of the industry, it’s only expected that any and every action anime will have excessive amounts of male power fantasy (and hot people). While yes, Gojo is very cool and funny and hot he is by no means interesting. We rarely get so see any of his interiority or truly understand what he cares about (besides saving Sasuke I mean Geto). The amount of raw screen time he takes up is astonishing. He’s arguably the main character of the show. And he’s usually always fighting or being a silly boy. Which would be fine if he wasn’t taking up SO MUCH SCREEN TIME. Gojo doesn’t have many great character moments or serve the plot, if anything the plot serves him weirdly enough and not in a good way. Gojo asks zero important questions beyond his relationship with Geto. Which, ONCE AGAIN, is completely dropped for the sake of a more simplistic and uninteresting plot line. 

Gojo’s seemingly infinite bullshit powers is something that you would think is only utilized in certain situations. And yet, the show actively acknowledges how bullshit it is and has to put him in the most obscure circumstances to avoid a power scaling fiasco. The end of most arcs is usually “oh no we all fucked up oh okay cool Gojo is here to fix it.” It’s honestly so dumb. There are no stakes in the show because Gojo exists and Yuji can’t die because of Sukuna. And I don’t care what Sukuna does. He has no interesting motives and is just supposed to be an evil incarnate. God forbid you have an interesting relationship with the demon inside of you to represent male anger like c’mon even Chainsaw Man can manage that. And what’s worse is that Sukuna is too separate of an entity from Yuji.

While in Naruto, when Naruto was in any type of Ninetails form, it was hard to tell how much control Naruto had. And that’s the the point. It often serves as a narrative for male anger but also any pent up emotion and for Naruto specifically it is about the curse and legacy he holds. While later on in the show Kurama becomes more of his own character, he is mostly a curse onto Naruto. It takes a lot of work for Naruto to reclaim ownership over his relationship with Kurama. And when Naruto does something terrible in his Ninetails form, there is no passing the responsibility. It’s his fault for losing control. While sure, that’s what JJK is trying to get across with the end of the Shibuya Incident, it’s very ineffective. Most people who know Yuji know it’s not his fault and Yuji typically has a disturbing amount of control over Sukuna. In Naruto, even those closest to him are scared of him in his Ninetails form and scared of what he can do. Both Naruto and his friends have to overcome their fear of what Naruto can become.

Because you know what, maybe it’s alright for the protagonist to be a monster. With Yuji, he just feels tortured by Sukuna because fuck it why not. It’s boring, it’s uninspired and just removes any stakes I would have in Yuji’s emotional arc. Yuji doesn’t have any interior problems, his problems only come from the outside world. Typically a good protagonist has interior problems from the exterior world but that shit just seems to bounce off Yuji. All he does is cry and moan and then get’s back up off his feet IN LITERALLY THE NEXT EPISODE. It’s insane how little they explore Yuji’s psyche mainly because I don’t know if Gege is capable of that. Like when I was criticizing Chainsaw Man and Fujimoto, I was very aware that Fujimoto had some talent I just didn’t think he could handle a story like Chainsaw Man. Something long with multiple characters that all need to have their own journey. Fujimoto can write a single idea well but struggles with pacing and maintaining a lot of elements of a story at once. But with Gege I’m not sure if he could handle writing the filler for most anime. Gege’s fundamental misunderstanding of characters and how they need to interact with the world and themes of their show is what makes JJK fall apart.

Can’t Stop Fighting:

At the end of the day the biggest and most obvious issue I have to echo is that Jujutsu Kaisen is about fighting. Not who is fighting or what they are fighting for but simply just fighting. And honestly, most of the fights aren’t that interesting. While the choreography and animation can be stellar at times, the fights are generally predictable. I never felt attached to any fight because the result didn’t matter and they weren’t that different from other fighting shows. The only good fight in the entire show is probably Choso vs Yuji which was actually fucking great. It had great animation, pacing, and even emotional stakes. Then ends in a dumb way because the plot demands it and once again it’s not like that fight mattered beyond getting Sukuna out of his cage.

All of the fights in Jujutsu Kaisen serve no purpose. Like more often than not, they don’t actually affect the outcome of the arc. It feels overly predetermined. Like, I don’t mind characters being powerless by predetermined situations, but JJK doesn’t really do that. JJK isn’t about predetermination it just happens to have writing this predictable. The characters fight to fill in the spaces between the narrative beats. It’s just predictable story buildup into 5 fights in a row into predictable ending and repeat. Most other shounen that I have liked or even disliked have had better moments even if they are shallow. MHA, AoT, and Naruto all have moments that I can genuinely say are objectively good. That’s because these shows have a more clear premise to be centered around at least at the start. JJK doesn’t even really have moments or a good premise to build off of. The fact that I can say that about JJK is indicative of how pointless the show is. The show doesn’t ever get good enough to where it’s dropping the ball because it never learned how to hoop in the first place.

Disclaimer: Season 2 has A TON of animation and art issues with the fights because Mappa is a fuckin slave house. I’m not even getting into those in this review so people can’t point and say that’s the only reason I didn’t like the show. I don’t care about the animation. It has issues but overall looks good enough. I’ve been watching quite a bit of older/cheaper anime recently so if anything JJK is a treat in that regard.

While I had my fun with Jujutsu Kaisen it is one of the most pointless shows I’ve wasted this much time on. If it wasn’t for the large cultural impact it has even in the west I would have never given it a chance past the first arc. And frankly, I can’t recommend that anyone else wastes their time on JJK. JJK blatantly steals material from better shows and stories only to do them in worse and more watered down ways. JJK is as predictable as it is empty and fails to come up with a single original thought. And look, if JJK is one of the first anime like even in your first 10 anime I can’t blame you if you like it. I’ve clearly watched far too much anime and am generally only excited by something with deep emotions or something experimental. One could call that elitism others might call it taste. If you like JJK I totally get why. The characters are funny and some fights are great to watch. The show still does some of the fundamentals right even if it always fails to follow through. It’s just that ultimately I never felt like I was actually getting anything from the show beyond me laughing at how dumb it was for better and mostly for worse. Jujutsu Kaisen’s success is reflective of how even nowadays the average anime fan’s taste lacks critical analysis and still believes that anime is a children’s cartoon that just happens to have a bit more gore. It’s a reminder that anime still has a long way to go but to be fair, all media have their issues.

Like how the hell does this win anime of the year? It’s just sad that I feel like JJK isn’t a good precedent for the anime world with how successful it is. I’m aware I’m rambling and being jaded so I’ll just say it clearly so you don’t forget.

Jujutsu Kaisen is a waste of time, don’t watch it.

– Jared/Zeph