JUJUTSU KAISEN 0

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionJujutsu Kaisen
MANGA ActionJujutsu Kaisen 0: Tokyo Toritsu Jujutsu Koutou Senmon Gakkou

REVIEWS

• 

  liliphobic

  87/100
  It’s a shame it was only an hour and forty-five minutes, but they made every moment matter.

  SPOILER-FREE

  For starters, this movie is very watchable as a newbie to the world of Jujutsu Kaisen. It was adapted from the prequel to the primary series, so while it doesn’t flesh out the world as well as the main series does, you can watch it without any prior knowledge of the world and still understand it just fine.

  Now, onto the review.

  ---

  Jujutsu Kaisen 0 had stunning animation, incredible music, and amazing characters. It’s a shame it was only an hour and forty-five minutes, but they made every moment matter.

  I thought the characters were great. I loved the look into the second-years from the main series when they were first-years, and of course I loved Yuuta. His development and relationship with Rika was clever and unique, and I enjoyed how the ending of the movie worked out for them. I also liked the further exploration of Inumaki’s character in how he related and reacted to Yuuta. The development here really builds the deeper you get into the story as a whole. Also, Maki was mega-hot in this movie.

  The animation was amazing. I can’t think of any particular scenes that made me think oh, clearly the budget went somewhere else, although the shots of Gojo’s eyes did make me think this. this is where the budget went. The fight scenes were animated incredibly as well. Of course you can’t compare it to the quality of ufotable, but MAPPA really did do a great job with the animation. The CGI was good, the fighting was good, the curses and characters were good. No complaints here from me.

  And then the music! Great music. King Gnu makes banger music. The OST was fantastic too. The right song played in the right moment, and the music really complemented what was going on during the movie.

  Then, of course, there’s the plot itself. Honestly I don't have much to say where the story is concerned (well, not without spoilers, anyways). I wouldn’t call it anything incredible, but it’s far from being a trash plot. I like how it works into the main story, and the concept as a whole was very interesting and enjoyable. It definitely got me wanting to get back into Jujutsu Kaisen.

  The anime original scenes were very enjoyable too. After recently rereading the manga, I can confirm that there were very few anime-only scenes; they added some extra pizzazz to the fights of course, and they also gave cameos to characters from season 1 that didn't appear in the manga. There is an additional end credits scene that was not included in the manga, but I think that's about it.

  As for some other negatives, I did think the pacing was a little off, but not so much that I didn't enjoy the movie. The manga (a mere four chapters and ~200 pages) had some poor pacing, and this movie was a very faithful adaptation. However, even if it was anime original, I do think that an extra thirty minutes or so could’ve made the movie just that much better. It really felt like a short movie, especially in comparison to recent American movies that have been closer to three hours.

  ---

  Overall, this was a great movie. I’m not quite as awed as I was after leaving the theater from the Mugen Train movie, but it’s certainly better than any My Hero Academia movie they’ve made so far. Many individual aspects I found amazing, like the characters, animation, music, and story, despite the pacing feeling a little off in a few places. But, even though the fights were amazing, it simply wasn’t as enjoyable for me as season 1 was. However, I do think it’s fair if you liked the movie more; it was a very solid movie with several incredible aspects. The big-screen experience is one you won't want to miss for this movie. Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is definitely worth the watch, regardless of how much you already know about the series.

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• 

  Horsie

  86/100
  [Spoiler Free] Go goujou go.

  The Good

  Jujutsu Kaisen 0 covers many of the checkboxes for a great movie.

  The plot is solid and engaging. Not outstanding, but no major issues. I'm definitely invested in the main character, possibly more than Itadori. It's an absolute treat to see the side characters from the main TV show in action again, and I mean it, because nearly all of them reappear in the movie. The animation is fantastic, and cursed energy is always cool to see. There is plenty of action to let the animation shine throughout the movie. The music is great and enhances the experience. Not in a way that I'll be downloading the soundtrack to my playlist, but it worked perfectly to increase the impact each scene had.

  Something I really like is that some side characters receive more attention, and as a result you find out more about their past and personality that wasn't told in the main show.

  The Bad

  It's easier to write about what I would have wanted instead of what I already got.

  Although the movie is entirely built upon the main character's backstory, it is painfully neglected. In fact, if you've seen it, the movie's trailer doesn't recap his backstory - it's pretty much what you get when you watch the actual movie. If you haven't seen the trailer yet, I wouldn't recommend doing so. It cheapens the already weak backstory by spoiling it ahead of time. Towards the end of the movie I actually felt somewhat emotional - so if they had just put in an extra 10 minutes towards the backstory, which wouldn't hurt at all for a 1 hour 45 minute film, it could have been phenomenal.

  On top of this, I wish the flashbacks to the backstory were presented in partially unique and overlapping pieces - not a repeat of the same scene each time. I can understand why it was done, because it works just fine under TV show pacing, just not in a movie where the last time I've seen the flashback is at most 10 minutes ago. This also leads into the next point.

  My other gripe is that Jujutsu Kaisen 0 doesn't utilize much of the advantages of a movie format. It doesn't feel like a movie - it feels like the back-to-back episodes of a slightly short TV show arc. To be completely honest I can't exactly explain at the moment why it feels this way, but I suspect part of the reason is the pacing, and a weaker central theme. A recent example of another shounen action movie that, in my opinion, was able to successfully adapt to a movie format and utilize its advantages, would be Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train.

  Conclusion

  All in all, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is a great experience, and highly recommended. The quality and content is on par with the main show, so if you liked that, you'll love the movie too. If you haven't seen the main show yet, I would recommend watching it first, as the movie leaves out quite a few details and assumes you already understand concepts explained in the show. If you haven't seen any of the trailers yet, keep it that way. Finally, there's a post-credits scene that apparently sets up season 2 and 3, don't miss it!

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• 

  vampirevore

  85/100
  get in the demon, shinji

  Just a heads-up, if you haven’t watched the movie and haven’t read the manga and want to avoid Any spoilers, just scroll down to after the second rainbow breaker for a tl;dr. This isn’t an in-depth review but I do make references to things that might count as at least minor spoilers. Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is a pretty good movie. I went into it having already read volume 0 of Jujutsu Kaisen about a year ago and not feeling especially excited to see it adapted into a movie format. Okkotsu was a bland character, and I didn’t feel like its plot was especially necessary to get through before the events that the next season of the anime will cover. I came out of the movie though actually wanting to reread volume 0 and catch back up with the manga for the chance of seeing more of this movie’s main character Yuta Okkotsu. The story primarily follows Yuta and his relationship with Rika, someone he was close to as a child that ended up becoming a cursed spirit bound to him, lashing out at everyone and everything she perceives to be a threat. Somewhat understandably, this has had the effect of making our protagonist close himself off from most people out of fear from what Rika might do to them. Somewhere along the line this uber powerful and kinda crazy cursed spirit catches the attention of Suguru Getou, the antagonist of the main series and of this movie, as he tries to acquire Rika’s power for himself. In the middle of all that we’re also given a bit of background on Gojo and Getou’s history with each other which will be further explored in the content that season 2 will adapt, and a pretty nice snapshot into what Maki, Panda and Toge were like in their first year at Jujutsu High School. In that regard, the pacing of the movie does feel a little off since we don’t necessarily get all that much time to fully develop some of the aspects around these parts of the story, but it definitely was adequate at the very least, and with this being something from Mappa with a movie budget the action scenes alone are more than worth the price of admission. The first thing that stood out to me right around the start of the movie was that Okkotsu is basically Shinji. Megumi Ogata does a fantastic job at really embodying this character, and while you can instantly make out parts that feel lifted right out of her performance as Shinji in NGE, it’s not necessarily distracting and also doesn’t take away from the unique traits of this specific character. Not gonna lie though, part of me did mentally go "__get in the demon, Shinji__" when Yuta took part in his first fight. Consistently throughout the movie though, he does what he does because he doesn’t want the people around him to get hurt, ultimately raising the threshold of what he’s willing to do in the name of protecting the people he cares about. It’s your usual shounen mc motivation but it works well because in the last part of the movie especially it’s clear that he’s really not going to pull his punches at all even though his intentions might be “noble.” There are some parallels between him and Itadori that I didn’t notice when I read the manga, with how they both were thrust into the world of sorcerors and curses through essentially being possessed by something of immense power that they then have to learn to live with and use to help people. Only issue is that since Okkotsu’s arc is mostly confined to this movie/volume, which itself skipped quite a lot of time through even what happened while he was enrolled at Jujutsu High, it can kinda feel like he moved on a little too quickly. The idea that he and Rika were so in love it created such an immensely powerful curse was also a bit more than the story was able to sell, but for what it’s worth the scene they shared at the end did feel earned, since the whole movie had been building towards Okkotsu fully accepting himself. Plenty of characters from the main story also make cameo appearances, and it works really well. The principal of the Tokyo school in particular was really fun to watch literally every time he was on screen, and it injected some good humour into the movie. Much of the rest of the comedic lines and scenes were pretty hit or miss though, which is the usual with shounen stories anyway. I’ve never personally been a big fan of those chibi moments in any story, and they felt even more awkward in the context of a big movie, but they’re not too prevalent and of course only last a few seconds at a time anyway so you can ignore them fairly easily. As I said before, the action here is incredible. Before going into this I couldn’t imagine that it could look much better than what they pulled off with some of the best fights in season 1 (the one against Hanami in particular) but they completely exceeded every possible expectation the anime series might have set previously. The fights in the last act were animated very fluidly, everything moved fast without being too difficult to follow, the scale and weight behind each attack felt appropriately epic for a movie. If I could I would just infinitely loop the fight that Gojo had in particular because that might just be the best thing I’ve seen so far this year. Sticking on the technical side of things, the cgi usage was simply immaculate, the way it was integrated in just helped with making everything feel that much more grand in certain shots. I wanted to have more to say about the soundtrack, but it didn’t stand out to me really at all at any point, which I suppose could be a good thing since it also means it wasn’t at all a bad or inappropriate soundtrack. The King Gnu song that played over the credits was pretty great though, speaking of which, you stick around for the credits. There’s a scene afterwards that I honestly did not understand at all but,,,,it exists I suppose. If it’s not already obvious, I had a great time watching this movie, and even if you’ve already read volume 0 it’s more than worth seeing how it’s brought to life and really even improved here through not just the stunning animation but also the addition of scenes that weren’t originally in the manga. It’s an easy __85 out of 100__ just for the rewatch value, the action, the added backstory for the series, and for Okkotsu himself really.
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