'Jujutsu Kaisen' Season One Review: This anime has some really cool action

Less than a week ago I wrote a first impressions post on Jujutsu Kaisen, an anime I had seen plenty about as of late but just hadn't bothered to check out myself. While I did start the anime back in October, I ended up dropping it after the first episode as I began some travels through Turkey and then ended up in Armenia. I didn't really have the time to be watching anime, things were chaotic, but I felt the interest in getting comfortable in the evenings and watching anime again as things began to slow down finally. It didn't even take me a week to go from the second episode to getting to the final episode of the first season, I can't remember the last time I managed to binge through an anime like this in such a short amount of time. I would say that Full Metal Alchemist was similar, but that had a significantly larger number of episodes and took much longer to get through. There's something a little more unique about Jujutsu Kaisen that makes it stand out in the sea of anime these days. It's hard to think of a specific reason as to why this is, and instead not just end up listing a plethora of reasons. I'm sure I will end up doing just that in this post still, however. But it's so refreshing to find an anime that is well animated, and has humour mixed in with interesting character designs and a degree of seriousness to it at the same time. Something that doesn't just feel like it's an endless copy of the rest of whatever is releasing in the season. I browse through MyAnimeList in search of something new, and nothing looks different from the rest.

This post may feature a few spoilers throughout the first season, though I will attempt to avoid doing so. Instead, this is more likely to be a post praising the things I do enjoy about the season, and a few things I dislike, avoiding the idea of plot summary and instead really trying to get the idea of what this show is about and why it's something I really enjoy. I feel this is a bit more necessary given my lack of interest in modern Mappa as an animation studio. There's a lot they've done right here, and I'm happy to actually be able to say that. Jujutsu Kaisen feels like the greatness of modern anime and its capabilities, without the weaknesses of what makes modern anime so insufferable. That isn't to say that the anime itself doesn't contain any weaknesses. There were moments in which I felt it strayed a bit off its main course, though I can understand why it did so and the importance of its pacing and character development. So, here it is. A bit of a review on the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen, an anime I really already recommend from this point.

Jujutsu Kaisen is a fast anime. It really excites me to be able to write that, having looked back at the fun time in which One-Punch Man's first season released and felt like an excuse for animators to brag over their capabilities by creating a show in which it felt like endless over-the-top action. I feel like Jujutsu Kaisen goes in this same direction from its very first episode, in constant motion and finding new ways to show its audience really cool fight scenes. Sure, there is a narrative here, and it is still being focused on and told, but alongside a pacing that just seems to refuse to slow down, even when the show wants to go in a direction of character development, it does so by bringing in new foes that mix things up, using characters we haven't seen a whole lot of to detail them a little more. Jujutsu Kaisen does all this greatness with an animation style that is colourful and varying. Sometimes it goes to simplistic drawing styles for humour, other times it feels like they've gone back to pencil and paper to create really cool frames that show the hatching and scratchy feeling of graphite. Adding a texture over the drawings that also adds to the weight of impact in the fight scenes.

Anime these days tends to be quite immature, a little silly. That isn't anything new to the world of anime. Elements of quirky humour have always been around. Jujutsu Kaisen finds ways to add this into the dialogue in unexpected ways. Into characters that have certain traits. One of which is fueled purely by the idea of what type of women his friends are interested in, to which they gain his respect even more and he opens up to them. One character is an elderly man which suddenly springs to life with a Metallica type of shirt and a guitar during battle. A lot of the time it's general one-liners from characters that you don't really expect much from. The composition changing to exaggerate their stances on the matter. "It's shit!" exclaims a rather sophisticated man in cool glasses; the perspective moving with his line, almost to convey some force to his words despite their sudden nature. These moments don't come when the show is trying to be super serious, it's not a sudden break in the atmosphere when tensions are very high, and that's usually what I like about it. Though sometimes something just hits you in such a moment and you can't help but crack a smile. Take the main image of the post for example, a battle unfolding, and the character's various expressions become plastered across the screen.

When it comes to character design, I really like how everyone looks. The villains have really interesting, thought-out designs in some cases. In others, it seems they're just designed with fun in mind. Almost with some sort of philosophical aspects in mind. One character being an embodiment of mother nature herself, containing no eyes and instead horned branches that extend from the eye-sockets. Strong in appearance, but containing a womanly voice. In their writing, it's as if there's some idea on what humanity really is, on who is cursed and who is simply just ugly. Alongside that idea of what curses actually are, their true nature being extensions of the worst qualities in humanity. As the season reaches its end it definitely does pick up a bit on the story, hinting at something a bit broader that faces a future challenge. Even here the show continues to be strong in its action, all while taking some inspiration from other genres; at one point it felt as if it followed the direction of The X Files in aesthetic. The horror elements and supernatural aspect, the detective attitude in finding answers to a mystery in what seems like a smaller town. The show loves to do this sort of thing, to take inspiration and make little references to things. It's not overly obnoxious nor reliant on pop culture references, and that's something I've really liked about the way it goes about doing this.

I'm quite curious as to how it approaches the story in a bit more of an extensive manner in the second season since it did feel a bit slow on the narrative in the first, quickly reminding us of that story to come in the last few episodes. Perhaps the second season will change its pacing in pursuit of more narrative, though I can see how fans might end up disliking that as a result of how strong the first season has felt. A continuation of that with some mixed development makes more sense.