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.