It's October 2020 and a newly released anime popped up in my YouTube recommended feed through the Crunchyroll channel. It's the fight scene in episode 2 where Gojo faces off against a newly awakened Sukuna. This piqued my interest as I had heard talk about this anime prior to watching this clip. Needless to say I was quite interested in the building hype surrounding this anime.

You see, I had just finished watching Hunter x Hunter for the first time and felt the need to fill the void it had left once I had completed it and thought Jujutsu Kaisen would do just that.

So I watched the first episode and... Yeah, it was pretty good. It followed a pretty typical jovial pilot formula of introducing the character and the event that would start his journey and I was onboard. I watch the second episode and it felt mostly like "Episode 1: Part 2" but I was still with it. I didn't feel like I was dragging my feet until I got to around episode 4 where something just wasn't clicking with me.

As the episodes kept on airing I eventually stopped seeing this anime as an entertaining "turn-my-brain-off" type show and more of a chore to continue watching. With the hype continuing to build I was wondering if I was going crazy. Like:

The story begins with Yuuji Itadori. Relaxed, easy-going high school student balancing his attendance to his ederly grandfather in the hospital and his club/school activities. Alongside this we are slowly introduced to the world of Jujutsu sorcerers, cursed energy and curses through the characters of Megumi, Gojo and Nobara, our typical shonen trio.

We also learn our MCs situation and the problem of an ancient powerful being merging with young Itadori. This is all mostly introduced in what I'd call the "Introduction Arc" which spans the first three episodes. For the most part, it's all done pretty nicely.

Now I don't think anyone could blame me for drawing immediate parallels to Naruto. I did so quicker and heavier with this anime than any other prior to this. It didn't wow me with any of the plot points because I couldn't help but think that our happy-go-lucky jinchuriki MC, moody and serious dark-haired boy and the bitchy girlboss alongside the white-haired mentor was serious a serious case of déjà vu.

I feel as though the anime wasn't even attempting to be very original in the way the main plot points were being introduced. I could very easily predict what was going to happen next and because of this most of the tension within the story was lost to me.

The MC is being tested on his worth in being a Jujutsu sorcerer?

"He'll fail at first, but then impress the judge through some unconventional means."

Yup.

The MC "dies" and due to a conflict with his inner tailed-beast?

"He'll have a random post-mortem inner monologue with the tailed-beast and be revived with little-to-no consequence."

Yep.

The MC loses a close friend in a tragic way to a villain?

"He gets an epic power boost and goes beast mode and fucks him up"

Yeah...

I could realistically go through just about every single major plot and story point. The anime was so generic shonen I could easily predict the events, making it SO much more less impactful because it had established itself as being the cookie-cutter we came to expect from shonen. It genuinely degraded my experience with the anime because... Well... I was expecting something more than just the standard.

Now I'd like to talk about the characters of:

Megumi (Sasuke) is done fairly well. He has an arc he goes through, and serves as the polar opposite or counter to the character of Itadori. However, he is probably the most uninteresting character out of our main trio. He's the most distant from the other two and has probably the weakest and least enticing motivation to move forward in the story than the other two. He wants to help his sister [and] keep up with the ever evolving Yuuji Itadori.

Nobara is my favourite character from the litter. She has a small arc she goes through about her letting go of her need or want to look feminine and display herself "beautifully". She's got a bombastic and slightly insane personality that makes her battles and interactions with Yuuji fun to watch.

Yuuji is quite a goliath to tackle, so I'll keep it brief. His character is fairly consistent throughout the show. He's a good kid with a good heart that wants to do the best he can and do it the cleanest way possible. He isnt too much different from your standard anime protag in that sense. He's not particularly clever or witty or... funny... on his own. In fact. there isn't much that seperates him from the rest. Unfortunately, out of our main cast of characters, he only ranks just slightly above Megumi for me. His goal of wanting to give people a "proper death" is just too weak for me and in the grand scheme of the events he find himself in, is kinda irrelevant.

Now we get to Gojo. The ladies man. Phew... probably the best thing this series offers is the character that is Gojo. Bro is just a walking W and the show really capitalizes on it. The shows antagonistic peons very much acknowledge the powerhouse that is Satoru Gojo. The enemies will go out of their way to make sure they don't come into contact with Gojo (with the exception of the idiot volcano guy) and will flee at his arrival. We don't particularly explore his character all too much, but we get to experience his personality through his interactions through the main trio and he offers great comedic relief when he's not being an absolute boss, so an in-depth character dive wasn't really necessary to appreciate his presence.

Ok. Now I'll get into the major gripe I have with the show.

Now I'm not saying this show is badly animated by any means. It's decently animated most times, with a few episodes being pretty great. However, this is all brought down by some quite horrendous compositing and directing/storyboarding. This show, by far, has some of the wonkiest and strangest directing I've seen in any anime, especially in the fight scenes.

Holy Sweet Jesus.

For most of the fights I can't even tell what's really happening on screen and when I can it almost looks laughably bad. I think the only fight that looked decent was the Mahito vs Yuuji and Nanami fight, which had Hironori Tanaka for the main director. But even that fight was brought own by the horrendous colouring and compositing. The show just had an ugly colour palette for nearly every scene that I sometimes had trouble even understanding or seeing anything. The night scenes in this show have this ugly washed blue filter and it looks terrible. There were a few episodes where they had an ugly shit brown colour over the whole fight that made it look like they were fighting in an unflushed toilet bowl. Not to mention the use of CGI is poorly implemented and the textures they use are crap to put it lightly.

This video done by Probably Pretentious goes into it more in-depth (and more objective analysis), however I believe even here he's being a bit generous:

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Now one aspect I can praise is the OST. I feel like it captures the modernistic setting well and melds in with the shows tone quite nicely. Scenes are most definitely elevated by a VERY solid score and stands out when it needs to. I enjoyed the first OP and ED much more than the 2nd ones (I thought they were pretty trash tbh). If I had to complain about anything, it would be that only a few tracks really stand out as being great, where as the rest kinda ranges from "eh" to "solid".

With the amount of hype this anime was getting, I was seriously beginning to doubt my own brain. I've now come to learn that I wasn't the only one who felt like this anime was getting a bit more credit than it really deserved, and have since come to peace with the fact that I simply just cannot enjoy this show to the level others do, despite multiple watches.

With all this being said, I am still onboard to see if this show will improve in the second season, but from my experience so far I can't confidently say that I'm particularly excited for it, but more inclined towards it as more of an obligation having completed the second season. I just hope that I can finally see what all the hype is about and not view this show as more than just a chore, because I really want to enjoy this show but have been struggling to so far.

Ok. I'm done. If you read through all that: Congrats. You don't get anything for it... but I appreciate it !

I'll get around to making a review on the movie which... hghhhh... Yeah...

edit:

If you have any criticism or opinion of my thoughts or any corrections then feel free to PM or just post it on my account. I like to hear others opinions as well!