“Jujutsu Kaisen 0” Review

By: Logan Williams

    “Jujutsu Kaisen 0” is the new animated film produced by animation studio MAPPA studios. It’s a prequel to the hit anime series “Jujutsu Kaisen”. The series focuses around Yuji Itadori, but this film does not. Since this film is a prequel, barely any of the main characters make an appearance. This film revolves around Yuta Okkotsu. He just got made a Jujutsu sorcerer and this is his first year at Jujutsu High. He’s accompanied by most of the side characters from the main series. Yuta’s main goal is to get stronger so that he can protect everyone that he cares for; the basic shonen anime plot. But of course, things start to go awry and then total chaos breaks loose.

    This film is jam-packed with awesomeness and only has very few downsides. These downsides include some minor issues I had with the editing, and some creative liberties taken for the music in the film. In regards to the editing, during the climactic final battle, rather than having it just play out before your eyes, the director chose to add in some cuts to kind of stylize the battle but it ended up being too much for me. Same goes for some of the music choices in the film. They’d be playing some songs during the fights throughout the film but sometimes they would just randomly stop the music and there were times that it was just blatantly jarring. There were also some issues with how the film handled the time skips that were in the manga chapters. In the film, it just felt pretty off putting at times.

    But let’s stop looking at the bad and let’s focus on the good. MAPPA did a stellar job at the art and animation for this adaptation. Albeit not their best work, but still very damn good. Especially in the climactic final fight between Yuta and Geto (the main antagonist), you can definitely tell that this is where most of the budget went. I also felt that the pacing was a little slower near the beginning but it definitely got turned up to 11 by the time the climax rolled around. I can proudly say that this film had an excellently rounded cast of characters. Those ranging from characters we’ve already seen in the show such as Gojo, Panda, and Maki; all the way to brand new characters such as Yuta and Rika. I can’t really touch on too many more of the positives without going into spoilers so i’m going to have to skip those. 

    As a fan who absolutely loves the manga that this series is based around, I can safely say that this was a very good adaptation of the source material. It definitely felt as if this film would’ve worked better as a short season rather than a film but it was still very good. I’m giving “Jujustu Kaisen 0” a solid 8/10 as my final verdict. I highly recommend everyone to watch this film. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen the show or not. Because this a prequel, it’s the perfect time to dive head first into the series.