I remember getting off the bus after junior high, walking home. A recent friend I made got off at the same stop and said, “Dude, you gonna watch DBZ today?” He was referring to DragonBall Z, the gateway anime series for many kids in the US, featuring martial arts, aliens, explosions, space travel, crazy worlds, etc. At 13, DBZ was the greatest thing that ever existed….until I started uncovering the depth of manga and Japanese animation out there. But you gotta start somewhere right? If I were 12 years old today, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 would have been my DBZ, starting me on an epic anime journey that’s produced some of my favorite movie memories of all time.
Jujutsu Kaisen 0 loosely translates to Magic School, needed in a world where curses are real and threatening. But this is no Hogwarts. Yuta (Megumi Ogata) our hero, is followed by a curse, Rika (Kana Hanazawa), a former childhood friend who tragically passed away. Rika is so powerful, Yuta is given Special Grade status to attend Jujutsu Kaisen by sorcerer/teacher Saturu Gojo (Yuichi Nakamura), where Yuta can hopefully harness the curse and maybe release it. Yuta is in one of 4 new sorcerers. The other 3 are curse combat specialist Maki Zenin (Mikako Komatsu), walking talking Panda (Tomokazu Seki), and Toge (Kōki Uchiyama), who only speaks in ramen ingredients. Gojo needs these pupils to learn fast, as the sorcerer Geto (Takahiro Sakurai), an, um, not so great alumnus of Jujutsu Kaisen, continues to grow in power and followers each day.
The joy of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, like all manga/anime, is the amazing worlds/action they conjure, seemingly out of thin air. Very much a Japanese creation, in this world, curses are real, and take various forms. Sometimes they’re tiny and kinda cute, some, like Rika, look menacing like a white xenomorph, and some are imposing giant blobs sucking all the life out of people who end up on the unfortunate end of a cursing. The best parts of Jujutsu Kaisen are the learning sequences, where Yuta goes on missions to expel curses from various places, learning from Maki Zenin, Toge, and Gojo the rules along the way. The action sequences are a delight, as we see that comic book/DBZ like character in action pose with moving background to keep the fight scenes electric and colorful. More impressively, they’re always different, as Maki, Toge, Gojo, and Yuta’s combat styles among others are wildly different and require different strategies/techniques that are always imaginative and fun.
When it comes to characters and plot, we’ve got more of a mixed bag. Streamlining a manga series usually means character sacrifices down to their essences. For the most part, Hiroshi Seko’s screenplay does a decent job giving us interesting characters. Yuta, Maki, Toge, and (especially) Saturu Gojo are given enough backstory to warrant the audiences attention. The big failing is poor Geto, forced into a Magneto like megalomaniac spewing all sorts of vile bile to show everyone he’s bad. Despite the sorta interesting ending, there’s still not a lot to that character. I almost would have preferred Geto be a reveal at the end of the film because all the learning at the school is the best part of the story and contains all the emotional complexity of Yuta and the rest of his schoolmates/teachers trying to find peace with the curses (real/imagined) they’re forced to live with.
If you want to find a gateway anime/manga movie for your kid and you don’t want to pay for HBO Max, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 has the potential to be that transformative film. It’s straightforward story and complex world will open the mind of those tweens searching for something different and exciting, and teach them a lesson or two about curses and learning to control them. And if that doesn’t work, just pay for HBO Max for a month and unleash Hayao Miyazaki on them.