Greg Shannon, Staff

When it comes to movies, the anime community seems to be in a good place. With anime being the most mainstream it has ever been in the West, we can finally see more of our favorite shows get movies. No longer do we have to just stick to shows like “Dragon Ball” or “Pokemon” for us to have feature length films. With the rise in popularity of Gege Akutami’s series “Jujutsu Kaisen,” we were finally able to get a movie for the highly anticipated prequel book “Book 0,: and here are my thoughts on it.

Straight off the bat, the animation quality is phenomenal. It looks like the same quality they put into the cinematic openings for the show’s first season. Everything from the characters, and scenery, to just the buildings and environments was pleasant to look at and it’s like this throughout the entire movie’s run. Every frame seemed like it was handled with care and it makes the movie feel special to watch. It’s honestly hard to think of something bad about the visual quality of the movie. 

Then there are the fight scenes which are intensely choreographed and dramatic. I feel like if there’s one thing that Studio MAPPA, the film and series’ animation studio, knows how to really do, is make an extremely good fight scene. Whether it be something like “Attack On Titan,” “Dorohedoro,” “God of Highschool” or any of their other works, they just love to grab the coolest moments from the manga and just push it to the max. I wasn’t sure how much effort they would put into some of the fights from the book that fans latched onto, but they went all out. MAPPA thought “Oh, dude wouldn’t it be cool if we just animate the hell out of these fights?” It’s insane how cool they made Gojo, the main character of the series, look in this film. While it’s still kinda cool in the book, it’s nowhere near what the movie gave. The panels of the manga were fun and had some good dialogue between the characters but the movie expanded its fights to full cinematic sequences that were truly a spectacle in the theater. Almost every battle in this movie goes extremely hard and had me and my friends losing our collective minds in the theater. 

If I had to pick out a stand out character for the movie, it would probably go to the villain of the movie, Suguru Geto. Geto brought a fun loving nature to the movie that honestly matched the one that the main characters also brought. He managed to have a small comic relief to him while also being an extremely convincing threat. From his unique powers to the charisma he brought every time he was on screen, made him an enjoyable character. Geto felt like the perfect villain for this story and only added to its enjoyment. 

If there was some downside to the quality of the movie, it would probably be that if you are expecting a lot of add ons from the manga, you at least aren’t going to get much in the first half. The first half of the movie is pretty much the exact same as source material with only a few additional scenes; however, once they get into the second half of the movie, we get a lot of extra parts to the story to help build on and expand what’s happening.

All in all, “Jutjutsu Kaisen: 0” was amazing and definitely is a perfect way to  continue the hype leading up to the series’ second season. It brings everything from extremely exciting fight scenes to stunning visuals, to an enjoyable story. If you need something to show someone that could potentially get them into anime or just the “Jujutsu Kaisen” series, this is definitely the movie to do that. I would give this a solid 8.5 out 10 and would recommend you go watch it.