Review of Fruits Basket

IF YOU ARE A MEGA FAN OF FURUBA ANIME DON'T READ THIS BECAUSE IT MIGHT BURST YOUR PERFECT BUBBLE. This is my first review so bear with me. First of, I read the manga before watching the anime. I had kinda high expectations of the anime because everyone seem to be praising it to Heaven and back. I enjoyed the manga (especially the later volumes) so I decided to give the anime a try too... I can say I was quite disappointed. Okay, I'm a guy and not really a fan of shoujo manga but what originally got me to be interested in Fruits Basket was the zodiactouch, it seemed different and promising so I gave it a try after one of my friends told me to read/watch it. I must say I'm really happy I read the manga before watching the anime because if I had watched the anime first I'm sure I would never have bothered to read the manga. The anime is bad in many ways when compared to the manga; the story is modified and some important characters are totally left out for example. But more about that later, now let's get on with the review.

Story 4/10

Basically Fruits Basket is about Tohru Honda, your average happy-go-lucky girl who is like a saint to everyone but thinks nothing about herself. She lives in a tent after her mother died in an accident and later gets to live in her classmate Yuki Sohma's house together with two other Sohma family members - Shigure and Kyo. What Tohru doesn't know at first is that these Sohma family members are cursed with the 12 zodiac animals.

Okay, so the the way the story unfolds itself is rather slow-paced and repetitive. The core message/plot of the story could have been summed up in less episodes, it felt a bit like it was dragging on. Not like there was much of a plot anyway, more like a "slice of life" kind of show with occasional drama and comedy and what-have-you mixed in.
We have Yuki and Kyo fighting all the time, Shigure with his random comedy moments (which failed to amuse me more often than not) and Tohru meeting a new zodiac member in every other episode, learning about their tragic past and then having a mega fluffy conversation with them which then made everything pink and happy unicorns and rainbows again.. rinse and repeat. It gets repetitive and dull really fast, especially when the characters are pretty clichéd. Oh, and actually most of the sad background stories are left half-way unexplained or just simplified and cut off so much that you can't even symphatize with them because there's so many holes left to fill and you basically don't get to know much about anyone; Yuki's and Kyo's pasts are just scraped a little on the surface. It's disappointing especially because Kyo's past and development turns out to be enjoyable in the manga. Speaking of the manga, most of the things that made the manga as good as it was don't even exist in the anime.. okay, I've heard the anime was made before the manga was even finished so the inaccuracies and lack of depth are forgiven a bit. But I can say that the anime follows the manga up to the first 8 volumes rather faithfully, which is good I guess, with some slight extras/changes added. The end is quite different though and in a way left pretty open with a lot of questions still hanging in the air, not to mention that the climax has like 2 episodes devoted to it to build it up but is then so easily solved that it takes the magic out of it and just makes it.. well, 'meh'.

Art 5/10

Not so much to say about the art. It didn't impress me but it didn't make my eyes bleed either. Nothing fancy.. just mediocre. Sometimes the animation felt... well.. lazy; the same frame would be on screen for like 5 seconds or something. I must also say that I found those sparkly-glitter-pink-lovey-dovey scenes to be overused to the point of being cheesy and annoying, heck they were even used during moments they totally did -not- fit to.

Sound 4/10

The opening and endings were too slow-paced for my taste so I skipped them most of the time. About the music in the anime I can't say too much.. nothing great but nothing terribly bad either. I noticed it was the same selected few songs that kept playing during the whole course of 26 episodes.
I found most of the characters voices to be annoying and just not fitting for the characters. Yuki lost what little manliness he had built up in the manga thanks to his disturbingly feminine voice in the anime.. I imagined him sounding clearly masculine but in a sweet/innocent way, not like a total girl. Ugh. And let's not even talk about Momiji... just.. what the hell. Okay, sure he is a shota but he sounds like a goddamn 3-year-old spoiled whiny girl instead of a cute pre-puberty boy, not to mention that I was hoping for him to have a German accent seeing how he was half German in the manga. Son, I am disappoint.
Only Kyo, Shigure, Hatori, Akito, Hanajima, "Yankee girl" and Kazuma sounded right to me. The rest gave me more or less painful mental earbleeds.

Character 5/10

As I mentioned earlier the characters are quite clichéd; we have the cute shota boy, the cool guy with a split personality, the troublemaker loner guy who actually is soft inside, the silent and overly idolized guy with social problems, the egotastic brat who makes you see red and not to mention the girl who is so desperately in love with a guy, who hates her more than cancer, and she punches him to death when he is being honest about not liking her.. yes, I mean Kagura and she must be the epitome of all the things I H.A.T.E in an anime character; I don't wonder one bit why Kyo doesn't want to get married with her.. who the heck would? lol Oh, and let's not forget about those Yuki Fan Club girls who had a whole episode devoted to them.. I wanted to punch each of them in the face so damn hard. That episode I was so tempted to skip, it awakened my puke reflexes.. especially how Yuki was totally oblivious to their behaviour and even treated that selfish bitch with kindness. Needless to say most of the characters I found annoying instead of likable because they were so plain, exaggerated, clichéd, had a lack of deep or unique personality. Only Kyo, Hatori and Kazuma I found likable all through the show, the rest were more or less a nuisance.

6/10 Enjoyment

I watched this anime in two days but I'm not sure did I watch it that fast because I wanted it to end already or why. Honestly most of the episodes felt like repeats of each other with little new to add to the basket. I seriously wanted to like this anime more than I did (mostly because the manga left a good impression on me) but I just found it more mind-numbingly dull and lacking than exciting. Sometimes it felt like I was wasting my time but luckily a few episodes were actually good too, like the one with Hatori's past. Oh, and the scene when Ayame turns into a snake and gets lasso'd by mistake into the sea made me crack up; that was one of the few times the attempted humour actually rubbed me the right way. Okay, occasionally Shigure was funny but he didn't save the (often badly placed) mass flooding of failed attempts at humour which were more embarrassing than entertaining due to trying too hard to be funny but falling flat on their face instead. The "I AM SO SORRY OHMAIGAWD" hot spring kimono lady was funny a few times too but that's about it.

5/10 Overall

The anime was quite a letdown for me personally. I would not recommend watching it unless you haven't read the manga or are the sort of person who likes cotton candy fluffy shoujo with a girl who radiates light with her presence.. and magically heals all past scars of other half-strangers with just a few sentences. If you are interested in Fruits Basket, READ THE MANGA INSTEAD. I promise, it is much better! It makes more sense, actually is enjoyable (especially when the story gets going for real) and it also fills in the many things left unexplained properly in the anime. The anime is quite the disgrace in my eyes, I don't understand why it has so high scores.. but oh well, whatever floats your boat I guess. People are free to like and enjoy what they want but Fruits Basket anime sure wasn't my piece of cake.