Yeah, I'm finally watching through JoJo. I'm only 13 years late to the hype. But this movie actually came out 5 years before the western hype for JoJo truly began, and it wasn't produced by David Production, the studio that's synonymous with JoJo to this day. Instead it was given to us by Studio APP, a studio you probably haven't heard of, was dissolved in 2021, and didn't do a whole lot of anime productions despite the fact that they existed from 1984 until 2021. When I watched this movie I thought it was necessary before getting into the David Productionseries', but afterwards I discovered that the 2012 anime series starts by re-adapting Phantom Blood before going into Battle Tendency so I technically didn't need to watch this, but I'm still glad I did, for completionist sake.

Most of you are probably already familiar with JoJo. It follows Jonathan Joestar, member of the wealthy and powerful Joestar Family, and the son of George Joestar. The other main character is the iconic Dio Brando, who's father dies at the start of the movie, and Dio himself is adopted into the Joestar Family. Dio and Jonathan do not get along. Jonathan is super kind and some might even say naive, and Dio seems to see him as a privileged rich kid, and they become arch enemies. I'm also aware that Dio becomes the arch enemy of his descendants for awhile even though I haven't gotten there yet. So I thought this movie was okay. It seemed a bit rushed, but since I haven't read the manga I don't' know if the Phantom Blood arc was paced the same exact way or not.

One thing that I was confused by is all the stuff I described in the previous paragraph happened literally at the start of the movie, bu then only a few minutes later Dio and Jonathan meet each other on the street and don't seem to know each other and start fighting. I also found it difficult to care about any characters other than Jonathan and Dio, since there are a plethora of characters introduced randomly and no time was given to them to make me care. Even Speedwagon falls into this category for me, which is unfortunate since I know he's one of the most popular characters in the franchise. i also didn't get the feeling of how over the top JoJo is said to be. I mean it is over the top, but not any more than any other anime like it.

To me, the best parts of the series where the character designs, which are extremely cool and unique, the fight scenes, especially the final one, and the overall finale of the movie, which was effectively emotional as Jonathan dies in the arms of Erina, the woman he loved, (plus his father died not long before that in his arms). Oh, and Dio turns into a vampire in the movie. That's pretty cool too, even though it doesn't play that deep of a role into the story of the movie.