Review of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2

Gege Akutami's manga Jujutsu Kaisen is deranged, taking after Attack on Titan's grotesquerie and Hunter x Hunter's horror movie aesthetics. Thankfully, Gege was inspired by Togashi's creativity for supernatural abilities as well, leading to Jujutsu Kaisen being the most ambitious and engaging shonen action series of its decade. This season renders these fights exhilaratingly, with greater clarity and intensity than the manga. Director Shota Goshozono and his staff do the complete opposite of merely animating the panels (during one fight there are regular cuts to a moving POV shot) while also, even more impressively, avoiding the share-ready showboating that plagues many big anime productions. Thesebattles are thrilling episodes of danger and kinetics, not fourth wall breaking animation showcases to be appreciated out of context. They are tense, violent and frightening; one gasps at the characters' feats of impossible strength as if seeing them in real life. That immersive spirit is precious, now as ever.

Equally importantly, someone on the staff for this second season has a bigger heart than Gege, which shows most in the first few episodes that depict the backstory of Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto. A montage of a beach time hangout, a strikingly grounded moral argument over a game of basketball, and an infectiously innocent, sweet portrayal of Riko Amanai handily elevate the flashback above the manga's depiction, but the killer is the opening and ending for this stretch of episodes both being rendered as though Geto and Gojo are the two best-friend main characters of a 50 episode adventure series. It's a stunning, sentimental gesture. The series does eventually drown in its own nonstop combat, but even that brings more poignancy to a lovely early episode where Kugisaki and Fushiguro plot to get Itadori a date with an old classmate who crushes on him (Itadori and Kugisaki even bicker at length about a new horror movie!). Beauty is all the more beautiful when it seems so far away.