Blair Loveday
I had seen a pretty strong positive vibe for this new series Jujutsu Kaisen for a while but still hadn’t gotten around to seeing it. So given the opportunity to see the first half of the first season I figured I would jump in it and holy crap. I was missing out.
Jujutsu Kaisen is a world filled with cursed creatures. Most humans can’t see them but that can do serious damage to humans. This is where the Jujutsu sorcerers come in. In the background the deal with some pretty gruesome murders and track down the cursed creatures behind them.
The series kicks off introducing us to Yuji Itadori who is a student at high school. Him and his friends find a weird box with something wrapped in heaps of bandages. He leaves the strange object with them when a strange man finds him and asks where the object is. It turns out the object is a cursed finger and by unwrapping it his friends are just unleashing heaps of curses.
They rush to where the friends are in mortal danger. The strange man goes to fight the curses and finds himself overwhelmed. Itadori then jumps into action to fight the massive cursed creature and does reasonably OK for a human with no powers. He is about to be beaten when he does the only logical thing… Eat that cursed finger to see if it will let him win the fight. OK, not logical. Anyway, our strange observer notes, Itadori is either gonna die, or merge with the super powerful curse that the finger belonged to.
The latter happens and after a very eventful first episode we are thrust into this strange and brilliant series. A super powerful being exists inside Itadori now and the Jujutsu team decide to give him two options. Die, or find eat the other fingers so the entire being Sukuna is within him, and then die. Itadori chooses option two so that he can at least help the world. We then are taken on a journey as we discover powerful curses who can talk and do some truly crazy stuff. To help with the fight, Itadori is admitted to the school for jujutsu sorcerers.
So all of this happens in episode one and it only gets better and more bonkers from there. The series is filled with kinda likable and pretty unlikeable characters who are all surprisingly interesting. The action and animation is top notch, and the world just gets more interesting the more we are exposed to it. The first half of Season 1 sees a very impressive battle and ends just as it is about to heat up, which is annoying as I want Part 2 now. It’s so damn good.
The Collector’s Edition of the Blu-Ray is fantastic too. A beautifully designed hardcover box contains a book with some cool art and insights about the series alongside some nice art cards. Inside the digipak are the two Blu-Ray discs and the soundtrack on CD. As a package it is damn impressive and the best kind of Collector’s Edition.
My biggest issue with this release is it isn’t the whole season, because I am hooked. The release as a package is fantastic and well worth the treatment a fantastic series like this deserves. God I hope they stick the landing in the second half of the series.
