by Kambole Campbell

Something which has bothered myself and like-minded writers about Jujutsu Kaisen is that there's often so little room for character work to breathe. Both on page and on screen, the story barrels through plot points to get to the next throw down – the second half of season 2 was essentially one big brawl, the destruction (mostly) well-executed, but numbing by the end. This feels especially true when compared not against other anime, but against itself: the six-episode mini-arc which opened season 2, called Hidden Inventory, stood out for its intense focus on the deteriorating emotional state of Suguru Geto, the villain of the prequel movie Jujutsu Kaisen 0.

So, this brings us up to Season 3 (Part 1, they're saying), which is centered around a build up towards the "Culling Game" – essentially a nationwide death tournament where sorcerers are forced to fight each other to the death for points as part of a wider plan by Kenjaku (a sorcerer piloting the body of the aforementioned Geto). The catch is that there's now a bunch of new sorcerers popping up due to… shenanigans, let's say for now.

The trouble with the show is that it has often felt like there's no middle ground between fighting, and laying out esoteric rules like the ones I've tried to explain above – the series switches from one overwhelming mode to another. (A recent sketch by some of my favorite YouTubers, RDC World, pokes fun at the show's often burdensome exposition). This is also reflected in some of the wider story arcs, which only briefly pause before barrelling into preparation for the next fight, rather than attempt to expand fully on character relationships or their state of mind. It felt like impatience; plot rapidly pushed along so as to get to the "good" bits again.

I suppose this is to be expected of a shonen action show such as this, and while fights are their own kind of storytelling, without space in between, it all becomes noise. I'm not immune to the excitement – after more or less declaring myself done with the story after feeling worn out by the manga and the back half of season 2, the blend of Kill Bill and Yutaka Nakamura homages in episode 4, "Perfect Preparation," drew me back in. But what stood out to most, was a shot in the fifth episode, "Passion" – the climactic sequence of the episode lead protagonist Yuji Itadori through an underground fight club to try and meet with the man who runs it – a powerful sorcerer named Hakari. I'll spare you the overly complicated details, but it's the framing of their meeting which stands out. Their conversation is framed from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, a fixed angle from the door through which Yuji enters the room – appropriate for a scene set in a security room, the wall lined with CCTV monitors. The conversation plays out as a long take, the camera never moving. Yuji stands, they sit and drink, Yuji messes up by overdoing it on a lie and slowly backs away, before Hakari attacks him and corners him against the camera.

This claustrophobic shot does more for the atmosphere than "faithfulness" ever good – an argument in the fandom which already began simmering with the episode centered around Maki (people claiming that it was "unfaithful" to the original work by leaning in to these homages – a ridiculous notion, given how open Gege Akutami has been about his influences).

In any case, this one shot held perhaps more attention than even the wildest moments of "Perfect Preparation," for a number of reasons (partly because the moment where Hakari nonchalantly turns on Yuji is pretty funny). It's a shot which shows Jujutsu Kaisen's potential for range: this is an episode which starts out with a talking panda mourning his creator, after all. Though there are moments of precise little acting details dotted throughout, the verisimilitude of this final sequence contrasts a lot of the episode which came before it, which leaned into looser drawings and a more expressive style such as during a staged fight between Yuji and a friend.

What also interests me is that it demonstrates an ability to experiment which has been limited for some American animators. Samuel Deats, one of the artists behind the adaptation of Castlevania and its sequel Castlevania Nocturne, remarked on Twitter that they'd, "have to perform some kinda ritual sacrifice to convince the powers that be to let us stay on a shot for longer than like 15 seconds over here" with him and Bobbypills creative director Balak quipping about inflated shot counts overburdening artists. This episode of Jujutsu Kaisen has shown that patience isn't just good for the flow of the episode, but perhaps also for the flow of work which made it.

/out of frame

🅰️ Kambole: So, Adobe has announced that they're gonna retire Animate. This has, understandably, got a lot of animators in an existential tailspin – not just because there's entire studios and so many artists who are primarily trained in this software, but also because there are teams who are potentially losing access to entire asset libraries by March 2027. As Ben Applegate from Kodansha commented to me: "Can you imagine if a corporation had the ability to brick Ernest Hemingway's typewriter?" Insane, and very likely catastrophic.

👼 Toussaint: I stumbled across Dogtooth Angel Zsaciel, a surreal sci-fi animated short series about a starry-eyed celestial being who’s been reincarnated on Earth to grant people’s wishes. Created by Glory Boy, a Hertfordshire-based animator whose previous credits include Agent Elvis and Punch Punch Forever, the pilot short feels indebted to the anarchic creativity and sketchy character designs of early-era Hiroyuki Imaishi, Yoh Yoshinari, and Masaaki Yuasa. If you like what you see as much as I do, be sure to check out the series' Kickstarter campaign.

😷 Rollin: My entire household has been sick for a week and I am very much head empty. I've gone back to both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Genshin Impact, however, so that's… you know, something.