You know a shonen manga’s made it when its anime adaptation gets a theatrical movie. We’ve seen it dozens of times with Naruto, My Hero Academia, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and now the newest anime to join that pantheon is Jujutsu Kaisen. The dark fantasy anime based on Gege Akutami’s 2018 manga about sorcerers fighting Cursed spirits in Japan received a pretty great adaptation back in 2020, and its first movie is hitting in a few weeks to introduce a new hero to its expanding world.
The series’ teen protagonists Yuji Itadori, Megumi Fushiguro, and Nobara Kugisaki are nowhere to be found in the film Jujutsu Kaisen 0. Instead, the film winds back the clock and shifts focus entirely to the meek Yuta Okkotsu (Megumi Ogata for Japanese dub, Kayleigh McKee for English), who’s spent most of his life with the Cursed spirit of his dead love Rika (Kana Hanazawa/Anairis Quiñones) by his side. The Cursed version of Rika has been protecting him from harm ever since, usually through bloody means, and it’s a recent event that draws the attention of Tokyo’s Jujutsu Sorcerers, particularly Satoru Gojo (Yuichi Nakumura/Kaiji Tang).
Yuta’s primary aim is to hone his supernatural potential and find a way to exorcise Rika so he can have a normal life. But his presence in the Sorcerer world has caught the attention of Suguru Geto (Takahiro Sakurai/Lex Lang), and it’ll soon fall to Yuta and his friends — Maki Zen’in (Mikako Komatsu/Allegra Clark), Toge Inumaki (Koki Uchiyama/Xander Mobus), and Panda (Tomokazu Seki/Matthew David Rudd), all three of whom are in Kaisen proper — to save Tokyo from being destroyed by Curses. Just like the original anime, the film’s being animated by Studio MAPPA, and will have some incredible fight scenes to go along with the emotional proclamations about wanting to live a full life.
Akutami originally created Yuta and company in 2017, under the serialized miniseries originally titled Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical School. The positive reception to that story inspired him to continue the universe with the primary Jujutsu Kaisen. Kaisen 0’s characters were brought over to the main story over time, with Yuta having been fairly recently inserted into the adventures of Yuji, Fushiguro, and Kugisaki. Having seen the film, we can confirm that Yuta’s a great addition to Yuji’s world, and the movie will more than make you excited for him to show up when season two hits next year.
Jujutsu Kaisen 0 will release in theatres, both sub and dubbed, on March 18. Look for our review closer to the film’s release.