Warning! Contains major spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen’s Season 2 Finale!
Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2’s finale left Japan devastated by Curses, which was shown in a unique and brilliant way. The show has often been praised for its innovative directing in the past, especially where fight scenes are concerned. However, part of what makes the scenes of devastation in the finale stand out is that they are essentially the opposite of those awesome fights.
After the sorcerer possessing Geto’s body summons a bunch of curses and escapes, the show cuts to snippets of dialogue over various shots of buildings. These shots occasionally transition into more typical scenes featuring human characters, but this framing device serves to show how chaotic the aftermath of the arc is and how far-reaching its ramifications are. Part of what makes it interesting is that it shows scenes of civilians not fully grasping the situation at hand and then being suddenly devoured by Curses.
These initially calm scenes help lull the viewer into the same sense of security that these civilians feel before they are brutally slaughtered.
Jujutsu Kaisen‘s Finale Proves It Can Be Innovative Without Much Animation
Part of what makes this sequence so innovative is how it deviates from what Jujutsu Kaisen‘s anime is most known for. While the anime’s plot and characters are great, many fans love the series most for its beautifully animated fight scenes. The Shibuya Incident itself featured many of the series’s best fights such as Sukuna vs Jogo and Sukuna vs Mahoraga. This consistent quality of animation also had some major downsides, unfortunately, as there was a lot of drama at Studio MAPPA this season of Jujutsu Kaisen. But the sequence from the finale avoids all that and instead shows that even when it isn’t dynamically animated Jujutsu Kaisen can still have impactful moments.
This is also an innovative adaptation of the manga. In Gege Akutami’s rendition of the scene, they featured lots of overlapping speech bubbles in front of a desolate cityscape. This would of course be difficult to adapt to the anime, so the series took a different approach, stretching out the chaos beyond a single page and assigning some faces to parts of the dialogue. This serves to help the viewer relate more to the individual lives affected by the chaos the rise in Curses has caused. It also helps to further convey the widespread nature of this turmoil, instead of implying it may be limited to Tokyo.
More Anime Should Learn From Jujutsu Kaisen‘s Approach
This brilliant adaptational choice is just one of the ways in which the staff at Studio MAPPA have elevated their source material. It is these sorts of innovations that prove that everyone working on this project has a deep passion and understanding for the original manga. More anime should learn from this approach that Jujutsu Kaisen took and take more risks in adapting their sources.
Watch on Crunchyroll
