Jujutsu Kaisen Review: The Modern Shonen Benchmark
Every generation of anime crowns a new flagship action series, and for the current one the crown mostly belongs to Jujutsu Kaisen. A good-natured high schooler with monstrous strength swallows a cursed relic to save his friends and wakes up sharing his skull with the King of Curses — and from that single reckless bite, MAPPA builds a supernatural action-drama that is meaner, sharper, and far better-looking than the genre usually bothers to be. It takes the well-worn shonen skeleton — a school for the gifted, a mentor stronger than god, a hero who won't stay down — and hangs real dread and real consequence on it. Here's my headline take: Jujutsu Kaisen is the modern shonen benchmark precisely because it makes the formula hurt.
Story & Premise
Curses are the show's masterstroke of worldbuilding — malformed spirits born from the fear, regret, and spite that people leak into the world every day, and the only thing that can reliably exorcise a curse is another curse. That single idea reframes ordinary human misery as a literal monster problem and hands every fight a grimy moral undertow. Yuji Itadori's normal life ends the day he swallows a finger of Sukuna, the legendary Double-Faced Specter, to protect the people around him; he survives, but the King of Curses now squats inside his body, whispering. Recruited by the impossibly strong sorcerer Satoru Gojo into a hidden high school for jujutsu sorcerers, Yuji accepts a grim deal: hunt down the rest of Sukuna's scattered remains, then die on the sorcerers' terms. Across a two-cour run the pacing rarely sags — the series lays its rules out cleanly, tightens through a nerve-shredding mid-season stretch, and pays off with a marquee inter-school exchange that pits Tokyo's students against a rival sorcery school. It moves like it has something to prove.
Characters
The cast is why the cruelty lands. Yuji is the rare shonen lead who's genuinely likable without being bland — funny, absurdly strong, and driven by a stubborn, uncomplicated conviction about who deserves a proper death. Around him, Megumi Fushiguro brings brooding tactical restraint and Nobara Kugisaki brings swagger and a refreshing refusal to be anyone's damsel; the three click as a unit fast, which is exactly why the show can put them through hell. But the breakout is Satoru Gojo, and it isn't close. Half-hidden behind a blindfold, flippant, and casually the strongest man alive, he's an instant icon who somehow never tips into insufferable, because the writing keeps undercutting his power with real affection for his students. The supporting bench is unusually deep, too: Kento Nanami, the salaryman-turned-sorcerer who treats heroism like a joyless day job, quietly steals every scene he's in, and on the villains' side the body-warping Mahito is one of the most unsettling antagonists the genre has produced in years — a curse who embodies the exact human cruelty the show keeps circling.
Animation & Sound
This is where the show flexes hardest. MAPPA directs Jujutsu Kaisen like it's out to embarrass the competition: cursed techniques carry clear, chess-like rules, so the duels stay legible even when the animation goes berserk, and the marquee sequences are the kind of thing fans clip and rewatch for years. The staff list is a flex on its own — Tadashi Hiramatsu's character designs keep the cast expressive under pressure, series composer Hiroshi Seko (who'd later steer Chainsaw Man) keeps the adaptation tight, and the storyboards pull in genuine legends, with Ninja Scroll's Yoshiaki Kawajiri lending his hand to a couple of early episodes. The single most celebrated stretch belongs to a mid-season showcase storyboarded and directed by sakuga star Hironori Tanaka — a Gojo fight so fluid it briefly became the whole anime internet's screensaver. The sound design hits just as hard, from the percussive weight behind every impact to a stylish rotoscoped ending sequence that trades spectacle for pure cool. Few shows on any schedule look and sound this confident.
Themes & What Sets It Apart
Strip away the spectacle and Jujutsu Kaisen is about death — specifically, who gets a good one. Its curses are literally made of human negativity, so every exorcism is the show insisting that our worst feelings have weight and cost, and its sorcerers fight knowing the job is a slow-motion way to die well. That's a heavier thesis than the genre usually carries, and it's what separates this from the pack of super-powered-teen shows it superficially resembles. Where a lot of shonen treats death as a temporary setback, Jujutsu Kaisen treats it as permanent and often senseless — the villains aren't misunderstood, they're gleefully, philosophically cruel, and the show refuses to promise that decency will be rewarded. The tonal range is the other differentiator: it swings from genuine slapstick to body horror to gut-punch tragedy, sometimes inside a single episode, and mostly earns all three registers. Add a grounded, present-day Tokyo setting and a magic system with real rules, and you get a battle series that plays less like a power fantasy than a horror-tinged tragedy that happens to have incredible fights.
Strengths & Shortcomings
The strengths are obvious: elite action, a magnetic cast, and a willingness to hurt that gives the whole thing stakes. But 8.7 isn't a 10, and the gaps are real. The biggest is structural — Jujutsu Kaisen front-loads a slightly generic opening stretch before it finds its identity, and newcomers who bounce off the early episodes aren't wrong to find them familiar. The show is also, at times, in love with its own mythology: cursed-energy mechanics get explained mid-fight in dense info-dumps that can stall the very momentum they're meant to raise. Nobara, so promising early, gets noticeably less to do than the boys as the season wears on, a sidelining the story never fully corrects. And the darkness that gives the show its edge occasionally tips into misery for its own sake — a couple of arcs pile on cruelty in ways that read as shock more than theme. None of this sinks it. But they're the difference between a great action series and a flawless one, and Jujutsu Kaisen is squarely the former.
The Verdict
Jujutsu Kaisen is the modern shonen benchmark, and it earns the title the hard way — not by reinventing the genre but by executing it at a level almost nobody matches. The animation is a genuine event, the cast is worth following into the dark, and the show's insistence that death costs something gives its spectacle a spine most battle series lack. It lands at 8.7 rather than higher because the early episodes coast on formula, the exposition occasionally clogs the momentum, and the relentless cruelty sometimes reaches for shock over meaning. Those are real deductions, not nitpicks — but they're the price of ambition, and this show has ambition to spare. If you're going to watch one contemporary action anime — the one your friends won't shut up about, the one that made MAPPA a household name — make it this one. It's the benchmark for a reason.
FAQ
Absolutely. It's one of the defining action anime of its era — elite fight animation, a genuinely lovable cast, and a darker emotional core than the shiny surface suggests. If you have any appetite for supernatural action, this is close to essential viewing.