Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 Review

MAPPA have never had a craft problem with this series. The first season made the studio's reputation and the Shibuya Incident in the second is still among the best sustained action television anime has produced, with the Gojo and Toji flashback pushed past what the schedule should have allowed. The third season brings all of that to the arc the fanbase has never agreed about.

The Culling Game is Gege Akutami at his most mechanical: a points system, rule additions that have to be explained on screen, a roster of new players dumped in at once, and Yuji pushed to the edge of his own story for long stretches while other people fight. What rescues it is the individual bouts, and they are the best in the manga. Hakari's domain is a pachinko parlour with a jackpot animation attached, a joke that becomes genuinely frightening once the odds land.

Higuruma's is a courtroom that passes sentence, the cleverest cursed technique Akutami has written. Kashimo is a walking argument about what a thousand years of boredom does to a person. Adapting this well means selling exposition as tension and keeping the emotional thread on Yuji and Megumi while the board fills up. On the evidence of the fights, MAPPA can animate anything in it. The structural problem is the source material's, and no studio can direct that away.