Fruits Basket: Prelude Review: The popular anime series becomes a full soap opera

[Ed. note: This review contains end spoilers for Fruits Basket season 3 and setup spoilers for Fruits Basket: Prelude.]

The 2019 TV adaptation of the manga series fruit basket ended in 2021, sparking tears and big hugs everywhere as the Sohma family finally broke their curse and could move on. Brave protagonist Tohru Honda and her love interest Kyo, the fearful cat of the Sohma family Zodiac, ended up together. There were happy endings everywhere, including some for characters who might not have deserved them.

With the story largely settled, the new Fruits Basket movie instead turns to the past. Foreplay Fruit Basket: Prelude shifts the focus from Tohru to her parents Kyoko and Katsuya and the love story that first brought them together. The romantic connection between her parents has generated some controversy, and the story delves into overly exaggerated and contrived moments. But dig deep, the emotional thread that makes fruit basket so memorable is present in the film – there is only one a lot of of questionable stuff covering it up.

preludeThe first half hour of is basically a recap of the last season of fruit basket, in all its heartwarming and heartbreaking glory. Unfortunately, that’s all it really is: a simple synopsis that doesn’t add much for anyone who’s already seen the show. It mainly serves to remind viewers that Kyo knew Kyoko when he was a child and that she was one of the few adults who ever showed him kindness. The synopsis also brings up the fact that Kyo was a witness the day Kyoko died in a car accident and he could have saved her if he hadn’t been paralyzed with fear. That was all settled fruit basket Season 3, which makes the length of this recap unnecessary except for new viewers or fans who want to relive the emotional highs and lows of the last season.

The TV series revealed small snippets about Tohru’s mother over time, but they weren’t enough to paint a concrete picture of her past. She was a junior high school delinquent who skipped school and joined a gang. When she met Tohru’s father, Katsuya, who came from a wealthier family. They married and had Tohru, but Katsuya died unexpectedly. Kyoko’s family had already abandoned her as they considered her a lost cause, and Katsuya’s family didn’t want much to do with her after his death, so she raised Tohru on her own.

Fruit Basket: Prelude, so was meant to be a touching romance between Kyoko and Katsuya, continuing the anime’s themes of love and redemption. But the problem — which manga readers will be familiar with and may have hoped to reconnect in this adaptation — is that when Katsuya and Kyoko met, she was a 14-year-old middle school student, and he…teacher. Technically a student teacher, and not she Teacher. But he’s still a 19-year-old authority figure who falls in love with a 14-year-old girl and shows her the only affection she’s ever known. It doesn’t get any easier when Kyoko calls him because he’s in love with a younger girl – and he just replies that it’s not his Blame she was born later than him. It’s hard to get over that inherent squick factor, no matter how cute it’s painted.

as a show, fruit basket has two major strengths: the moments when the characters ponder the nature of love and loneliness, usually while beautifully animated, and when love (platonic, familial, or romantic) is portrayed in tiny but deliberate gestures. fruit basket reaches its most memorable, evocative climaxes when it soaks up over-the-top emotion while using small details to justify those overly ornate internal monologues.

The movie follows that. Despite the peculiarity hmm of Kyoko and Katsuya’s relationship, her words almost transform her into something beautiful. This is especially true in the early days of her marriage, where she talks about her happiness and the small personal efforts she plans to make him happy. Adding Baby Tohru makes those moments even sweeter. But that is still fruit basketso it’s bound to be devastating.

The Sohma family is not the focus Fruit Basket: Prelude, so there is no magical bond or curse to contend with. All of the tension comes from everyday life, whether it’s Kyoko’s neglectful parents or Katsuya’s family pressures. To live up to the TV show’s fantastical tone, all of these dramatic elements are taken to extremes: so, as a young teenager, Kyoko is kind of a hard-nosed gangster and misses her exams because the leader of her gang hits her so hard for dropping out is to be studied at gang meetings.

The worst culprit, however, is Katsuya’s over-the-top soap opera-worthy death. Both the cause and the result are exaggerated to an almost comical point. Yet while this plot point is the film’s most incredible touch, it also facilitates the film’s strongest scenes. Kyoko falls into a deep depression, and her resulting narrative cuts through the convoluted plot and makes her grief compelling. When Kyoko describes Katsuya’s cremation, it’s a short sentence – Katsuya burned and turned into white smoke, and then he was bone – that’s still a gut punch.

With so much focus on the frankly problematic relationship at its core, Fruit Basket: Prelude is difficult to observe – and even more difficult to figure out what it’s trying to do. But as the focus shifts back to Tohru and Kyo, the questionable aspects of their parents’ relationship become a little easier to bear. After all their troubles, they have managed to unravel the tangled web in which the Sohma family and Tohru’s parents have trapped them both, and their happiness is well deserved. The film gives them a gentle epilogue that the series touched on only briefly.

Her solution is a happy juxtaposition of Kyoko’s sad story and passes on the happiness she felt in the early days of her young family to the new couple who comes after her. But it’s not enough to offset the film’s awkward relationship and over-the-top melodrama. prelude still has some traces of what makes fruit basket so convincing. But without the magic – both literally and figuratively – it loses what makes it special.

Fruit Basket: Prelude will be released in selected cinemas on June 25, 2019 fruit basket The series is streaming on Crunchyroll.