Common Name: Fruits Basket
Score: 6/10, 3/5
Length: 26 Episodes
Genre: Romance, Drama, Comedy, Shoujo
Summary: Legends tell of a great banquet God held for his beloved animal companions and their race to the banquet hall. Most people know this story of the Zodiac, but not the story 13th animal. Said to have been deceived by his friend the rat, the cat slept through the banquet and was banished from God's graces. To some, this tale is just a myth, a cute way to measure out the years. To the members of the Souma family, this banquet and race are a never-ending curse that binds them all together and prevents them from finding happiness. Of course, that doesn't stop them from at least trying to connect with the outside world. Having lost her mother and a place to call home, thanks to her grandfather's home being under renovation and a landslide taking out the tent she'd set up in the woods, Honda Tohru is taken in by her charming classmate, Souma Yuki. While her stay is only meant to last until her grandfather's house is finished, the Souma family can't simply let her leave once she catches on to their secret. Perhaps this fated meeting will be the key to finally break the curse that has gripped this family for generations.
Review: Have you ever had one of those moments where you look back on something you read, watched, or listened to as a teen and went, "Wow. I didn't realize I was such an angsty little shit back then." For me, Fruits Basket and nearly every CLAMP title other than Cardcaptor offer me that re-realization every now and then. Now, don't get me wrong; I still love titles like Fruits Basket. These stories, while dated, are still good, in their own right, but are very clearly meant to appeal to a very particular audience--the angsty, self-destructive, and hormone-crazed teenager. There's just way too much melodrama in these titles for them to really be considered "great" outside of that specific age range. Or, at least, I can admit that's certainly the case for the source material for this anime, the manga that saw some pretty solid success in Japan as well as the United States. The anime is, however, a different story.
To be blunt, it really wasn't that great.
While the anime did a fantastic job of adapting the manga, it also had some glaring flaws. For starters, the show just hasn't withstood the test of time on any level. It might be a bit unfair to judge the style of anime from the early 2000s, the art of the anime hasn't done the show any favors over the years. Simplistic, low-budget, and generic are the first words that come to mind when I look back on the art and animation of Fruits Basket. Though this kind of art style can still be seen today, namely in shows that are meant to call back on that older period in anime, this show's attempt simply doesn't hold a candle to some of the greats of this period--most notably the titles from CLAMP that featured a similar style yet had a kind of quality to them that have made the works still hold up today.
Yeah, I know this is the point where I usually pull back on the criticism a little but I really can't find any
screenshots of this show that can be considered "good" that haven't been
heavily doctored and the saturation dialed up.
Moving past that petty quip, the Fruits Basket anime also suffered from another standard of that era--a plot that had two modes of storytelling--slow, grinding comedic filler and breakneck sprints to keep pace with the manga. Sure, a good portion of the fault lies with the manga already for being a pretty slow grind, but having that kind of back and forth run throughout the anime doesn't help an already bad situation. While some comedic pauses in the drama in this show are a necessity, this kind of stutter-stop motion validates neither format, effectively turning the show into something you're watching for either the comedy or the drama and hating every moment the other takes the lead. For me, the comedy was always the weakest part of this show. I simply couldn't get behind the one-note gags that each character and pair had to offer. For example, it figured that Shigure's comedy centered on the fact that he's cursed with the spirit of the dog, which makes him a lazy house dog and a booze hound. Similarly, Kyo at the Cat is thrown into the part of the spitting, hissing, cat-like tsundere who only tolerates people at his own convenience. Since most of the comedy surrounding the Soumas is dependent on their animal, it then only figures that Tohru's comedy is easily the blandest of all in that she's just a bit of a bumbling air-head.
Sure, that just makes her all the more endearing, but it isn't really that original.
As for the drama, though, everything is generally pretty solid and follows the main push of the manga. Afflicted by the curse, none of the cursed members of the Souma family are every really able to find love or happiness since contact with the opposite sex turns them into their respective animals. While this curse is typically played off for gags, it does still weigh on them none-the-less. While each animal finds some comfort in their fellows, the loneliness created by this curse can be seen most plainly in the nature of the cat, Kyo. Since the cat never arrived at the banquet, any family member afflicted with this curse is immediately shunned by the others. Either because they don't like him personally, because sympathizing with him angers the head of the house, or because the cat's absence was supposedly the source of this curse in the first place, it just stands as a point of fact that Kyo has it rougher than any of the other animals. This drama is then also tainted into full-on abuse when the head of the household, Souma Akito, comes into play.
Yeah, I'm just going to say this now: pretty much everything actually wrong with
this story and anime starts with this piece of shit.
It is at this point that drama turns into vomit-inducing melodrama. For reasons that aren't ever really explained in the anime, or at least not very well, Akito is the cause of most of the family member's personal issues. Easily angered, physically and emotionally abusive, and just kind of a terrible person in general, nearly every member of the Zodiac bears scars given to them by Akito, who is cursed with the role of God in the Souma family. I say this is where the show starts to fall apart because, at this point, the anime had run out of source material and started to venture off on their own and, since the author hadn't really gone into addressing Akito's character, the anime didn't really know what to do with him (easily noted by that fact that the manga reveals later that Akito was really a woman). So, left with little else, the show simply amps up the melodrama regarding Akito and their toward Kyo and Tohru toward the end, effectively making it impossible to take the show seriously. While these segments still speak to the themes of familial abuses and how easily they can be forgiven for the victim's own sake, the anime takes things to a point where there really is no redemption for Akito since their, and everyone else's, fate is already sealed. This twist, in turn, then renders Tohru's place in this show as the great savior and catalyst for redemption a mute point. Rather than finding a way to break the curse, the anime functionally ends on a sour note where Tohru and the others try to live on happily in spite of the curse and in spite of Akito's cruel hatred for her and the rest of the Zodiac.
For the sake of time and sanity, I'm not even going to try to go into how weird and angsty
the romance is in this show. I'll just say it's pretty typical teen romance nonsense.
I might not be inclined to look on this show favorably, now that I'm well past the age when this kind of nonsense would appeal to me, but I suppose I should at least try to judge this show fairly. As an adult, I likely wouldn't be able to stand this show again, but I'll wholly admit that I loved this story to pieces as a teen. It spoke to me about the trials and tribulations of maintaining relationships with one's family (who are easily seen as antagonists in those years) and friends alike. It gave me a romance arc to fawn over back then and a few good laughs along the way. While I was certainly disappointed with how much of the original story they changed, and subsequently ruined, the product as a whole still held my interest. More than that, it compelled me to figure out what the actual ending was, driving me to push my local library to buy each volume as they came out until it was done. Many years have passed since then, though, and all those copies I checked out from the library are gone--years of abuse and then lack of circulation did them in--but I still look back on this show fondly. It was a mess, much like my teenage years, but it was still part of my history. Would I recommend this show today? Hell no. What I will do, though, is recommend giving the manga a read. It might be a bit long and melodramatic, but it still holds up today in a way the anime never could.