It's been a hot minute since this finished, and now I've reread the manga for comparison I'm a bit more clear on my final thoughts for the series. All in all, it's a fantastic adaptation; having author Takaya Natsuki on board as an executive really helped keep it in line, and apart from a few wonk scenes the production was consistently good-looking. I laughed and cried about as many times as I did watching this adaptation as I did reading the manga, so that's a good benchmark! A few more deets below:
Positives
- Styling
One of Ms Takaya's provisos for permission to make this adaptation was "don't make it look like my art too closely, the manga is 20 years old and it makes me cringe"; they followed that perfectly in my opinion, keeping the character designs an 'echo' of her style rather than matching it, but still mirroring all the important and iconic manga panels that people know and love in structure.
- Comedy
Fruits Basket is full of Feels, yes, but it also has great comedy interludes, which were well handled here. Especially fond of the fact they kept the "outline" chibis from the manga, and really went all-out on things like Ayame's comedy.
- Casting
This was another proviso of Takaya's, a whole new voice cast, and it went extremely well for me. Pretty much everyone knocked it out of the park, but my faves were the Main Three (Tohru's Iwami Manaka, Yuki's Shimazaki Nobunaga, Kyo's Uchida Yuuma), Sakurai Takahiro as Ayame, Han Megumi as Momiji, Sawashiro Miyuki as Kyoko, and the fucking inspired casting of the "big bads" of the Sohma clan, Orikasa Ai as Ren and Sakamoto Maaya as Akito.
Negatives
Honestly, there were only two negatives for me:
- Minor scene alterations
Nothing major was changed, but just here or there were a couple of things; like leaving a comedic tweak out of a more serious scene, which changed the tone of it a bit.
- Skipped content/Single Cour "The Final"
This is the big one for me. There were a few scenes and parts that were left out, presumably for brevity's sake since The Final was only 13 episodes, and while I'm not devastated, it did give me a little disappointment. Some of these are manga spoilers; the non spoiler version is that some scenes with the Student Council were scrapped and we don't see Kyoko and Katsuya's past. The full version is manga spoilers, thoughts below:
SHORT VERSION:
This was so good, and I feel blessedâ„¢? to have been able to watch it :')