Review: Fruits Basket

After living on her own in a tent in the woods after her mothers death, Tohru Honda a slightly naïve but deeply kind-hearted girl, stumbles across some of the Sohma family living nearby including her classmate (and school heartthrob) Yuki and discovers that there is more to them than there seems. The Sohma family are cursed and 13 of their members involuntarily transform into one of the animals form the Chinese Zodiac (plus the Cat) when hugged by a member of the opposite sex, or if under great stress.

Promising to keep their secret, Tohru soon comes to live with Yuki and his cousins Shigure and Kyo. Many comedic situations arise from the involuntary transformations and the constant friction between Yuki and Kyo who seem to live out the animosity between their Zodiac animals, respectively the Rat and the Cat who he tricked out of being in the Zodiac itself.

For the most part the series is very light hearted with plenty of comedy and slapstick (largely due to the transformations and the fighting between Yuki and Kyo), but there is also great focus on relationships. We watch as Tohru’s relationships develop with Yuki and Kyo and get an understanding of her friends and their feelings as well as the greater dynamic between the Sohma’s. Among the members of the Sohma family, who are also part of the Zodiac that we meet, most get on well, but not everybody and all is not well under the tyrannical thumb of Akito; and so we watch as frictions unfold and darker undertones are revealed between the members and as their greater backstory unfolds.

Fruits Basket is filled to the brim with interesting characters with diverse personalities that you can’t help but want to get to know better and for the most part, this desire is well served. It is likely that viewers will find a lot of characters very relatable, which naturally adds to the enjoyment of the show. Tohru is characterised beautifully as wonderfully caring girl who puts everyone before herself and a number of the Sohma’s have interesting (and occasionally heart-breaking) backstories.

The only shame is that the story is unfinished, as it ran parallel to the manga and so doesn’t cover the whole plot and the last couple of episodes shift into a rather dark place (and into perilous melodrama territory), quite out of kilter with the rest of the episodes. Though there is a fair ending, it doesn’t feel entirely satisfying. The viewer knows that there’s more story here and will undoubtedly want to find answers to the big questions that the anime doesn’t manage to answer in its run. Unless another series is commissioned, we’re going to have to make do with the manga alone to complete the story.

The animation for the series is nice, but as not an exceedingly recent series, isn’t anything particularly amazing, all the Zodiac animal forms we see are consistently cute though. The animators do however have a tendency of depicting Tohru, who has particularly massive eyes (even by anime standards), as staring off screen in such a way that her vacant expression becomes mildly creepy! All the dub voices feel well cast and the series music is very pleasant and relaxed, with the title and ending song being particularly enjoyable pieces.

There are a good number of extras for this release beyond the usual textless opening and closing. There’s a behind the scenes featurette which is quite fascinating along with an interview with the director and 3 interviews conducted between the Japanese voice actors themselves, all of which are a lot of fun to watch and provide a fair bit of insight. There are also character profiles on each disc, along with several galleries, including for the series eye catches (the images you see either side of the where the mid episode adverts would be).

In all this is a highly enjoyable series, with well rounded characters and a nice balance of comedy and relationship drama. The only mark against it is the fact that the story doesn’t feel finished (because it isn’t), but for that at least, we have the manga!

Ratings
Story
A fun story, but not enough exposition of the mythology.
Animation
Nice, but nothing particularly special.
Audio
Great voices make for a fun dub.
Extras
Textless opening/closing, galleries, a featurette and interviews with the director and several of the Japanese voice actors.
Overall
Filled with fun, interesting relationships and characters, but slightly marred by not going into enough of the background mythology.