What's So Great About Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (500k Special!)

I would not be where I am today or Who I am today without JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and I'm not just talking about how my first Jojo video basically kick-started my career I met many of my best friend's in the world including the love of my life directly as a result of watching and talking about and loving Jojo so I can't really be anything close to objective about this series but I also can't think of any anime that is better suited to marking a huge milestone in the growth of my channel and in keeping with the vague numerical theme that my previous milestone videos have had it just makes sense to ring in 500,000 subscribers by talking about the five parts of Jojo that had oh wait sorry aya started working on this special a while back and I just kind of figured that by the time I hit 500k they would have you know announced part 5 already it's not like they need to give the manga time to get ahead I mean it's probably not even physically possible for an animation team to catch up to this manga at this point we're gonna be in the middle of like part 10 by the time steel ball run gets an adaptation but yeah David production you just keep spending your time making crafts like Sakurada reset and Monster Hunter stories and well actually it's kind of cool that you guys are rebooting Captain Tsubasa still though giorno is waiting and so are gyro and Jonny JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has never been the world's most popular manga or anime though in Japan it comes very close but among people who have actually sat down to read or watch it it's almost universally beloved some fans can get a bit home Stucky about it but that's par for the course with anything that inspires passion in its fan base and Jojo fans are nothing if not passionate I mean super eyepatch wolf got passionate enough to create his own extensive four-part retrospective on the anime so far and gig ik made a fantastic video giving his own take on the series so after this is done if you've got a spare two hours give those a watch as well but where does that passion come from what is it that makes us love this decades-old manga about burly fabulous men beating the snot out of each other with plot contrivances so watch what's so great about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure darn I was hoping someone else would answer that question and do my job for me alright let's hop to it to understand JoJo's success and influence we need to look back at the series relatively humble beginnings hirohito Araki is probably an immortal but since Keanu Reeves is often Hollywood it's been a good while since he's had to cut anyone's head off and in that spare time he's gotten really really good at drawing things and as good artists in Japan tend to do at the tender young age of infinity he decided to try breaking into the manga industry after a few modest successes with the short sea realizations of his earlier works cool shocker BT and Bao Araki struck gold with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure a small-scale horror action manga with heavy shades of Fist of the North Star about a virtuous young man who has to muster all his strength and courage and learn how to breathe better to defeat his evil adopted brother who is a vampire as happens when manga get popular the scale of Jojo did not stay small Shonen Jump wanted more chapters but instead of continuing with the same somewhat limited set of characters and story set up that he had Arak he decided to end the tale of do and Jonathan Joestar with their deaths and jumped forward in time to tell a new story following Jonathan's descendant Joseph a much more nuanced and interesting protagonist suddenly this was no longer a story about a simple sibling rivalry but an epic decades spanning tale of an entire lineage and that shift in approach allowed Orakei to keep Jojo running and keep it fresh long past the point where most shown in battle manga start to fall apart and while Jojo isn't the only manga to shake things up by periodically introducing new generations of Heroes it does it better than almost any other series when burritos dads son took up the mantle from his father it was meant to be a jumping on point for new fans as well as a way of giving old fans the closure they'd waited so long for essentially we get more of the same successful formula with that all-important highly marketable brand but without the baggage of needing to know 15 years of backstory to properly enjoy it jojo's more frequent time skips solve the same problem but they also give our icky opportunities to wildly shake up his storytelling and I'm not just talking about the introduction of Stan's when I say that although that is the most obvious example shifting from being a horror themed martial arts manga to a psychic battle manga dramatically expanded the possibilities for the series but I don't think that even that change in fight mechanics is as significant as the way that Joe Joe constantly changes genres with every time skip well there are thematically allistic elements that tie Joe Joe's disparate parts together when you look at the stories actually being told it's kind of incredible just how wildly different they are phantom blood is in many ways a classic gothic horror story that just happens to have weird Japanese [ __ ] mixed in battle tendency meanwhile is more of a globe-trotting Indiana Jones style adventure with two sides racing to collect an ancient all-powerful treasure using weird Japanese [ __ ] also the Nazis are the good guys in that one which is weird but come on you can't not like Stroheim even though objectively he's a [ __ ] monster stardust crusaders is more of an odyssey with a clear destination and elements of road trip movies mixed in diamond design breakable meanwhile is a twin peaks' esque murder mystery set in a fixed location with a huge cast of recurring quirky characters something the series had never done before that point part 5 is a gangster flick part 6 is a Prison Break Story part 7 takes us back in time for a turn-of-the-century cross-country race with shades of around the world in 80 days and the great race and part 8 is an even more horror tinged take on part fours mystery that takes clear inspiration from the works of Genji Ito Araki has improved a lot over the course of the mangas run both in terms of his artwork which was good when he started and is now absolutely jaw-dropping and his writing he's gone from creating characters who are essentially quirky and likable cardboard cutouts to more believable nuanced human beings who are just as quirky and likable as ever but even as he builds on his skills he constantly challenges himself to try new things to stay out of his comfort zone that means unlike basically every other successful Monica he's never stuck telling a particular kind of story for much longer than he wants to be which seems to help keep his enthusiasm up and prevent him from burning out and that's not the only benefit of this evolving story structure it means that we as an audience can keep reading or watching without getting bored the way we do seeing say Goku doing fundamentally the same goddamn thing over and over again don't get me wrong I love me some Dragon Ball but by the time the Buu saga rolled around I was exhausted with it meanwhile I was able to enthusiastically tear through five and a half parts of Jojo picking up stardust crusaders after the first anime ended in a matter of just four months and at the end I was still left wanting more it's similar to how each new island of one piece gives Oda a chance to wildly shake things up and it's really easy for someone to start Jojo for the first time with almost any of the parts except for maybe part six because that one's very referential to past parts even if you're just not a fan of big adventure stories like part two and three part fours mystery or part fives fabulous mob drama might suck you in anyway because each part exists in a different genre there's much less chance that someone can look at the entirety of Jojo and say yeah that's just not my thing but all of these parts still feel like they fit into a cohesive whole because of their common elements they're generally bizarre tones and Archie's distinctive artwork and quirky sense of humor which means that once you do find a part of Jojo that you like and you come to appreciate the things that make it Jojo you can go back and enjoy the parts that at first seemed like they weren't your cup of tea that distinctive bizarre tone is a huge factor in why JoJo's fans get so passionate about it because there is truly nothing else like this series out there for starters no other Monica wears their musical influences on their sleeve with such flagrant disregard for trademark but that's really just the tip of the iceburg iraqis artwork is on a whole other level from almost every other manga artist and that's not hyperbole he was the first manga coup ever to have his artwork displayed in the Louvre that's huge his line art is impeccably detailed and realistic the faces he draws while they can be a little bit on the similar side something that even he has made fun of in one of his arts are like mathematically perfect and the anatomy of his characters in the way that he poses them is very reminiscent of Renaissance sculpture then you add color to the picture and the art becomes otherworldly the sky will be blue one minute yellow the next trees often appear in shades of purple the entire color palette of characters and environments can change drastically to change the tone of the image or just because that combination of colors looks cool but the colors are all balanced and calculated so that no matter how surreal they may get or how much they may change they feel natural and cohesive within the world of the series likewise the imagery and concepts in this series are insanely surreal yet everything from baby Freddy Kreuger to the may be alien who turns into sneakers just feels like a natural part of the universe you're continuously surprised by Araki's wild imagination but you're never left feeling like the story he just told you was out of place with everything else he's a master of suspending your disbelief pulling it higher and higher until by part seven our heroes are fending off exploding sound effects zombie dinosaurs while searching for mummified parts of Jesus Christ and you're just like yeah okay it gets to a point where you don't even notice when he casually forgets what one of his characters powers does or just leaves a gaping plot hole open which he does a lot Araki is clearly making a lot of this up as he goes along but he's having so much fun with it and throwing out so many wild and crazy ideas that you've never seen before that dealing with some inconsistencies is a welcomed trade-off which isn't to say that there's no consistency to Joe Joe when it feels like an author can just change things on a whim that makes it very hard to get invested in the story they're telling Jojo might fudge a few or a lot of details but it's mostly consistent where it needs to be namely in the rules that drive its conflicts and govern its world you need a lot of factors to line up to make a battle shown and story work properly interesting characters who we care about and want to see win a plotline that drives those characters into believable conflicts while still remaining compelling and of course the actual fights themselves need to be interesting to watch Jojo nails all of those points but the nail in that last one is one of those giant bong shisha gummy nails that puts all other nails to shame every fight in Jojo is different from the last every fight introduces some new crazy reality bending power that seems impossible to overcome at first glance it feels like every few chapters or episodes you're seeing something that you've never seen before like a battle with a dude who can fold anything he wants up into paper or rainbows that turn people into sales through hypnotism because that's how both weather and hypnotism work despite this every fight feels fair and is interesting to watch unfold because our icky treats each one like a puzzle in way too many others shown in anime even the really good ones conflicts are often solved by characters pulling heretofore unknown abilities out of their butts or by clashes of power that basically just boiled down to who's the strongest button Jojo with rare exceptions like koichi's evolving stand echoes that's just not the case almost every conflict is solved by characters creatively applying abilities that they already have and when they do things that we haven't seen them do before it's usually because they've figured out some new way to use their stand or at the very least because they've utilized some sort of previously established method of unlocking new abilities like the stand arrow or echoes different acts and while stands are emblematic of this approach to action Araki has been using it since the very beginning of the series jonathan joestar's final battle against do is a puzzle where he has to figure out a way to transfer the ripple to his evil brother's body without touching him because Dios vampiric flesh can flash-freeze him before his hit lands and ultimately he wins by using the characteristics of the battle arena around them lighting his own hands on fire with a wall sconce to counteract Dios flash-freeze ability this approach where ingenuity and rapid improvisation are the keys to victory rather than brute strength makes fights feel much more engaging for the audience because we find ourselves strategizing alongside the heroes trying to figure out a way for them to win when we're right and they use the strategies that we imagined ahead of time that's gratifying it makes us feel clever and when they take us by surprise that's just cool and exciting it also means that every victory our heroes earn feels earned we see them apply their minds and push their abilities to overcome their enemies with their own strengths and often with the help of their friends enemies can have powers that border on invincible but are icky always are almost always paints a clear picture of how the Joe Broz overcome them there have been a few instances where our aqui wrote himself into a corner by making enemies too strong particularly the final bosses of each arc and had to come up with a contrived explanation for how they were defeated King Crimson is the prime example of that and in part 5 even one of the heroes pannacotta Fugo had a stand so strong that he had to be written out of the story entirely but while that is a downside of the series basically making things up as it goes along the upsides far outweigh those problems it really feels like you never know what's coming next in Joe Joe because sometimes our aqui doesn't know himself he only has an idea of where he wants to go and plans ahead just enough to lay the groundwork for how to get there and sometimes this can lead to really incredible unpredictable moments like in part 6 where okay one sec I'm about to put like the biggest spoilers ever in this video so please skip to this timestamp if you don't want to know how part 6 of Joe Joe ends ok you guys have been warned so as I was saying moments like in part 6 where the villain Enrico Pucci creates a stand with the ability to accelerate time and reset the universe a stand so strong that he effectively wins erasing all but two of our from existence and creating an entirely new timeline where he is only defeated when the remaining heroes turn his own immense unbeatable power against him which ultimately is what opened the possibility to reboot Jojo leading to an entirely new story set in an entirely new universe based on the old one which is hands-down the best Joe Joe story told to date also in series mangaka rohan kishibe a who are aqui says isn't an author insert character but who is totally an author insert character manages to complete all of his deadlines despite time accelerating which is a hilariously specific piece of wish fulfillment as a series Jojo tries to never let a stand idea go to waste no matter how outlandish or insane a power is the series always makes an effort to show it being used to its fullest and to explore the implications of what that power does which paradoxically both leads to some absolutely absurd scenarios and makes the series world feel more grounded its concepts are explored in such depth that when you watch or read the series you feel like there's an explanation for every question that you might have even though there's definitely not Joe Joe suspends your disbelief 10 miles high on a scaffolding made of duct tape flimsy plywood and dreams and while at times it comes dangerously close it presents the illusion of a well-thought-out world just enough to never actually let you fall which makes the experience of reading or watching it feel distinctly well bizarre and so far I've really just talked about the strengths of the manga the anime from David production adds many layers of extra greatness on top of that with the adaptation getting bolder and more creative with each successive season for the first season it's honestly enough to just faithfully recreate iconic panels and moments in animated form complete with visual sound effects and other comic book trappings with full-color artwork and stellar voice acting that elevates the production the first two parts of Joe Joe are let's say rough compared to later chapters and simply updating them to be better paced and more in keeping with the current manga art style does wonders for them but in moving on to the more well-read declaimed stardust crusaders and especially diamond is unbreakable in my opinion the second best part of the series the anime needed to up its game to continue improving on the source material and boy did it ever pull that off with surreal direction and transitions that blur the line between manga and anime part 4 in particular takes on an almost lynchin directorial style with some anime original scenes that are just breathtaking David productions take on Jojo is remarkable on basically every level especially given that the series was once considered to be basically unadaptable another studio made an attempt at turning Stardust Crusaders into a more conventional anime style OVA in the 90s and the results were you know that and let's not even get started on the cancelled phantom blood movie the less said about that trainwreck the better Jojo is that rare brand with an uncompromising artistic sensibility and an outlandish premise that has somehow managed to become an important mainstream cultural touchstone and more remarkably it managed to maintain that individualistic identity and copyright infringing name scheme even through the creativity draining process of being turned into mass media through the cooperation of several huge corporations Jojo as a manga is a defining work of the Japanese literary canon but as an anime its very existence is a goddamn miracle as is its success outside of Japan because all conventional wisdom about marketing suggests that it's something that would never take off in the West I'm sure it was a challenge just to convince the higher-ups at crunchyroll to license it I mean you want to talk about invincible enemy stand battles that must have been a boardroom battle for the ages yet here we are Jojo is huge maybe not as huge as it is in Japan where it's arguably as influential as Dragon Ball Fist of the North Star and others shown in giants but it has an undeniably massive fan base one with a level of loyalty and passion that you'd expect from something far more obscure and niche and that's the thing because despite its insane popularity being a fan of Jojo feels personal your favorite part your favorite stand your favorite Joe Joe and Joe bro and villain all of those feel like they're yours and while there's inevitably going to be some over you're unlikely to find another Jojo fan who loves it quite the same way as you do oh and for the record part 7 Pearl Jam Johnny gyro and Kira anyway the Jojo fandom is kind of contradictory in that sense but then so are a lot of other things about the series it's an unapologetic surrealist art house story with strong creative vision about the very mainstream concept of muscly dudes kicking the [ __ ] out of each other to save the world its characters are insanely charming and memorable but also quite often paper-thin it's world feels fleshed out and believable but it's also clearly cobbled together from wild ideas and the spontaneous whims of its author it is nothing short of bizarre it doesn't really make sense but then maybe it doesn't entirely have to maybe the not making sense is ultimately the point you can't deny that Jojo is well-constructed on a lot of conventional levels but I think the reason that it works the reason that people love it so much is that it neither Baus to nor ignores conventional standards of quality its content to just be Jojo but regardless of the genre that Jojo currently inhabits it always tries to be the best Jojo that it possibly can be it's a labor of love on every level an uncompromising effort to make something fun and funny and awesome and weird even with unclear and sometimes contradictory narrative goals and the passion of the creative teams behind both the manga and the anime is ultimately reflected back by its fanbase tenfold what's so great about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is that it is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and there is nothing else in the world quite like it well except for diesel I'm Jeff Zhu professional [ __ ] signing out from my mother's basement and if you're still here after I said that I just want to quickly say thank you to everybody who is subscribed in the last three years and keeps watching my videos and supports me in any way I can't thank you guys enough it's amazing that I'm able to do this and I am happier than I've ever been so thanks

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 1,221,214

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, best moments of jojo, jojos bizarre adventure (adapted work), diamond is unbreakable, mothers basement, jojo reference, joseph joestar, jojo no kimyou na bouken, part 5, stardust crusaders, phantom blood, kono dio da, lucky land communication, everything great about jojos bizarre adventure, jojos bizarre adventure, anime (tv genre), video essay, jojo vs dio, best bits of jojo, jojo part 4, dio brando, hirohiko araki

Id: 3PFagLd6Jh4

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Tue May 01 2018