fruits basket review

stats

also known as: furuba
# episodes: 26 eps, jul 2001 – dec 2001
anidb rating: 8.05 (3161 votes)
my rating: 5.00

thoughts

am i really one of the rare few that isn’t enchanted by this anime? the top two google searches for the phrase “fruits basket review” (this and this) gave fruits basket a stellar rating. quoting from one of them, “fruits basket would be my top pick for a ‘relaxing’ anime.” i seriously beg to differ here – i pat myself on the back for being able to actually watch fruits basket to the very end.

why didn’t i like it then? i think the reason can be summed up in the following picture:

honda tohru, the main protagonist of the story, for a lack of a better word, is simply JustTooNice^TM. there really IS a limit to how nice you can be, really. living in a tent so that you don’t burden your relatives and your friends is really noble, i agree, but not being able to sleep without your deceased mother’s picture is.. way too nice. (by the way, i wonder why her father, who has passed away as well, does not feature as much as her mother in terms of tohru’s flashbacks and the bedside picture. hmm)

while some might suggest tohru’s niceness is like a fresh breeze amidst the bitterness inherent in the sohma family, it seems to me that her niceness is like a typhoon instead of a breeze. yeah, mind-blowing, literally. she’s responsible in doing household chores when she moved into shigure’s and yuki’s place, but being able to put up with their antics is a whole new level of tolerance. it’s a heroic effort, really – nothing short of a medal as big as a frying pan. shigure’s 27 years old already, for goodness sake – he avoids his publisher using tactics that fit someone having a 10-year old intellect; yuki and kyo fight over the most random things one can think of.. and i have no idea why that’s supposed to be funny!

also, as the cast is based on the 12 animals of the chinese zodiac, there seems to be more characters than the anime can develop well enough. i guess that’s partly due to the limited length of the show – if so, why not cut out a few characters in entirety, and develop the others better? akito is so important in the story, and yet she (ok fine, portrayed as a he in the anime) is only shown either a) throwing tantrums at other sohmas for not following her orders or b) sulking for some unknown reason. if i didn’t read up on the story, i wouldn’t have known her central role in the breaking of the curse!

that brings me to another point – the incompleteness of the anime! i can’t blame the creators of the anime though, as the manga was completed fairly recently (nov 2006) while the anime aired 5 years prior to that. thank goodness it didn’t continue, a la bleach, naruto and one piece style, or else i’d be so brainwashed by the end of fruits basket that i’d be cleaning, cooking and washing clothes for all of my friends.

it chills me thinking how anyone could ever manage to reach the JustTooNice^TM status of honda tohru.

ps couldn’t resist adding some random biological fact to the post: niceness is not an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) because rare selfish individuals would achieve greater fitness than the general population of nice individuals; however, a population of selfish individuals wouldn’t be an ESS as well, as they aren’t able to achieve the benefits from cooperation (hence rare nice individuals would thrive in a selfish society). see richard dawkins’ the selfish gene for a more detailed discussion =P