JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Season 1, Episode 3: Youth With Dio
[revised 10/2018]
This first arc of Phantom Blood finally draws into a close, and this episode really hammers in just why anime is so much more effective. The music, the crisp colours and fluid movements, end up really selling the fight between Jonathan and Dio as this climactic battle between the two -- whereas in the manga it just feels like the first of many conflicts. But we do get a whole lot of great scenes, including Dio's voice actor gloriously hamming it up with so many glorious, memorable lines. We'll cover Dio's hamminess later on.
The episode starts off with a pretty quick engineered-confession. With the help of Speedwagon and a bunch of policemen he's gathered, Jonathan gets Dio to monologue and confess his role in poisoning George Joestar. A cornered Dio attacks Jonathan, but George takes the mortal blow, while the blood splutters out and hits the stone mask that seems to stab Dio in the head, knocking him off the second-story window and causing everyone to presume him dead. After a tearful apology and farewell from the dying George... Dio, of course, reveals himself to be alive.
But not before Speedwagon steals the scene after George's death, with a very dramatic finger point and declaring that "Sir George has passed down his noble spirit to Jonathan, and it has became his iron will that will pave the future!" Got to love that Speedwagon.
And thanks to relatively lax censorship at that time, we are treated to some pretty gory and gloriously brutal deaths of the random policemen thanks to Dio. He slices off some poor dude's head like a sandwich just by swinging his hand, throws some other dude so hard that is explodes on impact, and Dio just wipes a bloody swathe through the poor policemen as he shows off a bunch of classic vampire powers like making lesser spawns, regeneration from bullets, crawling up walls and all that jazz. At one point Dio does a reverse-plank on the ceiling just to freak people out. "Even Speedwagon is afraid!" indeed.
Among Dio's hammy lines in this fight includes four usages of WRYYYY, a battle-cry that Dio does a lot. Meant to symbolize a bestial, vampiric battlecry (and actually played seriously in the first couple of times Dio does it), it quickly evolves into a hammy, glorious high-pitched roar-to-the-sky WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.
It's a pretty brutal set-up for a final battle between Jonathan and Dio for now, and it's a typical desperate last stand for sure. Speedwagon's wounded, the police are dead, Dio's got crazy vampire powers... and Jonathan just charges in, ripping the spear from a convenient armour display, and somewhere in the fight (and Dio's clear desire to dick around with Jonathan) the mansion gets set on fire.
Jonathan's motivation in this fight is pretty simple but effective -- he blames himself for the state Dio is in, as well as the death of his father, and just goes the martyr way of knocking Speedwagon out of the mansion and is perfectly willing to burn himself up with Dio if that's what is needed. It's a pretty stark contrast to the far more competent action heroes or guile heroes that will succeed Jonathan as protagonists in the future of the series. He's far from perfect and clearly is improvising a lot of it, but damn if his earnestness isn't infectious.
The subsequent fight of Dio walking up walls and implausible mid-air acrobatics is not the best the series has to offer, although it definitely is animated pretty well. Both Speedwagon and the narrator takes turns narrating the fight, though, getting ever more excited about just how determined Jonathan is or how inhuman Dio is or whatever -- I'm not sure if the fight would feel more mundane if the exposition monologues are cut, or more epic.
And as the fight nears its climax, Dio tells Jonathan that it's "useless, useless, useless!" to resist him. Or, in the original Japanese, "muda muda MUDA!" -- this word, repeated, will be Dio's main catchphrase throughout the series. And it's so glorious to hear it. Glorious for another reason is the "goodbyejojo". JJBA likes to sprinkle in English words here and there among its dialogue, and it's charming.
The fight ends with Jonathan managing to impale Dio on his back as they fell, and Dio realizes that despite his immortal power, he still can't best Jonathan's unwillingness to give up and his pretty great ability of improvising. It's a pretty neat end, and just like in the manga, they do manage to imply that this is the death of 'starter villain' Dio -- something that is definitely not the case.
Anyway, the execution of this episode is pretty great. Despite the narrator's fight commentary (which probably could've been pared down) it's still a pretty well-executed fight and easily the point in the anime where I realize that, yes, watching this animated with fluid animation and great background music really does elevate the otherwise pretty mundane conflict in Part 1 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure into something more special.
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