JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

The Technicolor Weight of Lineage

I've been puzzling over why something this loud feels so cohesive. *JoJo's Bizarre Adventure* shouldn’t hang together. It’s a sprawling, century-spanning soap about a cursed bloodline, vampires, and psychic manifestations named for classic rock acts. By every normal measure of television pacing, it’s chaos. But David Production’s 2012 take on Hirohiko Araki’s manga doesn’t care about normal. It treats the absurd with such deadpan conviction that I honestly couldn’t look away.

It helps to accept that this isn’t just an action show—it’s a full-on study in aesthetic overload. When the tension rises, the sky might suddenly bleed radioactive purple. Trees go neon blue. The studio isn’t merely adapting a comic; it’s translating the feeling of flipping through a vividly painted page.



There’s a tactile quality to the impossible violence here. Araki’s characters resemble Greek statues dropped into Gucci campaigns, yet the camera frames them with suffocating tightness. Anime News Network’s Mike Toole once said the series “treats every single conflict, from a fistfight to a game of baseball, like it’s the end of the world.” That over-the-top description is basically the show’s heartbeat.

Take the notorious poker showdown against D'Arby the Gambler in the *Stardust Crusaders* arc. No fists, no powers—just humans around a table. Still, the camera pushes so close on sweaty faces that the frame feels poised to burst. You watch knuckles turn white. The sound drops to a single pounding heartbeat and the sharp scrape of a playing card. It turns a routine parlor trick into a ten-minute panic symphony.



And the bodies—characters don’t just stand, they fold themselves into ungodly positions just to deliver a line. It’s pure theatrical showmanship.

The voice work keeps the whole thing grounded somehow. Kenta Miyake as Muhammad Avdol is a great example of how to anchor the chaos. Miyake tends to play hulking bruisers, yet here he gives Avdol a dignified, tired intelligence. When he speaks, his deep baritone cuts through the surrounding hysteria. You can hear the weight of a man who understands the monsters they’re chasing. He sounds worn out. (And with the villains on their path, who wouldn’t be?)



I’m not convinced the formula holds at all times. The middle seasons fall into a grinding monster-of-the-week grind. You sense the story treading water, waiting for the inevitable showdown with Dio—the series’ long-running antagonist and a villain petty enough to force a politician to drive a car down a crowded sidewalk just to prove a point. It can drain you. Sometimes you just want them to board a plane and actually get somewhere.

But maybe that fatigue is intentional. *JoJo's Bizarre Adventure* is ultimately about the slow grind of battling evil across generations. It’s about the scars handed down from grandfather to grandson, rendered in blinding neon and set to pop music. It shouldn’t make sense. Yet when the credits roll and the bassline of Yes’s “Roundabout” hits, you realize you’ve surrendered to the lunacy.