When Netflix's One Piece was released to generally positive reviews and enthusiastic fans, it gave me hope that the same quality and care that went into it would be carried over into another adaptation of a groundbreaking work in shonen anime would be included: Yu Yu Hakusho. With the show finally available, my hopes were completely misplaced.
Netflix has taken one of the best examples of an action anime series, edited out the best, most emotional and bloodthirsty moments and spliced them together poorly with surprisingly good fight choreography in a criminally short five-episode series.
This article contains spoilers for Yu Yu Hakusho below.
Yu Yu Hakusho is the story of Yusuke Urameshi, a misunderstood criminal teenager with a heart of gold and iron fists. One day he is killed while saving a little boy from being hit by a truck. Since no one expected a ne'er-do-well like Yusuke to sacrifice himself for a child, the Lord of Hell gives him a second chance at life. In return, Yusuke and a motley crew of human and demonic allies work as ghost detectives to protect the human world from the criminals of the demon world.
The styling of the ghost detectives sometimes seems a bit amateurish. Photo: Netflix
Although the anime spends a lot of time with Yusuke and his allies solving crimes as ghost detectives, the live-action series eschews most of the necessary plot and character building and focuses on a very loose adaptation of the events of the Dark Tournament.
The first episode of YYH started off really strong. No, I don't mean that it started with an updated version of “Smile Bomb”, although the iconic opening theme did appear, which I know will satisfy fans of the anime. Yusuke (Takumi Kitamura) is already dead, and the episode spent the rest of its running time making us understand the tragedy of this young man's death. Kitamura plays a fantastic Yusuke. I know American anime fans will compare him to Justin Cook, the voice actor of Yusuke in the anime. And while Kitamura isn't as aggressive or snarky as Cook, he still has Yusuke's apathetic, dirty, “modern-day Robin Hood” vibe about him that really nails the character.
Yusuke's rival Kazuma Kuwabara (Shûhei Uesugi) also surprised me. Uesugi played him perfectly as this infinitely sweet and loyal guy who really loves fighting. Again, Uesugi can't match Christopher Sabat's vocal performance, but he's the actor I fell in love with the most.
Late in the show, Kuwabara (who is a bit of a romantic) meets Yukina, an ice demon who was captured and tortured by gangsters because her tears produce extremely valuable gems. Kuwabara immediately falls in love with her and immediately changes his voice to sound like a real gentleman to impress her. You can hear him switch from informal, hyper-casual Japanese to a very formal honorific (and thank the localization team for portraying this well in the subtitles). It was the best scene in the series, the only one that gave me the only laugh out loud “he's just like his anime counterpart fr fr” moment.
However, all the other characters left a lot to be desired. I fell in love with Kurama – one of Yusuke's demonic allies – as a teenager, and I'm not ashamed to say that I still love him to this day. But my heart won't allow me to recognize the Netflix incarnation of him. The show has nothing to do with his character or anyone else's.
I don't know what made Netflix decide to make this series only five hour-long episodes, but the result of this extreme flattening leaves characters who are shapeless, uninteresting seats in costumes that make them look like they're in them a high school production of a Yu Yu Hakusho episode. (Kurama's wig is criminal, y'all. Look how they massacred my bishonen!)
You versus the plant-loving fox demon that she tells you not to worry about. Image: Netflix / Crunchyroll
The fact that there's no reason to care about the people fighting is even more tragic given that the actual fights were actually good action sequences. YYH didn't try to translate an anime fight into live-action, which can often seem strange and clunky. Instead, the focus was on delivering authentic, well-choreographed and filmed fights that happen to take place between a teenager and a seven-foot-tall Oni. However, Netflix's terrible shortening of the story has robbed us of the reason to look forward to these really good battles.
I can understand why Netflix chose the plot points it used to craft this series. It basically jumps straight into the Dark Tournament saga, which is literally the best story in anime and one of the best examples of the shonen tournament trope ever. But because Yu Yu Hakusho didn't take the time to show us the personality traits that made characters like Kurama, Hiei, Genkai, and Toguro who they are, viewers have no emotional investment when watching them fight . The show took some of the most electrifying fights in shonen anime history, stripped them of their context and risk, and presented them to an audience that will be amazed by what they see but have no reason to care .
Netflix calls this show “Yu Yu Hakusho,” which is like trying to pass off a YouTube video of the Darth Maul fight as all Star Wars.