Fruits Basket: Prelude goes full soap opera, for better or worse

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: This review contains end spoilers for Fruits Basket season 3 and setup spoilers for Fruits Basket: Prelude.]

The 2019 TV adaptation of the manga series Fruits Basket ended in 2021, prompting tears and big hugs all around, as the Sohma family finally broke their curse and got to move on. Plucky protagonist Tohru Honda and her love interest Kyo, the angsty Cat of the Sohma family Zodiac, wound up together. There were happy endings all around, including some for characters who might not deserve them.

With the story mostly resolved, the new Fruits Basket movie instead turns to the past. The prequel Fruits Basket: Prelude shifts the focus from Tohru to her parents, Kyoko and Katsuya, and the love story that first brought them together. The romantic connection between her parents has sparked some controversy, and the story plunges into overly exaggerated and contrived moments. But digging deep, the emotional thread that makes Fruits Basket so memorable is present in the movie — there’s just a lot of questionable stuff covering it up.

Prelude’s first half-hour is basically a recap of the last season of Fruits Basket, in all its heartwarming and heartbreaking glory. Unfortunately, that’s all it really is: a straightforward recap that doesn’t add much for anyone who’s already watched the show. It mostly exists to remind viewers that Kyo knew Kyoko when he was a kid, and that she was one of the few adults who ever showed him kindness. The recap also resurfaces the fact that Kyo was a witness the day Kyoko died in a car accident, and he could’ve saved her if he hadn’t been paralyzed by fear. All that was handled in Fruits Basket season 3, though, which makes the length of this recap unnecessary, except for new viewers