Fruits Basket has been pulling at heartstrings for over 20 years now and it’s hard to believe that the new anime adaptation is finally going to conclude in just three more months.
Before it can come to an end, however, some more new characters need to be introduced, such as Tohru Honda’s father, Katsuya Honda, who will be played by Yoshimasa Hosoya in the Japanese dub. J. Michael Tatum will play the role in the English cast and either way I can’t fault the casting directors for either choice!
Hosoya might be more familiar to people as the voice behind Fumikage Tokoyami in My Hero Academia or Reiner Braun in Attack on Titan. Meanwhile, J. Michael Tatum might sound familiar as the voice of Sebastian in Black Butler or Kraft Lawrence in Spice and Wolf.
Fruits Basket (or more simply known as Fruba) started as a manga series created by Natsuki Takaya which ran in Hana to Yume magazine in Japan from 1998 to 2006. It was collected into 23 volumes. The series features a supernatural love story with a young girl named Tohru Honda who is on her own in the world. When the story begins, she is camping on her alone in a tent in a forest when she discovers that she’s actually living on the land of the Sohma family. One thing leads to another and Tohru learns that the Sohma family is cursed and that when they are hugged by a member of the opposite sex or undergo extreme stress, they turn into an animal from the Chinese zodiac. Thus begins her quest to heal their hearts and find a way to break the curse.
This is the second anime adaptation for the series as Studio DEEN originally adapted Fruits Basket into a 26 episode series back in 2001. The second anime adaptation, which was promised to be a lot more faithful to the source material, began in 2019 with a two cour first season. It was followed by another two cour season the next year, which brings us to the present day with the series rapidly approaching its climax.
If you enjoy good drama and romance with a touch of comedy thrown in just for giggles, you will be hard-pressed to find another series that tells a better story than Fruits Basket. Filled with memorable characters and a story that will grip you by the collar and refuse to let you go for even a moment, Fruits Basket has earned every single one of its accolades.
If you haven’t touched Fruits Basket yet because of its shoujo roots, I highly recommend you fix that as soon as possible.
Source: Funimation Blog
