×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

This Week in Anime
Does Stone Ocean Live Up to the Joestar Bloodline?

by Steve Jones & Jean-Karlo Lemus,

The next installment in the popular franchise is set in none other than a Florida prison and stars Jolyne, the daughter of Jotaro Kujo. Framed and sentenced for a crime she didn't commit, Jolyne finds herself up against Stand users out to end her bloodline. Does Stone Ocean build on its predecessors or should it have stayed in Netflix Jail?

This series is streaming on Netflix

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Jean-Karlo
Kira Buckland finally got to voice Jolyne Cujoh.

That's it. That's the column. Watch Stone Ocean, losers.

Yeah, no joke, that is pretty darn rad! I met her at Sakura-con a few years back when she showed up at my Yoko Taro panel in her 2B cosplay. She's super nice, obviously talented, and it's always great to see an actor get their dream role like this. The same goes for Jolyne's Japanese VA Fairouz Ai too! JoJo's is full of magic. Bizarre, bizarre magic.
I hate phrasing it like this, but I'd been into JoJo since before it was cool. When I begged my peers to read Phantom Blood when Soul Eater was all the rage, I didn't get a second glance. But when I was driving to a con a few years later and all the same people were gushing over Battle Tendency, I didn't even say "I told you so". I was just happy that JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had finally—finally—attained an audience in the US outside of old flash memes and Capcom fighting games. Yet Stone Ocean was the one part I knew oddly the least about. Stardust Crusaders had all the memes, Diamond Is Unbreakable got people a feeling so complicated, and Golden Wind was when the guys got twink-y. Stone Ocean to me was just "the one about Jotaro's daughter", and outside of Jolyne appearing in some of her old man's animations in Jump Ultimate Stars she was unknown to me.

You know who else spent years begging people to check out Stone Ocean? You know who else must feel vindicated that the anime adaptation is awesome? Kira Buckland, ENG voice actress of Jolyne Cujoh, protagonist of Stone Ocean. Man, that feels good to say.

I am but a measly anime-only JoJo's fan, but I've been a fan since the first episode of Phantom Blood, and each new iteration has been an Event for me and many of my brain-broken Twitter compatriots. And after 5 arcs (and a few spinoffs) of increasingly fabulous applications of muscle-rippling masculinity, I've been very excited to learn about Jolyne's deal. And beyond that, frankly, I can't think of a better setting for a bizarre adventure than Florida.

I believe this is just what normal Florida men look like. Hirohiko Araki always does his research.
Verily, when you take the events of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure out of context, they work as Florida Man headlines. "Florida Man sticks dog into furnace". "Florida man replaces teeth to drink urine". "Florida Man safely lands airliner after a beetle kills the pilots".

And Stone Ocean starts with the best headline of all: "Florida Woman caught in compromising situation in prison".

This first scene completely assuaged any apprehensions I had about Araki writing a "girl JoJo," because he literally just writes Jolyne exactly like he would any other protagonist of his, i.e. like a big loud weirdo. And that's why I love her.

Like, yes, Jolyne is the kind of person who would scream about masturbation in front of strangers and then challenge one of them to a Seinfeld episode reenactment. This is what I'm here for.
I was worried about Jolyne's characterization too! But then I realized that the Jotaro is more the black sheep of the Joestar line, so more than taciturn, steely-eyed beefcakes, the Joestars are a gang of rowdy, punch-happy weirdos who nevertheless have their hearts in the right place. Even if they have not-so-sensible means of doing the right thing. Jolyne being a space cadet who can and will break your face is just the apple falling right under the tree. Grand-Uncle Josuke would be proud.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Stone Ocean starts with Jolyne Cujoh imprisoned. She's the sole daughter of Jotaro Kujo (yes, their surnames are officially spelled differently like that, and yes, she's named after the Dolly Parton song). She was involved in a hit-and-run, and her weird elfish lawyer sticks her with a bum deal that lands her with a 15-year imprisonment sentence.

And as we all know, nothing is more normal than the United States penitentiary system.

I get that, for the purposes of making Stand battles possible, Araki invents his own kind of Looney Tunes-style prison, but intentionally or not, he nails the intrinsic absurdity baked into the system. This is why he's a mad genius for giving the warden a talking pink puppet alligator. Or crocodile. I'm not from Florida so don't expect me to know the difference.
I don't think the series knows, either! There's a bit where Jolyne points out a reptile in the field—the sub says it's a crocodile, but the dub identifies it as an alligator.

As a paleontology buff, I'm gonna ask that people put some respect on the names of crocodilians—they existed before dinosaurs did (and yes, that's a JoJo's reference; look forward to Steel Ball Run kiddies!).

Crocodilians aside, Jolyne learns right from the get-go that money is the source of all power in prison—going in without at least $200 on you is practically a death sentence. She might be a bit of a space cadet, but there's no underestimating just how much prison is its own world. If there's any setting that serves as an excellent set-up for battles of wits between wild personalities, it's the chain-gang.

This scene also sets up a little thing I like to call Chekhov's Boob Money.

Strong hiding place? Sure! Smart hiding place? Not so much, eight episodes later.
There's a catch: when Jolyne is jailed before her trial, Jotaro sent her a mysterious charm. Jolyne didn't think much of it, as she and Jotaro were quite estranged, but after pricking her finger on the charm she begins to develop a strange power where she can unspool her body into mysterious thread...

Huh. That charm looks familiar...
That darn arrowhead just keeps causing problems, but in Jolyne's specific case, it gives her a spirit robot made of silly string that wears cool shades, so I think that all comes out in the wash.

I don't know if I like it quite as much as Giorno's totally bullshit power, but Stone Fr—I mean, Stone Ocean's ability is pretty darn versatile, and anything that lets Araki's brain run wild is good with me.
In retrospect, that clip you posted is a cheeky way for the localizers to reference both Stone Ocean's original Japanese name (Stone Free) as well as its localized name. I am so pumped to see how they handle D4C.
Not all fake Stand names are created equal, but there are some gems here.
At any rate, Stone Ocean can unspool itself into thread. They're part of Jolyne's body, so she can literally run herself too thin if she overextends herself. But she can snare things, garrote people, or even use her own body as telephone wire. And when Stone Ocean is compressed into its human form, she's dense enough to deflect meteors with her fists. I'm a little disappointed that Stone Ocean looks more like Shizuka Joestar than Star Platinum; a bit of familial resemblance between the two Stands would have been cute. Nevertheless, the simple power with wide-reaching ramifications make for a lot of interesting encounters.

Take Jolyne's battles with her cell-mate Gwess, for instance. (For the record: Gwess is named after the Guess brand of jeans—it's a theme in Stone Ocean). Gwess's stand, Cry Cry Dolls (née Goo Goo Dolls) can shrink people, so long as they stay within range. We've seen incredible shrinking Stands before like The Lovers or Little Feet, and Cry Cry Dolls is even more limited than either of them—but Gwess is still smart enough about her power and its ramifications to put the heat on Jolyne.

More importantly, she puts Jolyne in a hollowed-out rat.
And she forced her to speak in uwu.
Our first indication that Gwess has Stand powers is when Jolyne sees her pet parrot do this, which proceeds to go uncommented on for five more minutes until the battle starts in earnest. This is why I will never get tired of this franchise.

btw, RIP parrot man. May you keep squawking in the next life.

Where Stone Ocean REALLY picks up, though, is the fight against the blind sniper Johngalli A. And incidentally, I think I have a pretty good idea of what the "A" stands for.

Dude is more caked up than an industrial bakery.
Johngalli A (named after the fashion designer John Galliano) wasn't just setting his sights on Jolyne, you see—he attacks right when Jotaro comes by to visit Jolyne. As it turns out, Johngalli is out for revenge on the Joestar line for the death of DIO back in Stardust Crusaders, which puts Jolyne right in the thick of the old vampire's schemes whether she wants to be or not. To wit: her being framed and imprisoned for the hit-and-run was all part of the plan.

The Johngalli A fights are wild—just a never-ending sequence of waking nightmares that Jolyne and Jotaro keep trying to navigate in order to escape Johngalli and his stand, Downtown Transfer (née Manhattan Transfer). But as it turns out, Johngalli A wasn't working alone...
I just love the way this fight keeps moving from beat to beat, idea to idea, bizarre problem to bizarre solution with breathless intensity. Like, a blind sniper who "sees" with his Stand is a good enough idea on its own, but Stone Ocean throws in all these complicating factors, like a mysterious baseball kid, Jotaro's cryptic motivations, Jolyne's distrust, and—eventually—a complete distortion of reality. Note that these aren't just Stand powers, but character conflicts too. It's a powerful way to go about making this father-daughter moment so memorable.

Also there's the bone-melting white goo. That certainly makes an impact too.
Well, this is the longest Jolyne and Jotaro have been with each other in who-knows-how-long, and Jolyne doesn't have the most trust in Jotaro ever since he just ghosted her mother when she was 14 and rocking the Ziggy Stardust look. They don't quite patch over their differences over the course of the fight, but the groundwork is laid for Jolyne as she comes to understand that Jotaro's silence isn't contempt (Jotaro really reads as someone on the spectrum, crimeny). As for Jotaro, he comes to appreciate just how much Jolyne takes on after him.

But then it turns out, Johngalli A isn't working alone, and that juicy white goo wasn't from Downtown Transfer...

Pale Snake (a.k.a store-brand Whitesnake) is our big bad this time around, and he comes with the ability to turn anybody into a multi-deck stereo system. This lets him steal souls. And no, you're not allowed to ask further questions.

I mean, I remember learning in religion class that your soul only takes up about 1.2 gigabytes, so two CDs is more than enough to store all that.
Alas, Jotaro Kujo, he had his soul stolen as he lived: as an... "Ocean Man"? Yes?

I didn't actually know that this was how Jotaro was written out of Stone Ocean, and it's fairly brilliant. Some might grouse at this, but Jotaro would have just overshadowed Jolyne if he stuck around. Him stopping time would also trivialize a lot of the encounters—the limited Stand abilities work when they're pitted against each other, but an S-Rank stand like Star Platinum trivializes all of those. That, and Jolyne desperately trying to revive Jotaro is just gut-wrenching. All these years, all the unsaid things, and this is potentially how it ends.
Yeah this is Jolyne's story at the end of the day, so Jotaro just needed to show up to look cool and ratchet the plot forward. And while Jolyne might not match his power level yet, she has plenty of time to grow into her own. As for me, I'm tickled to see that she inherited his inability to deliver suave one-liners.

We must never forget that the Joestar bloodline is full of gigantic dorks.
The good news: Jolyne can resuscitate Jotaro—she just needs to get his Mind and Stand disc first. The bad news: the ever-supportive Speedwagon Foundation can only keep him on life support for so long before his body rots away. So much like with Jotaro and his mother Holly in Stardust Crusaders, Jolyne has to find a way to deduce Pale Snake's identity from within the prison.

And for now, all she has is this mysterious Cubs fan to help her: Emporio.

Just a helpful little guy who hangs out in phantom trash cans. I can relate.

Emporio's Stand power, conceptually, is maybe lowkey the weirdest in this arc? It lets him manifest and travel between "ghost" rooms and areas that used to exist but have since been destroyed, so he's been living in the prison walls ever since he was born. I'm looking forward to what Stone Ocean does with him in the next part.
For those keeping track, Emporio is named after Emporio Armani, and his Stand is named "Burning Down" (aka, "Burning Down The House").

Jolyne also finds a friend in Ermes Costello, a Mexican-American woman who had also pricked her finger on the Stand Arrow charm. Her stand, Smack (aka "KISS") lets her summon a sticker that can duplicate whatever its attached to. Removing the sticker fuses the two items back together, but it damages them a bit. Like I said, many of the Stands in Stone Ocean have much more limited scopes than in other arcs, but this leads to much more heated fights where characters have to find increasingly-creative methods of using them.

Ermes' power is my favorite of the bunch so far. An exquisite combination of creativity and bullshit, garnished with the slapstick that happens every time the clones are fused back together. And "Smack" is my favorite needless localization out of this crop of Stand names, especially because the original is literally emblazoned on its chest. We are fooling NOBODY.

Ermes is also just a very fun character. More worldly than Jolyne, but also more rash. This is her reaction to getting a Stand power. It is the correct reaction.
There's one bit I don't like about Ermes, and it's that she's apparently Mexican-American, so the dub has her do that thing were she says "chica" in a forced way to let everyone know that she's Latina. Guys, I'm saying this as a Puerto Rican: you don't have to try that hard. At least cast someone bilingual as your bilingual character so that the "chica" sounds right.
She and Jolyne do at least form a powerful bond of friendship within the prison walls—one forged from having each other's backs, saving each other's lives, and protecting each other from reptile feces.
It speaks to Ermes's nature; she might be a hardened criminal, but she can tell Jolyne means well, and also needs someone to keep her from getting punked on. Meanwhile, Jolyne just needs a friend. Ergo, Ermes becomes the newest in a long line of Jo-Bros. Speedwagon, Caesar, and Okuyasu are pleased to have you, Ermes.
Best bros fighting sentient plankton together.

Unlike Jotaro, I'm no marine biologist, but I'm skeptical of Araki's grasp of water microbiota.
So, this here might be one of the weirdest Stands in JoJo's history—and that's saying something. This is F.F. (aka "Foo Fighters"), a sentient colony of plankton that... is its own Stand? It can fire parts of itself off like bullets but its limited by its access to water. When they gain a human form, they're never without what is clearly a Big Gulp (hey, like we said, "Florida Man: The Series").
"F.F." is a bottom tier fake Stand name (come on, guys, Goo Guardians was right there), but as far as trademark JoJo's bizarreness goes, I couldn't be be happier with this grotesque swamp thing trying to blend in with normal humans. Bless their tiny collective hearts.


They're not too picky about their source of moisture either.


That's what I call a flawless top-billing JoJo's character.
F.F. is also important because they know where Pale Snake's spare discs are. Originally hired to protect Pale Snake's stash, Jolyne's mercy towards F.F. convinced them to switch sides and help Jolyne find Jotaro's disc. Sure enough, they're able to get Jotaro's Stand back, but they're still missing his memories.

But this is also where the man behind the mask finally appears: as it turns out, the only thing worse than the industrial prison complex is... Evangelism.
No wonder the two are so closely intertwined! Pucci the priest, notorious cherry enjoyer, is Pale Snake's Stand user, and he's been amassing quite the collection of soul CDs in his quest for vengeance and ultimate salvation. Why does he want vengeance and salvation? Well, the answer to that is an axiom as old as time: everybody is DIO-sexual.

DIO's presence looms over Stone Ocean even though he's physically long gone. I appreciate the parts where his leitmotif plays even when characters just reference him in passing. At any rate, Pucci (possibly named after Gucci) was keen on joining DIO's pursuit of heaven, but Jotaro killing DIO put a stop to that. Jotaro is the only person who had apparently seen DIO's plans for doing this, hence why Pucci needed Jotaro's memories so badly.

Being that he's the chaplain for the prison and he has a stash of Stand discs he can distribute, Pucci has no end of willing servants he can manipulate into attacking Jolyne for him. Like Miraschon here and her stand Mary Lynn Manson (obviously "Marilyn Manson").

This is one of those fun purely conceptual Stands. Manson can only mete out judgment within the rules of an agreed-upon bet, so this "battle" ends up resembling something out of Kaiji more so than your usual Stand punchfest. A battle of wits, not muscles. That said, it still ends with Jolyne beating the shit out of Miraschon.

As previously established, Jolyne has many good qualities, but patience isn't one of them.
It's also one of the cooler uses of Stone Ocean: the Stand itself becomes the stitching for the baseball, letting Jolyne basically use it like a paddle ball on Miraschon's face.
Yeah! It's a fun exercise keeping track of all the different ways she uses it.

I also love JoJo's commitment to making Stand users complete weirdos in ways that have nothing to do with their Stand powers. Case in point:

Green Dolphin is really lax with their dress code.


So, that's Lang Wrangler (named after Helmut Lang and Wrangler jeans). And he has suction cups on his fingers and toes? For some reason? That alone makes him one of the biggest weirdos this season, and that's accounting for the sentient plankton colony that is its own superpower.

And he's there to interrupt Jolyne as she tries to get her father's Stand disc to the courtyard where someone named Savage Guardian (aka Savage Garden, whose music you may have heard in Diamond Is Unbreakable) will show up.

His gravity-manipulation powers make for one of the more confusing Stand battles. Like, I'm not an idiot, I know to expect wild leaps of logic when I'm watching this show. However, I think Araki bites off a bit more than he can chew when he starts incorporating zero-gravity complications into things. Lucky for me, though, there are also piss jokes, and that's a JoJo's classic right there.

And thank the heavens, Jolyne has extra help this time.
So, that there is Weather Forecast (originally "Weather Report"). Emporio introduces him to Jolyne. He stands on his tiptoes, he only speaks in whispers, he loves reading T Guide even though he doesn't watch TV, and his Stand "Weather Forecast" (originally "Weather Report")—yes, they have the same name, don't lose track—can control the weather.
A simple enough idea that quickly gets extrapolated into "can make a spacesuit out of clouds."

Even if the concept is a bit beyond the production's capabilities, I do like the brief moments when the battle turns into the movie Gravity.

More exploding rats in this one tho.
The Giant Rat That Makes All Of The Rules will not be happy to see this.

At least it's not dogs this time.

But speaking of things that rhyme with dogs...

No animal is safe from Araki's unquenchable bloodlust.
Weather Forecast uses Weather Forecast to summon a storm of frogs so that Pucci can't get his hands on Jotaro's Stand disc.

God, I love JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Now THIS is the kind of JoJo's logic I can follow.

Another completely normal Florida phenomenon.
Not just any kind of frog, either—they're poison dart frogs. Weather Forecast has some range, and Pucci immediately smells a rat, hinting at a connection between him and Weather Forecast.
As a bonus, we also get to see some of Pucci's neuroses in action, which include counting prime numbers to relax and wearing 800 dollar priest pants. And we already covered how bad he wants that DIO dick. Really, his only flaw as a villain is that he's not voiced by Jouji Nakata.
Words can't hurt him, that man is Pucci.

At any rate, Stone Ocean's first half ends with Jolyne being sent back into solitary confinement for breaking out into the courtyard, and Pucci renewing his efforts at stopping her. It's an amazing cliffhanger to end off on, and it really makes me want to see more. Diamond Is Unbreakable was an amazing ensemble piece and Golden Wind was a very emotional story; Stone Ocean, I think, is much more interesting as a character study for Pucci himself. DIO was always feared as an amazingly charismatic figure. We see here the ramifications of his evil charisma, through Pucci's actions. In a way, this is his story just as much as it's Jolyne's and her fight for freedom.

Yeah I basically had no problems getting swept up and strung along with Stone Ocean's both familiar and novel iterations on the JoJo's format. I am, however, a bit less enthused about the distribution method this time around. Following the prior seasons weekly alongside everyone else was a really fun communal event for my little corner of the anime fandom. As watchable as these episodes are in sequence, I can't help but lament Netflix making me shotgun all the current Jolyne content at once.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure was not meant to be binged. The fun of the series is marinating in your anticipation for a whole week, itching to find out how JoJo gets out of this new bind. And we have Komi Can't Communicate being aired on a weekly basis instead of binging, so the format is even weirder in that light.
It also doesn't seem like this release format has made the production process any smoother. If anything, this first section of Stone Ocean has some of the roughest-looking spots yet out of the franchise's anime adaptation. Not enough to ruin any of its inherent charm, but it's kinda sad to see a flagship series like this fall victim to the incessant churn that's eating this entire industry from the inside out.

Oh well, at least we still get plenty of good Jolyne faces.

Oh and the OP is fantastic!

So glad they got Kamikaze Douga back to bookend the Joestar saga.

I was always curious why they didn't bring Kamikaze Douga to do the intros for Diamond Is Unbreakable and Golden Wind, but it's nice to see them finish off the Kujo/Cujoh family's arc—especially when the intro has cheeky allusions to Jotaro's intro.
The punch ghost apple doesn't fall far from the punch ghost tree.
I think Araki really deserves some credit for writing Jolyne. You can tell over the course of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure that he had really wanted to introduce women as characters for a long time. Lisa Lisa was supposed to be that in Battle Tendency, but Araki wasn't "Araki" then so the editors shot him down. Diamond Is Unbreakable was an ensemble piece, so no one character stood out more than the entirety of Morioh did. Trish was compelling in Golden Wind, but unfortunately she did get overshadowed by Giorno. Araki finally got it right with Jolyne: she's driven, she's funny, she's witty, and she has a great gang of loveable freaks at her side.
There's no bad part of JoJo's, imo, but Jolyne's pugnacious charisma has already made my affection for this part skyrocket. Will Stone Ocean be able to unseat Diamond Is Unbreakable as my favorite arc? I can't say at the moment, so I'll just have to wait for Jolyne to waltz back through Netflix's doors in several months.
That's definitely the worst part of Netflix's binge format: the months of waiting. We can only hope Jolyne not only escapes Green Dolphin, but Netflix Jail as well.

At any rate, like I said: watch Stone Ocean, losers.
Or else.
discuss this in the forum (8 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history

This Week in Anime homepage / archives