Denji is a teenage boy living with a Chainsaw Devil named Pochita. Due to the debt his father left
behind, he has been living a rock-bottom life while repaying his debt by harvesting devil corpses with
Pochita.
One day, Denji is betrayed and killed. As his consciousness fades, he makes a contract with Pochita
and gets revived as "Chainsaw Man" — a man with a devil's heart.
(Source: Crunchyroll)
It is undeniable that Chainsaw Man has gained a significant amount of popularity in recent years, with many hailing it as a masterpiece of the shounen genre. However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that this praise is largely undeserved, and that Chainsaw Man is, in fact, an incredibly mediocre and over-hyped series. One of the primary reasons for this hype is the high production value of the series, which is often cited as a standout aspect of the show. While it is true that the animation and visuals of Chainsaw Man are impressive, with high-quality action sequences and background design, these elements do not completely make up for the numerous awkward-looking scenes and the heavy reliance on CGI. It seems that much of the show's notoriously high budget was poured into the explosive and visually impressive endings as well as hiring twelve different popular artists to make them, rather than the overall quality of the show itself. Furthermore, the story and characters of Chainsaw Man are completely bland and generic, lacking any depth or originality. Most characters fall into very common tropes that have been beaten to death, like Aki, who is the shounen genre’s twentieth Sasuke copy. The plot follows the typical shounen formula of a goofy, a semi-charismatic protagonist fighting against increasingly powerful enemies (with poor and incomprehensible power scaling). But the twist for csm is that this mc’s most stand-out feature is being horny instead of being hungry. With shallow and surface-level character development, the characters themselves are one-dimensional and fail to leave a lasting impression, with most of the side characters simply serving as vehicles for the plot and "huge twists" when side character A & B die an inconsequential death to show how strong the antagonist is. To further expand on the lackluster character writing, let's break down a few specific characters. First, Makima, the most beloved character in csm. She is commonly touted as a remarkable and incredibly well-written villain, but in reality, the biggest twist she brings to the table is her gender. If an antagonist was exactly like her, and manipulated Denji in a way that wasn't sexual, then the character would just be incredibly average, and nobody would care about them. Makima isn’t the only character carried on the back of horny anime fans, but Kobeni is too. To be frank, she’s just incredibly unlikable. She only cries and screams and proceeds to make the wrong decision at almost every opportunity. She did only one thing right in this entire season, but she was crying while doing it, and did a half-assed job of it too. For the rest of the main cast, Power and Denji are fine, they serve a decent job as comic relief type characters, but they still aren’t that stand-out in that regard either. I will not elaborate further on Aki being a Sasuke clone, that is the plain and simple truth. With all the criticism out of the way, none of that is to say that Chainsaw Man is a horrible show, it is just remarkably average. The high-production value and the one-note characters are enough to derive enjoyment from when watching this anime, at least to the point of not being bored, but this series is nowhere near the masterpiece it is claimed to be. It’s as bland as demon slayer but has a little more gore and more mature aspects but they aren’t handled maturely they’re just used in gross excess that detracts all meaning. But the series possessing those aspects is enough for fans to convince themselves that csm is a profound, deep, and mature work. In conclusion, while Chainsaw Man may have impressive production values and action sequences, it is ultimately a mediocre and over-hyped series that fails to deliver in terms of storytelling and character development. Its relatively good fight-scenes and twelve unique endings cannot make up for its shallow and generic narrative, making it just an average to slightly enjoyable watch.
___Preface: This review is primarily a comparison of the anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man and its source material. If you clicked on this review just for an actual review of the first season of Chainsaw Man’s story, only read the introductory paragraph inside of the quote bubble.___ ___ #~~~__ This review and comparison contains minor spoilers for Chainsaw Man.__~~~ >Chainsaw Man’s draw lies in chaos. It may be mentioned in the same breath as other modern shounen, but it is the odd one out. At times, it can feel like it goes out of its way to break norms and conventions. Its main characters are more governed by primal instincts than those of typical heroes. Characters that are more anchored to reality either die or start to become more detached as the world and characters around them. For nearly half of the entire season, its main character’s primary motivation is to fondle a girl’s boobs. This type of chaotic attitude can get out of hand quickly, leading to an incoherent story. However, Chainsaw Man pulls a very important trick. While it poses under the illusion of chaos, under closer inspection, it's supposed chaos starts to become far more orderly. Chainsaw Man examines what constitutes a normal life as a human being. What does it mean to have a normal life? What does it mean to be human? In its more deranged characters, like Denji and Power, these themes manifest themselves by developing them in ways where they are learning how to feel basic emotions of life, like empathy and motivation. By contrast, the one main character that already has actual motivation and drive, like Aki, learns to detach themselves from it in ways that lets them enjoy the pleasures of life. This is the consistent thematic throughline in this story, even if it is intentionally invisible. It is the glue that keeps Chainsaw Man coherent in its chaos. And it is also what makes it click. What makes Chainsaw Man work is in how it imbues its characters, world, and story with seemingly idiosyncratic elements. Even if these elements don’t seem like they fit together at all, when taken in its whole, it forms a beautiful picture. Although its themes surrounding the nature of humanity aren’t fully matured yet, the seeds are planted for a beautiful blossom. ~~~__8.5/10__~~~ However, to leave a review at just that is to be a tad disingenuous. My short write up can easily apply to both the anime and manga versions of this story, since it only touches on story and plot details. This is a by-product of the anime being extremely faithful to its source material storywise. There is very little deviation from the original storyline, not even breaking from the manga’s weaker plot elements. It is a very faithful adaptation in that sense. Plot is always half of the picture though. In the transition of mediums, presentation needs to be taken as much, if not more into account. Here is where the problem with a Chainsaw Man adaptation lies. Chainsaw Man’s manga is a convention-breaker in the plot-sense, and it also is that way in its presentation. Compared to most contemporary popular manga, Chainsaw Man is crude. It lacks much consistency when it comes to art quality, with faces commonly being underdrawn and environments being under detailed or blank. But what it lacks in the detail it gains unique in framing and paneling. In comparison to its competitors, Chainsaw Man’s manga possesses a paneling style that is reminiscent of live action cinematography. There is a real feeling of kinetic motion that can be a bit hard to describe in words. Here is an example, take the end of the Leech Devil fight when Aki summons the Fox Devil. img(https://i.imgur.com/ceEZVL1.png) _It is hard to express manga panels through AniList images without clogging up the review, so it is best to experience this moment through the turn of a page and not through a horizontal image of all four pages laid out. This moment is Chapter 10, Pages 12-15._ In three of the four pages where the summoning takes place, the point of view remains stationary. This stationary point of view familiarizes ourselves with the space that is established, from Aki’s point of view. When Aki’s hand moves upwards, it goes from the bottom panel of the first page into encompassing the full second page. Although it cuts back to Aki briefly, the fourth panel features the Fox Devil encompassing the full page, eating the Leech Devil. The framing of objects in the moment leads to a feeling as if we are looking at Aki’s point of view, staring down at the Leech Devil. What makes this moment most impressive is that motion is established through the simple turn of a page. Our brains can fill in what happened within the page turn, leading to an illusion of movement. It is like how animation fools our minds with smooth movement despite being a series of moving images, but it is through a medium made up of solely stationary pictures. Here is that same moment in the anime: ~~~webm(https://i.imgur.com/HDxmvd2.mp4)~~~ The end of the Leech Devil fight in the anime has the animation, it has the higher visual fidelity, it has the sound effects, but it isn’t nearly as special as its manga counterpart. This isn’t due to any changes in the framing of the moment, because it is nearly the same. By complete necessity, the motion of Aki’s hand movement has to be explicitly stated by the animation. However, a sense of motion in a medium where things don’t typically move is different from a sense of motion in a medium where everything moves. It is just that this moment specifically works because it is in a manga format. Although its techniques are replicants of those found in audiovisual mediums, the end product ends up having an impact that only something in a manga might have. Any attempt to transition it into animation would water it down due to the juxtaposition of techniques and mediums being completely gone. In transitioning into an audiovisual medium like animation, much of the appeal of a moving camera being emulated on paper is lost when it no longer becomes emulated. Much of the more clever moments of paneling get dampened in their anime-equivalents just due to them not being in a manga format anymore. Moments where techniques that were adapted into the manga medium were used can’t have nearly the same impact just due to those techniques being used prevalently elsewhere. Other moments where this type of paneling technique that is lost in adaptation happens in moments like when Power kills the Sea Cucumber Devil, the beginning of the Katana Man fight, etc. Much of a Chainsaw Man adaptation would be difficult just due to Tatsuki Fujimoto’s idiosyncratic style of art and manga. He is an unconventional mangaka, but he is one that would squeeze the most out of the medium he is working within. Chainsaw Man is great because he can consistently push the medium to its near limit. However, an anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man can’t do that without a direction that is comparable to the manga’s creation of cinematography in a flat space. That is a hard task, and any attempt to create a new direction without a strong idea or foundation could lead it to easily backfire. So the anime adaptation plays things very safe in terms of visual direction for the most part. Although a scene like the Fox Devil summoning is far better in manga format, the anime adaptation of it was probably the safest way to adapt it. The risk of unwatchability of a scene is persistent when not every element of it is in tune. At the end of the day, adaptation relies on interpretation. How one would understand Chainsaw Man is key to knowing what they would think about the manga or anime. Is it prestige shounen or is it something else entirely? If you have been reading this review, you may see that I have a very strong preference towards the “something else” angle, but all pieces of media are subject to one’s own interpretation, and to act like there is a correct answer to this question is to be a ridiculous person. Media is made for its medium, and to adapt it into something else will naturally involve infusing one’s interpretation of the work within it. MAPPA’s anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man leans a lot more towards the “prestige shounen” angle, which is a very valid interpretation of what Chainsaw Man as a story is. Even if the visual direction isn’t in the direction that I would like, it is still visually stunning. I know that I have been poo-pooing this entire adaptation for this entire review, but just know that it is because of very subjective factors that are inevitable. Just know one thing, ___ #~~~ __This Adaptation Is Very Very Good__~~~ ___ Just because Chainsaw Man stands out among prestigious shounen, doesn't mean its anime adaptation loses out on the full love and care that other prestige shounen have in their adaptation. As a matter of fact, saying something is “prestige shounen” is usually far from derogatory when discussing presentation. Like others like it, the visuals and animation is top-class. Obviously, the fight scenes are a feast for the eyes. Sure, the CGI is a bit noticeable at times, but it doesn’t look so bad that I would start an [online petition](https://twitter.com/tomogetback/status/1606724288920297472?s=46&t=SIr5bi-Lzo-lV4EbS6NyrQ) over it. That is the thing that jumps out the most with the visuals, as is with any of the anime’s contemporaries. However, the anime has an absurd amount of detail in its environments. The manga’s underdeveloped backgrounds are now contrasted with the anime’s overdetailed backgrounds. ~~img(https://i.imgur.com/5nQ2PNV.png)~~ _~~~look at this hallway, it looks so good, i think i am legitimately obsessed with it~~~_ Combined with extraordinary sound design, the Chainsaw Man anime becomes one of the most immersive anime in recent memory. This culminates in the sequence of Aki’s morning routine, a nearly two minute long anime-original sequence at the end of Episode 4. His morning routine is absurdly overdetailed and absurdly well animated. ___ ~~~_uh, my computer’s storage is full so i can’t download the video of aki’s routine and put it in my review_ _go watch it on your VERY LEGAL anime streaming service of choice, and if you have already watched it, go watch it again, it is the thing the anime medium has been leading up to for a 100 years_~~~ ___ However, if there is one singular blemish on this adaptation, it would have to be the rather dull color palette. Chainsaw Man is a chaotic story, and judging from many of the [volume covers](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6fZia9XoAEdxxF?format=jpg&name=large), and even [the EDs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEwAiwttN10), it should have a very colorful color palette. A chaotic story and a chaotic cast of characters should breed chaotic colors. However, the color palette of the anime remains extremely dull. Compare this moment from the anime and the manga. img(https://i.imgur.com/YUiSOd7.png) img(https://i.imgur.com/21MJp5C.png) The manga lacks any color, but it makes up for it in contrast. That contrast between the light outside and the darkness in the cart car is what sells the moment in the manga. In the anime, there is a little bit of contrast, but it is dampened by everything looking extremely gray. Considering the existence of nearly every piece of Chainsaw Man media and the colorful color palettes of most other prestige shounens, this is a very weird flaw for this show specifically to have. ___ _Well that was a bit of a negative note to leave on. I can’t think of a better way to transition into the conclusion though, so yeah._ ___ Chainsaw Man’s anime provides a good lesson in adaptation. The change in medium will always lead to a different story being told. Even if all plot beats are completely retained, there will always be a wrench that forces a change to happen. The more entrenched that piece of media is within its source medium, the harder it becomes. Going from manga to anime is comparatively way easier than say, from anime to live action, but it still provides its own challenges. Losing aspects in adaptation is inevitable. To try to adapt everything completely faithfully is to play a fool’s game. If you fail, people will just go and see the source material since it does everything you tried to do but better. The key in adapting faithfully is to build off its own strengths completely unique to it while still retaining the original’s feeling and story. Is the Chainsaw Man anime better than its manga? I don’t really think so. The manga provides a far more unique experience that would be hard to find elsewhere. The anime is forced to whittle down many of its more unique elements, and just for that, I think that it is worse. However, there is a very strong argument to be made that it is better. The truncated uniqueness of the story is made up for by having some of the best animation there is to offer in the industry as well as being one of the most immersive. Chainsaw Man’s anime and manga are both very good pieces of media that I would highly recommend. It is just that they are very good in two different directions. ___ _Thank you for reading to the end of the review if you did. If you have any criticisms of how this review was made, you are free to message me or reply under [this activity](https://anilist.co/activity/495386195) to critique what I had to say._ _Also, please don’t like or dislike the review without reading it._
I hate post-Maruyama MAPPA. I can't help but hate this studio that treats its animation and production staff as if they are lower than human. Masao Maruyama founded this studio with a passion. He put his everything and created a studio where directors could bring their visions to life. And what was the purpose of all of that? Did he do all this only to see his beloved studio turn into a factory-like environment that doesn't give a damn about its staff? Also, what will happen by keeping this business vision? Will they produce as much anime as possible before most of their talented staff escapes to other big studios and turn this studio into whatever goblingon MADHOUSE is nowadays? Is watching his beloved studios turning into garbage Maruyama's curse, or does MAPPA's higher-ups only care about stuffing their pockets as much as possible before the inevitable end? You might say, "Why are you talking about this in a Chainsaw Man review? Even though MAPPA's higher-ups are evil, Chainsaw Man's production has no problems!" but this will be just sweeping the problem under the rug. Although Chainsaw Man's production is still better than most other TV anime, its shortcomings are as plain as day. But let's talk about the story and characters first because I don't want to sound like an obnoxious swine that complains about everything, as if I already didn't for some people. ~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/8ef28870041343dc4aa2aad7b6b583a4.mp4)~~~ The story follows Denji, who made a contract with Chainsaw Devil Pochita. Their days are going with poverty because he is trying to pay the debt his father left behind. He constantly dreams of an ordinary teenage life—where he will have a warm bed, three meals a day, and a girlfriend. The golden opportunity finally knocks on his door when he dies and returns from the death by Pochita sacrificing himself, replacing Denji's heart. After this point, Denji is no more human. He is a special case who can turn into a devil, the Chainsaw Man. He joins the Public Safety's one of the devil hunter divisions with the help of a woman named Makima from the Public Safety. Here, he finally obtains a warm bed and three meals a day, and the only goal left for him is to get a girlfriend, he decides to be lovers with Makima after she was the first person who treated him like a human. ~~~img(https://thecinemaholic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/21vxzzbbz.jpg)~~~ Chainsaw Man (2022) is the first 12 episodes of a series that will probably consist of 24-25 TV episodes and one cinema film in its first "saga". So, if you still haven't watched the show, mind this while setting your expectations. The first seven episodes of this season pass with character introductions and plot setting, and the real deal starts with the eighth episode. Spending more than half of the season with set-ups might sound boring for some people, but I assure you it is one of the best set-ups in this genre. It gives every needed information to the audience without spoon-feeding them. It presents its world and characters to us without relying on over-exposition. The scene where Aki warns Denji about the dangers of empathizing with devils and fiends is a prime example of this. We, as the audience, don't have a clear idea about how Chainsaw Man's world works. We know there are devils and devil hunters, but we don't know if the public has information about them. Then, instead of a character looking at the camera and explaining everything as if the audience are morons, we get a tense scene where Aki reminds Denji almost every people in this world has someone close to them killed by devils or fiends, and some of them are working for getting revenge or not letting the same thing happen to the others. Even if Chainsaw Man falls into laziness sometimes, it hugs the principle of "show, don't tell" more than all the other works in the same genre. ~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/befd183ae197ea6b20e39ddc8543ab58.mp4)~~~ We see a similar fashion in the characters too. Characters in Chainsaw Man are introduced in situations where they can shine by showing their personalities. We first briefly learn how they act in certain circumstances and their personality traits, and only then dive into their inner worlds or backstories. It might seem like a feature that is easy to achieve since it's a simple aspect of writing, but you can't believe how many works try to throw tear-jerker backstories at their audience before introducing the characters properly; therefore fail at this. Chainsaw Man constantly achieves this with its supporting characters like; Power, Aki, and Himeno. Denji's case is a bit strange because we start the show by watching a sequence that can be called his backstory, but it still is a fair way to introduce Denji's character without being too much of a tear-jerker. However, we don't get character developments this season since the main focus here is serving as an introduction to a story that will be almost three times longer than the first season. There is story progression in the second half—which makes things very interesting and puts one of the characters in a very mysterious place—but that's all. Don't expect a storyline with an ultimate conclusion in this season. But you can expect highly unstable production values. I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I believe MAPPA planned the anime adaptation of Public Safety Saga as a 2-cour TV series and a cinema film in the first place, but for some reason, the higher-ups insisted they needed to release the TV anime in 2022, even if it's during the Fall season. Once they realized there was no way they could finish a 2-cour TV series in the given time, so they divided it into two parts. I will repeat myself, I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I can't come up with another explanation for this unstable mess. On the one hand, we have scenes with beautiful backgrounds, stunning directing, creative camera work, staggering voice actings, fire soundtracks, and fluid character animations. On the other hand, we have scenes with backgrounds filled with 3D objects and crowds that look like student projects made on the weekend with a hurry, bland directing that conveys no emotions, tedious camera work, bland voice actings, unimpressive soundtracks, and janky animations. One side of this project flourishes with passion and creativity, and the other side crumbles on MAPPA's stubbornness. It's despairing to see because if MAPPA higher-ups didn't hold back the talented staff of Chainsaw Man, we could witness a production that comes twice or thrice in a decade. We still would be stuck with these dull colors, but at least everything around them would be stably good. ~~~img(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uQfqXZ0q6DQ/maxresdefault.jpg)~~~ Also, I wonder what would Ryuu Nakayama's directing look like under ideal conditions. Because he said this in an interview: "When I was in junior high school, "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" was broadcast late at night, and anime boomed. However, there is a certain "type" of TV anime. The so-called Akiba-kei, moe, and other fixed concepts in subcultures, such as girls having green or pink hair, are examples of this. However, animation is not an expressive technique that can only be achieved by relying on such things. I always wanted to make something that could be seen by adults, something that would be powerful enough to withstand the viewpoint of appreciation of the work. When it came time to make an animated version of "Chainsaw Man," I looked for links to what I wanted to do, and since I love movies and Mr. Fujimoto also loves movies, I thought it would be interesting to incorporate the essence of the realistic and cinematic. Rather than personal selfishness, I'm convinced that this would benefit the work." Even though I disagree with his "something that could be seen by adults" statement since, in recent years, we got shows that have some of the aspects Ryuu Nakayama points out and still can be seen by adults too, I still admire his passion for trying to find different ways to approach animation. So, seeing he couldn't convey his vision perfectly in this project made me sorrowful. Like the other aspects of the show I talked about, the directing is also unstable. There are scenes with a cinematic approach Ryuu Nakayama talked about, and they are a treat to get in a TV anime, but there are also scenes that are held back by this approach and end up being tedious. Also, I'm not sure what he meant by "cinematic" essence because the number of scenes that use techniques you would see in other anime is more than the number of scenes that feel cinematic. The former still has the usual directing we see in other anime with high-production values, but it doesn't have the aspects that can only be achieved through animation, which makes it automatically bland compared to the shows in the same genre and demographic, like Jujutsu Kaisen and Mob Psycho 100. As a result, all episodes except the eighth—which had [Shouta Goshozono](https://anilist.co/staff/131334/Shouta-Goshozono) as the episode director—feel messy in the directing. ~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/f1996c18283a473f9e14b25f9bbca7fd.mp4)~~~ Chainsaw Man has a very talented staff that needs to be applauded since they still were able to bring an excellent show to us even though they faced MAPPA's shenanigans. It's an incredible set-up season despite being shaky in some areas. I wonder how long MAPPA can go like this before almost all of their irreplaceable staff members leave the studio, similar to what happened in MADHOUSE and Shaft. Because spending tons of money on twelve different endings while underpaying their staff members is an iniquitous thing to do. I loved Chainsaw Man's first season and recommend it to everyone who likes to watch action shows, but I despise MAPPA's work ethic even stronger than before.
Chainsaw Man was with no doubt the most hyped up anime of this entire year, and I can see why. Not only is it a battle shonen, but it also features a very intriguing cast of characters, and one of the more unique protagonists out there. With its popularity, it’d be near impossible to meet the anime community’s expectations, and from what I’ve heard from people, some love it, and some are just okay with it. As for me, an anime-only for this show, it met my expectations for the most part, as a solid, entertaining show, with some good production and music to boot. STORY: It’s quite difficult to explain what Chainsaw Man is, because it’s quite chaotic, but the synopsis does a good job of explaining the beginning. What I liked from the premise was how Denji started from rock bottom, but not in your typical shonen fashion where their family or loved ones die, and then a revenge story ensues. Denji’s dreams are simple, it’s not to defeat devils or anything, but just to get a girlfriend and cop a feel in process, probably relatable to some extent to some people out there. The story isn’t really anything special, but it works better than your “demon of the week” type of story. While it does have that sort of feeling sometimes, you get a feel for some of the characters too, it’s not just fighting all the time. There’s some slice of life mixed in, as well as some… let’s say… intriguing comedy. Fujimoto always knows how to make an intriguing plot after all. ART: The animation is generally good, as the production was good throughout. I know some of you might have wanted two consecutive cours (24-26 episodes) for this show, but I guarantee you, it would have looked way worse if that was the case. MAPPA was still likely on an extremely tight schedule, and their employees must have gone through hell and back, but the product we got was still good for the most part. The background shots gave us more of a cinematic approach, which looks great, but doesn’t necessarily fit the grittiness of the manga. The action sequences looked good most of the time, with some janky CGI some of the time, which is to be expected given the production timeline. MUSIC: They went all out with the music, and Kensuke Ushio did a great job with the soundtrack, capturing the dark atmosphere well. The opening was good, but those endings were definitely the highlight of the entire show. As for my favourite endings, I’d say ED 5 (“In the Back Room” by Syudou), and ED 7 (“Chu, Tayosei” by Ano), were my favourites. Very different genres of music at play here, and I appreciated them a lot. CHARACTERS: The cast was quite unique to watch for sure, and that’s what makes this show stand out from other shonens. Denji is your relatable teenage guy, and makes quite the comedic moments, along with Power, a loud and extremely funny character. Denji and Power’s interactions were absolutely hilarious. Aki and Himeno were another good duo, and made for some of the more darker and emotional moments in the season. Kobeni was to some people, probably a little annoying, but for me, she’s a fine character, adorable too, and she acts just like if a random passersby were to be thrown in a situation like the devil hunters face every day. Makima is quite the mysterious character, and it seems like she’ll be developed further in the future. ENJOYMENT: I generally enjoyed most of the episodes, and had some laughs along the way, sometimes even got a little emotional too. THEMATIC EXECUTION: The themes were executed quite well, with Denji’s theme of just enjoying life being pretty relatable. The atmosphere was quite unique too, and the comedic and dark aspects were balanced well, with the tonal shifts not being much of an issue. OVERALL: I wouldn’t say this was the best anime this season, but it was definitely a very entertaining one. It felt quite unique for a shonen, and I enjoyed Chainsaw Man more than some other shonens for sure. The music stood out the most to me, especially the endings, which I still listen to a lot. Overall, a fun experience for sure, and one that most anime fans will enjoy to some extent.
~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/b346df77d9d8f5f3ebf60b4c1f2451cc.mp4)~~~ In a way, MAPPA had taken on the ultimate challenge – “adapt the unadaptable.” I do not necessarily mean this in terms of character design, backgrounds, or any of the things that art textbooks teach you. Rather, I refer to reputation. *Chainsaw Man*, barring perhaps one or two other recent examples, might have been the most keenly-anticipated anime of recent years. I cannot remember the last time the community so feverishly held its breath, either ready to praise unabashedly or cut to size the split-second it fell below their expectations. With such a crushing weight forced upon it, it seemed highly unlikely that *Chainsaw Man* would ever actually reach the manga’s plateau, whatever that plateau was or meant to whomever was watching. In that sense, MAPPA was doomed to a Sisyphean punishment (especially its animators, who probably collectively lost about two-hundred pounds from the stress alone), forever pushing a rock up against the anime community’s monolithic mountain where any one single slip-up would leave it tumbling back down. But, if there is any story suited to such a grind, *Chainsaw Man* might be it, and it does not take long for the series to make this point clear. ~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/a23b1c0a6862aafb6b1baabb1cf54857.mp4)~~~ During our first substantial encounter with Denji, he remarks that he has had to do some rather-unsavory things to make money, even selling off one of his testicles. With nothing but his friend Pochita helping him slay some Devils for extra dough, the uneducated and simple-minded Denji learned early on that nothing will be handed to him. If he is to have any future, especially once he’s finally outside the clutches of the yakuza boss hounding him to pay off his debts left by his late father, it’ll be by his own making. But Denji’s chance is snuffed out, as he and Pochita are left to perish at the hands of the boss too impatient to let him live any longer. Then, in a moment of absurdity that Denji could never put a price on, Pochita merges with him and chainsaws sprout from his arms and his now-demonic face. Becoming the titular Chainsaw Man, he carves up the zombie goons sent to kill him. Denji’s first step into a new future is bathed in bloodstained metal and thrust into the arms of the mysterious Makima, who seems only too willing to accept him… *Chainsaw Man* wastes no time with its exposition, both in terms of worldbuilding and its visual aesthetic. Everything we see is awash with neutral, bloodless colors. Ushio Kensuke’s music is often atonal and bass-laden, relying on heavy expanses of sound to throw everything into a dismal swirl; it’s a world that, for all intents and purposes, does not care one iota about Denji or anyone else in it. Yet hidden within all this misery is a flicker of quirky humanity, and what develops slowly throughout the episodes is the sense that, despite the crushing weight of this world, there is indeed a wholesomeness that lies underneath its exterior. In the midst of all the tumult his life has endured, Denji aspires to be at least somewhat-normal (and feel someone’s breasts while he’s at it). Pochita perfectly embodies this wholesomeness – a demon deliberately given brighter colors and adorable mannerisms like a housepet…so long as you conveniently ignore that there’s a chainsaw sticking out of its head. The juxtaposition within Pochita’s visual design and Denji’s less-than-heroic motivation works both for sincere character and comedic contrast. And *Chainsaw Man’s* comedy is, much like everything else, colored with layers of crazed irony. It is not always funny in the sense of trying to make you laugh, but rather works in the sense that you find something attractively-weird. This is partially accomplished by Fujimoto’s material not being afraid to be crude, juvenile, bloody, and at times flagrantly disgusting. In part because Denji is a largely-uneducated and horny teenager, the material adopts that similar kind of unbridled teenage hutzpah. Denji’s inability to sometimes grasp the bigger picture and rely on swagger borders on being completely stupid. Even the show’s violence is likewise funny, but again not in the way of how we normally assume comedy to work. Because of the sheer preposterousness of its world, every battle is tinged with an “anything goes” attitude which makes not only for creative setups, but also creative executions. Director Nakayama Ryuu and action director Yoshihara Tatsuya evidently took great strides in making *Chainsaw Man’s* battles and sequences evolve beyond convention and into the realm of more-cinematic approaches. The OPs numerous nods to previous films (which have been pointed out by people with far more knowledge of cinema trivia than I have) made it clear that this was not supposed to be framed as “just another shonen.” The freedom the camera has to move throughout the space makes the actual battlegrounds themselves feel more like places rather than mere backdrops. The actual success of these executions does vary from battle to battle; sometimes the marriage between the camera movement and the actual fight choreography isn’t at its most harmonious. Besides a handful of moments where it somewhat shirks away from really divulging in its carnage by getting close, the drabness of the color palette, whether it be because of a filter MAPPA used or otherwise, does sometimes make the crunchiness of the violence less-crunchy or more plain than it might have been. But counter to that brutality are the sizable number of times that the material decides to calm itself down, to dwell on something more intimate and simplistic rather than grandiose in the absurd. It is easy to remark on the beautiful, bloody spectacle of a shonen’s bloody violence and indulgence in the more R-rated. But some of *Chainsaw Man’s* most-splendid animations come in the small things, the tiny, mundane movements where a character’s clothes move in a believable way, or when Aki is doing something as simple as preparing his morning with coffee and the newspaper. Every explosion must have a quiet aftermath, which is something the production staff and animators understand quite well. ~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/fa33da1112635d1b4dad7875868b71e2.mp4)~~~ The creativity in the series doesn’t merely stop at the action, but also expands to include its cast. Pochita is only one Devil in a sea of many grotesque creatures, and each character has a design, power, or personality that feels just as odd as the next. Makima’s mysterious air is both alluring in its enigmatic-ness and slightly off-putting, as though she was likewise trying to convince the viewer, along with Denji, that she can be trusted and has their best interests at heart (thumb-biting included). Aki’s serious demeanor clashes with the aloof and brusque Denji and Power, especially when Power steadfastly refuses to flush the toilet. Much like the various parts of the Gun Devil that are dropped around the world, the cast’s overall chemistry is a bunch of loose parts. They are, at times, barely holding themselves together because they keep getting on each other’s nerves for one reason or another. It’s improbable-ness is a part of the draw, as each character gradually tries to piece together the mystery that is pressing them at any given moment. How successfully they manage to do that, of course, varies wildly, but goodness knows that Power will get that Pulitzer Prize somehow! Even so, it does not matter necessarily what mystery is hanging over the narrative, because the answer feels inevitably the same – no matter what gets revealed, or who has to battle who, someone is going to die, and it is going to be brutal. Devil Hunting is terrifying (as poor Kobeni learns for herself rather early on), and an underlying dread tinges the entire series. Denji, Power, Aki, Himeno, and the entire team may have a lot of strength on their side, but it is not true that they are impregnable. Dialogue insinuates that death is quite common in Public Safety. As a Devil Hunter, death is never far away, and as *Chainsaw Man’s* world of Devils gets bigger, the threats are ever-present and ever real. The show’s greatest threat though is not within its Devils, but in its very existence as an anime. When I talked about “adapting the unadaptable” earlier, I was not speaking to an exaggerative degree. A [Tweet](https://twitter.com/sarcataclysmal/status/1606361126429528064) about the series needing a slew of outsourced in-between animators for the final installment shows the sheer scope of the forces needed to put this series together. When MAPPA took on the property, and in the short amount of time that they did (assuming about seven months of production), there was always a part of the material that was going to be held back and unrealized. The reckless abandon that the manga prides itself upon could only be captured so much, which is perhaps why even when the series seemed to be flying, it never quite felt like it could get as high as it wanted to. The fact that *Chainsaw Man* is as good as it is can be thought of as something of a miracle, and it should be celebrated by virtue of that alone. Every animator, sound engineer, editor, and colorist who worked on this project, from the backgrounds to the CGI (which is frankly not anywhere close to being as bad as we know CGI can get in anime), deserves nothing less than admiration for somehow making this work. It will never be a perfect adaptation of the material, but for what it is, let us not lie to ourselves – the final result could have been infinitely worse. One can only imagine what even one more month of time could have done for this… But in the meanwhile, Denji and Power live to dance in the OP for another day. ~~~webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/020b5bb9c6ed7127f28f8bdc62c3f3f3.mp4)~~~
Please note that this review represents my personal opinion only. I acknowledge that this is more of an angry rant than a coherent review but this is what I wanted to write. Denji as a character is immediately thrust into a bad situation before you can gain any attachment. The entirety of episode 1 only exists to try and convince you that Denji is somebody worth paying attention to, but it has the opposite effect. There’s nothing eye-catching to be seen anywhere, and this is made worse by the mind-numbing colour palette, which is basically all greyscale. The last scene of the first episode is just this meaningless zombie slaughter mess, which is also animated with a lot of horrible CGI. Even in the first scenes, which are animated normally, there’s something really odd about the way the mouths move that I can’t quite put my finger on - but it adds an uncomfortable vibe to the whole thing. In the first episode, there’s also a conveniently inserted flashback scene of Denji and Pochita. This is the first of many, many blatant attempts to emotionally win over the viewers without actually doing anything with the story - it's almost arrogant, the way it simply expects you to get invested in it for no reason other than Denji being poor and losing Pochita. For something that is supposed to be bleak and dystopian, it feels very normal. Makima appears to be an emotionless robot right from her introduction, which only serves to further alienate you. Her conversation with Denji at the udon place was very easily the cringiest, most horrible anime scene I’ve ever seen (I wrote this before finishing the show, this is no longer true). The whole thing with Denji being her dog could be mildly funny if it wasn’t put in such a serious way. It’s genuinely off-putting, _especially_ because Denji is so stupid that he doesn’t understand the connotation. Personally speaking, a really dumb guy with the mental age of 12 is just incredibly annoying to watch as a main character, literally anything else would be better. Denji is the worst out of them, but to be honest, all of the characters are garbage. I think the main problem is the frustrating lack of purpose - maybe if the characters had any kind of tangible motivation other than killing devils they would be more interesting. But Aki, Power and Makima don’t actively hold back the show just by being boring - the glaring flaw in the cast is, of course, Denji. Denji does have a motive of sorts, his own curious horniness, which has nothing to do at all with anything else in the show, it's completely pointless to include. Denji, to me, honestly would feel much more at home being a gag side character in an ecchi maybe? There’s a huge genre mismatch going on here, and it’s not good. Denji, with his childish horny curiosity and comical stupidity clashes very badly with the dark, bleak setting. This might not seem like a big problem but it really is - because it raises the question: if the main character, the focal point of the anime, doesn’t care at all about what’s going on, then why should I? It certainly doesn’t inspire any idea that you should care about the characters - such an intrinsic story-telling device such as making the characters sympathetic to the audience is tossed aside in favour of making Chainsaw Man feel more unique. I have just mentioned that Power is a boring character - however this does not hold true throughout the show. She combines Denji’s juvenile attitude and unbelievable stupidity with her own trait of animalistic selfishness to produce something truly repulsive. Her presence in any scene consistently makes it even more of a drag to watch; the more she screeches, the more painful it gets. Power is the character who doesn’t fit anywhere - on multiple occasions you can see her openly, shamelessly laughing and taking joy in others’ pain and suffering. This makes the main “team” of Chainsaw Man feel more like an empty shell than a group of people. Of course Power is not the only problem, just the biggest one - there is not a single distinct personality out of anyone there that is remotely interesting or adds to the vibe whatsoever. Fujimoto is simply trying to recycle old shounen tropes for his own use, and while the “group of good guys who team up to kill the bad guys” trope can work very well, here it’s openly forced for no benefit. It doesn’t work when the characters are either so paper-thin you can’t relate to them or, like Power, have a personality that fundamentally disagrees with connecting to others. And in anime like this, I believe the idea is that you care about the characters enough so that when they die, it should affect the audience somewhat. That is normally the goal when writing any character death into a story. The problem in Chainsaw Man is that deaths are brushed aside as insignificant, and to me it's ridiculous that _even the other characters from the same team_ clearly don’t give a shit what happens to anyone else. Over the course of the show, in this way and more, Chainsaw Man miserably fails to build tension, which results in every dramatic scene feeling anticlimactic and underwhelming. One part which was supposed to be very dramatic and failed spectacularly was the hotel scene, eps 6-7. After quickly being introduced to Himeno and Kobeni, they find themselves stuck in a building they can’t leave. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this setup - but as always, the execution is butchered. The scene is never really made scary by anything - sure, they’re stuck with no way of getting out but because you can’t sympathise with the characters normally, suddenly making it a dangerous situation changes nothing. Because the scene never feels scary, seeing Kobeni freaking out with the knife seems like the stupidest thing in the world, because the way the scene is framed makes her reactions so hard to understand. Most of this part is either Kobeni overreacting and Aki pacing around not knowing what to do, with some neatly inserted scenes of Power being a dick to everyone, which only makes this feel like even less of an emergency. The scene is finally ended when Denji gets out his chainsaws and kills the devil who trapped them there, in possibly the laziest fight scene I’ve ever seen, where he just stands in one place until the devil slowly dies. Now it’s time to mention my least favourite scene in any piece of fiction, which takes place in episode 7. People who’ve been following the anime will probably already know what I’m talking about, it’s just so fucking disgusting that I don’t want to go into detail. But yes, the scene with Denji and Himeno in the bar. What reason could you possibly have for writing that in? Even in something that’s trying to take pride in being random and edgy, it’s far too far. So Himeno assaults Denji, Denji is traumatised, and everyone else laughs at him. You know, just team-building stuff. Easily the most unbearable, most revolting thing I have ever sat through, not even just the event itself but the icky “fake team” vibes make it exponentially worse. This scene then has a little continuation, showing Denji more than happy to be assaulted again, because he has the intellect of a small child. It’s so genuinely uncomfortable, it feels like I’m watching grooming. The way these bedroom scenes are shot adds to it even more, the POV camera angles are especially vomit-inducing. The worst part is that if you removed these scenes from the show, the story wouldn’t change! It didn’t add anything at all. Call me a pussy all you want, but I think I have good reason to find this part completely unbearable. At around this point, Aki and Himeno both get their silly little “feel sorry for me!” flashback scenes, which are just so blatantly and conveniently inserted that it’s insulting. But actually, now that I think about it, seeing Aki’s house get blown away might be the only time I actually laughed in the whole anime - it was shot in such an amusing way, because the scene is cut so short it can only show a little segment of him playing and then woosh the house is gone, with great comedic timing. Emotionally, it does nothing though. But the failure to make anyone care about the characters pays a price - because Himeno is very quickly killed off, and, shocker, nobody else on the team cares at all! The only one who cares is Aki, who is still portrayed as an emotionless robot, so it never mattered anyway. Other than that one scene of him crying later on - which was ruined yet again by Power and Denji, clearly sitting there without a care in the world for either Himeno or Aki. Power and Denji are such a huge problem that affects the show because they’re both deliberately very childish and very stupid, which just means their mental capacities are so small it’s basically impossible to put themselves in other people’s shoes. Essentially, they’re stuck so far up their own asses that they can’t see anything happening around them. This means that no story event can actually affect them unless it happens directly to them, and this has a sloppy, uncaring feel to it that heavily detracts from any quality the show might’ve had. Another part I found heavily uncomfortable was the many Makima/Denji scenes from the first half - I touched on the first one earlier, but they are all very similar. I despise the ASMR whispering, the heavy breathing and the way Denji openly worships her, it produces some agonising scenes. If the goal of these scenes is to make you feel deeply unsettled, then they do their job perfectly. It’s unfortunate that Makima actually seems to be a character with more than one dimension to her. The grave issue at hand is that the initial setup for the show was executed so fucking terribly that it’s _really_ hard to care about anything that happens afterwards. But she is horrific to watch at the very start, and unfortunately, that is the most memorable thing about her. Another issue with these scenes, and most of the anime in general, is the depressing, empty feeling the scenes with no music have. Even in the fight scenes, the only thing you hear is this weird grindy repetitive soundtrack. Because they spent all the budget getting big artists to make 12 EDs, the actual anime lacks any attention pertaining to the sound that would help it feel less lifeless. The entire premise with the devils and the hunters is set up in a way which makes it incredibly easy to just make up and randomly add in good guys and bad guys, but that means that nobody gets any kind of setup that would make them interesting. It’s just extremely lazy and shallow writing overall. The rushed and unimaginative creation of the setting makes it feel utterly devoid of life. The ball-kicking scene in the final episode was another one of the absolute worst things they could have included. It feels genuinely insulting that this is portrayed as a scene of revenge or of satisfaction, essentially all it does is bring Aki right down to Denji’s level in terms of maturity and removes the last character who had potential to not be completely unbearable. This episode, and the build-up to it, was just plain boring, almost nothing at all happens in this part worth commenting on, it’s all just crap mindless action scenes and the occasional character development failure. Anything that happens in Chainsaw Man that I haven’t mentioned so far is one of two things. Either: so bland and uninteresting I’ve completely forgotten about it (very likely) or: a fight scene. The fight scenes existed, I guess. They just weren’t interesting - it feels like they were leaning on the gore aspect far too much, and that they would much rather make a scene more gory than improve the choreography, or the animation quality. And, just speaking personally, it really didn’t do it for me. This makes it incredibly repetitive over the course of the show, as none of the individual action scenes have anything to offer past the very surface level. Obviously, a battle scene of any kind can be made really good even when repetitive if there’s high tension, or it has some kind of emotional impact, or at the very least you can feel some passion from the combatants. Chainsaw Man doesn’t even attempt this approach, sadly. It simply relies on its janky CGI chainsaws and spurting blood to carry it all the way. Almost all of the second half consists of this kind of scene, which is why I haven’t really mentioned any specifics after episode 8 or so. They’re just showing you gorefest after meaningless gorefest, in the hope there’s some shock value to be had there (there isn’t). Chainsaw Man as a whole, rather than being made to craft a story, is simply made as a way to cram in as much edginess as possible, without any of the substance that it should come with. Pretentious and flimsy, it tries so hard to be unconventional that it loses all the properties that would even qualify it as a basic story. In my opinion, it is vapid and dull to the very extreme. Chainsaw Man quickly becomes quite painful to watch because it’s really difficult to ignore - while not engaging, its cringy dialogue and jarring visuals make it noticeably unpleasant. Hey, if you like gore, and meaningless edge for the sake of it - then this might be the show for you. It certainly wasn’t for me. Thanks for reading my review.
Chainsaw Man is the latest dark shounen manga adaptation to take the internet by storm, and for once, I get the hype. It is a dark, action-packed series that follows an orphaned street punk desperate to make ends meet. After an encounter with a devil, Denji is transformed into a human-devil hybrid with the ability to manipulate chainsaws to fight devils. He is then recruited by the Public Safety Devil Hunters, an organization that makes contracts with helpful devils to hunt devils that threaten the world. In exchange for fighting devils, he'll receive food, housing, and possibly romance with the high-ranking devil hunter who took him in as her so-called pet, Makima. There are a lot of characters here, but the leading players are easy to keep track of because of their distinctive character designs, vibrant personalities, and the devil they've contracted. Denji and his first partner, Power, bounce off one another hilariously—as a devil and fiend, respectively, they have a lot in common as outcasts fueled by blood and gluttony. Denji's chemistry with Aki, his superior and constantly annoyed roommate, is also quite funny. They never seem to agree on anything but slowly develop a quite rewarding friendship. Other side relationships flesh out the cast members, so you know who you're rooting for while watching. A few of the dark-suit devil hunters were a bit forgettable, so their minimal involvement in the season felt underutilized. Kobeni, uniquely, was a tertiary comic-relief character until one scene that attempts to make her more unique. Makima is nearly the antagonist of the season, with how she manipulates Denji from the beginning so effortlessly that everyone but him can see through her. Denji looks up to her, but she controls his inceldom and naivete to use his Chainsaw Devil. She is overpowered, which can be countered later in the series if she has a weakness. Various intriguing relationship dynamics are presented through Makima's involvement, such as codependency, manipulation, girl bossing and gaslighting, some deep, some less so. The story has some plot contrivances, but overall it's a good vehicle for the action. Plenty of the fanservice makes sense, and it usually fits within the story. Denji being offered some kind of sexual reward for fighting and nearly dying highlights the insanity of the premise. Showing fanservice from Denji's perspective ties into his motivation, and it wouldn't be very believable without it. The pacing here is fine, a couple of thoroughly engaging episodes, then the shifts between arcs can sometimes seem jarring as the show shifts gears suddenly, and the occasional exposition-heavy scenes slow it down. Though there's a fair bit of world-building, it leaves you wanting more, but since explanations aren't the show's strong suit, it is best left for the next season. With its intense action scenes, compelling plot twists, and, most importantly, thought-provoking themes, it's no surprise it has become such a sensation. The themes are not the deepest or most intricate, but they give you plenty to ponder; Grief, pursuits, death, and further dark recesses of humanity. These are the most consistent themes throughout because of how expected death is in the world of Chainsaw Man. Denji struggles with grief in naturalistic ways, which goes a long way in humanizing him. The score during these melancholy scenes aids our compassion for the characters. The music for the series is composed by Kensuke Ushio and merits praise for its unique blend of styles and ability to capture the dark and gritty mood of the series. The opening's visual is loaded with homages to iconic scenes from classic cinema, including The Big Lebowski and one of the best horror films ever, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The OP shows respect for the classics and a boldly modern approach to the genres. Every episode has a different ending song and visuals from various musicians and genres, including rock, metal, punk, and hip-hop. The ED visuals reflect a theme or highlight a key devil hunter from the episode. Chainsaw Man's adaptation deserves every bit of praise it's gotten for its stellar soundtrack. Visually, it is just as, if not more, praiseworthy. The series is animated by MAPPA, the studio behind popular anime series like Attack on Titan, Yuri!!! On Ice, Jujutsu Kaisen, and more. MAPPA's animation style is unique and stands out amongst other shounen series. The fighting sequences in Chainsaw Man are incredibly detailed and fluid. The disturbing devil creatures have grotesque, deformed bodies and move at an inhuman speed only achievable with animation. The humanoid character designs are highly expressive and dynamic. Utilizing CGI models for Denji's transformation allows for more dynamic direction and gives the scenes more sense of speed. The solid lighting and shading make the CGI appear more natural. Almost every frame feels poured over by a vast committee of artists and animators, to the point that it is sometimes 'overly' polished but impressive nonetheless. The blood and gore visuals and realistic sound effects are very compelling, both enough to disgust horror fans but also over-the-top in a ridiculous way that it doesn't come off as gratuitous. Chainsaw Man has gained much popularity since its release and will be considered one of the best manga adaptations of this generation. It boasts some of the best animation on television, intense action sequences, unpredictable twists, memorable characters, and dark subject matter, such as death, grief, and violence. Its unique take on the traditional hero/monster story sets it far apart from its peers. An absorbing blend of comedy, horror and the supernatural makes Chainsaw Man thrilling and a consistently entertaining experience.
First of all, I’m a huge fan of Chainsaw Man, and more importantly the manga is my all time favorite. I’ve already done a shitty review on it, but this time it’s about the anime! I’m very bad at expressing myself. I had a hard time reviewing the manga because the story of Chainsaw Man is too crazy and filled with messed up events, as I'm sure you have also experienced it if you are reading this. However, as I already mentioned, this time it’s about the anime adaptation. As someone who has read the manga several times, 7 times to be exact, and watched the anime almost 5 times total, I'm pretty sure I know for certain whether the adaptation turned out well or not. This review contains spoilers from the anime. Rather than reviewing the story and characters, I’ll be comparing the anime and manga, covering the anime original and manga only aspects as well. ~~~img400(https://i.imgur.com/1pf56q4.png)~~~ The 12 episodes of the adaptation include the introduction arc, the Bat Devil arc, the Eternity Devil arc and the Katana Man arc. What they left out is the story of the little girl and the muscle devil that took place between the Itroduction arc and the Bat Devil arc. In the manga, this was originally Denji's first mission as well as a part where we get to see the strict side of Makima's character. However, the most important Makima’s line, “I don’t need a dog that says no,” was naturally built into a different scene/conversation. For the production side, it was probably the right decision. The story was not something that would be relevant later on, and a few small changes covered it. Everything that happened in the manga was almost completely adapted. Anime original were the everyday scenes, such as the morning routine of Aki, but also flows that were not really shown in the Manga, e.g. how the criminals were taken to the shrine by bus. But did they have any effects? Yes, they definitely made the story easier to follow. My parents didn’t like the manga of Chainsaw Man, ~~I forced them to read it~~. The reason for that was that they almost didn’t understand anything because everything happened too fast. But once they started watching the anime they were hooked, amazed. #~~~__Animation and CGI__~~~ Both animation and CGI were well done. The 3D models for Chainsaw Man and Katana Man, which were probably the most complex, were perfectly designed. There were some scenes where the CGI looked a bit awkward, but in most cases, it was pretty well done. The same applies to the animation. MAPPA's animation has always looked realistic, but this time they aimed for even more realism. They were very particular about lights/shadows, put a lot of focus on the characters eyes and worked hard to make the movements look very realistic. The only episode that bothered me a lot was episode 8. As soon as ep 8 aired, a lot of people, especially the anime onlys, went insane. They were amazed by the quality, cinematography and most importantly by the mind blowing appearance of Katana Man. For me ep 8 was more a disappointment. The cheap-looking animation of the Fox Devil, the use of CGI for the Snake Devil and Curse Devil and the battle between Katana Man and Aki with lack of speed. Let me show you what I mean. Maybe others see it differently, but I in any case saw in episode 8 a lot of need for change: ___ ~~~The Fox Devil in ep 8 img1200(https://files.catbox.moe/eto60j.gif) Same scene in the first trailer of Chainsaw Man where it definitely looked better img1200(https://files.catbox.moe/ejmzr5.gif) The actual scene in the manga img700(https://i.imgur.com/8kvSJMn.jpg)~~~ ___ ~~~First appearance of the Snake Devil, CGI that obviously doesn't look good img1200(https://files.catbox.moe/gkpyfl.gif) ~~~ ___ ~~~First appearance of the Curse Devil, no animation, only CGI, just showing off their 3D models, Katana Man T-posing img1200(https://files.catbox.moe/hly97x.gif) Actual scene in the manga img(https://i.imgur.com/atNyWRh.jpg)~~~ ___ ~~~Aki vs Katana Man in the anime webm(https://files.catbox.moe/91dx9a.mp4) Literal fan animation that looks better or let's say "what I expected" img1200(https://files.catbox.moe/l0suez.gif) Ok I guess that's enough~~~ ___ #~~~__Voice Acting and Soundtracks__~~~ These 2 aspects are the main reasons why this adaptation is so enjoyable. The voice cast was mainly chosen by the author Tatsuki Fujimoto himself and many of the voice actors/actresses delivered an excellent job. Denji sounding young and powerful, Power loud and cute, Aki sounding calm and cold, Makima seductive and manipulative, Kobeni hysterical af. Each of the voice actors/actresses fitting the characters so well and making the watch a fun ride. Going on with the soundtracks, Kensuke Ushio making the best OSTs once again. Some tracks creepy, some very emotional and some tracks very powerful. His music is memorable and creates a whole new vibe that makes every anime very special. Not only just that. The 12 Ending Themes and the amazing Opening Theme by Kenshi Yonezu. Each ending song is part of every single episode and leaves a unique impression. ~~~img700(https://i.imgur.com/ibrPEky.jpg)~~~ #~~~__So what makes this adaptation so good ?__~~~ Did you know that Chainsaw Man doesn't have a production committee? The anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man is a huge project for MAPPA. Usually there’s a so called anime production committee, a group of companies that invest in the anime, which is also the obvious reason why the rights are always split. The committee makes a lot of various requests for their own benefits. Therefore it’s a common case that anime studios are not really allowed to make/animate scenes the way they want. For example, they have to censor a lot. Not only that. Whether the anime is successful or not, the animators don't make a big profit since the anime studios don’t own the rights. In the case of Chainsaw Man, somehow MAPPA was able to buy all the rights so they can animate it in any way they want. This also means that they make a great profit if it ends successfully, however they could also go bankrupt if it actually fails (which is very unlikely tho). To put it simply, it's the passion put by the production team that makes this adaptation so good. The perfect example is the passion they have put in the opening theme animation. Mother's Basement made an entire 30min long video analyzing the opening. You can see that the people involved in the production have a high understanding of the work. ~~~youtube(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojtC85a1gMM)~~~ Nevertheless, this adaptation is only the first half of Chainsaw Man. Things get even more interesting ~~fucked up~~ in the second half, and since MAPPA managed to adapt the impossible, I have high hopes for the second half as well. Did the adaptation surpass the manga? Well, I don't think so, but it's definitely one of the best adaptations I've seen so far.
Chainsaw man is one of the, if not the, most hyped-up Anime (With no prequels) of all time. The manga was the most popular on this website before the Anime even had a release window, and now it’s here and I’ve seen mixed reviews on it. I don’t blame people for not enjoying the story too much up to this point, and to those people, all I ask is that you stick with it. Trust me. The first few episodes of the series were an absolute blast. Finally seeing chainsaw man in action was so cool to see. You could finally see the movements that were being depicted on paper. The first few fights were an absolute CGI mess and the story wasn’t backing it up after a few episodes. It became hard for me to watch this show for a while because of the bland color palette and the story solely based on Denji’s horniness, but even those episodes had some moments you can’t miss. The fight with the eternity devil reminds us what chainsaw man is known for, guts and blood everywhere. Chainsaw man hits its stride at the end of episode 8 with the first Katana man fight and the first feeling of “Painsaw man” The last 5 episodes were such a blast, and the fight scenes were much improved than the disaster in episode 1. Oh, and of course, the characters are funny throughout the season which makes the action all the more fun. Episodes 11 and 12 were the high point of the series, with the much-improved fight scenes and the characters being entertaining as ever. Hayakawa swinging his sword around in episode 11 was cool but the best part was the second Chainsaw man and Katana man fight, when they weren’t engaged you could see some janky CGI but when they were fighting it look smooth as ever. The most impressive part of the series was the presentation. There was so much hype for this series, as I said before, it was built up to be an event. I’m sure this put a lot of pressure on all the workers at Mappa, so the fact that they delivered, and made it feel like an event, is extremely impressive. They were able to take this series off paper and, with everything bearing down on them, made the people who had been waiting happy, for the most part. It’s clear how much heart Mappa poured into this just by the intro and outros. The intro is as unique as any with countless references to movies and other things (For example a reference to a snail that hypnotizes its prey and makes it sit in the open) and you never watch an outro twice as there are 12 different outros, one per episode. I’m sad season 1 is over and so excited for season 2 but I’ve heard things about how Mappa and other animation studios treat their workers and I’ve noticed Mappa has a big project releasing for at least the first 3 seasons of 2023, so I hope Chainsaw man, as well as the other Mappa shows, will continue to get the time and attention they need and deserve. Chainsaw man was the first manga I read and it’s my favorite to this day so maybe I’m slightly biased, but Mappa did everything they had to do to give the fans what they want so I am extremely pleased with Chainsaw man season 1. img220(https://sportshub.cbsistatic.com/i/2022/11/09/ff8037b1-74cd-4e54-b538-1b8294e70f92/chainsaw-man-denji-episode-5-anime.jpg)
I’ve kept this as clear as spoilers as I could, however this is a spoiler warning, I do talk about plot points, whilst I try not to go into depth about arcs or major spoilers, there will be spoilers of plot points and beads, else it’d not make any sense whatsoever, so consider this your official spoiler warning so read at your own risk if you’re trying to avoid spoilers, there is a small summary of points right at the end for those who just want basic basic basic info, I’ll also have a TL;DR down there. I’ve tried to keep this as fair to the show as possible, whilst also sharing my genuine criticisms and what I dislike about it, at the end of the day I will be honing in on the negatives more, but that’s down to me wanting to explain my issues properly, I’m not mindlessly bashing the show, but I just want to be as fair as I can be. One last note, this is a flipping essay, so if you don’t want to read it I won’t blame you, but I thank anyone who takes the time to read it. Ahhhh, Chainsawman, a series that needs no introduction I’m sure, as it’s all anyone has talked about all flipping year. Now, I know my title has immediately rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and some of those people, it won’t matter what I say, they will hate me, hate this review and call me stupid, but alas, tis the way of the internet, and this review, ain’t for them tbh. Let’s start by saying, this isn’t a bad show, but it’s not a great show, and when you’re told over and over………and over……….and over……..and over……..and over…….and over………and-...ya know what, you get the point, that it’s the best thing ever, it’s going to be the best thing ever, it’s going to be your new favourite show, it’s all this and when it’s not, it stings just that bit more, because of how much you’ve been told it’ll be amazing, when it’s not all that, it feels worse, it’s a feeling I’m sure everyone can attest to, whether it’s a friend hyping something, the internet hyping something, or what have you, it’s a feeling we’ve all gone through, anime, movies, TV shows, games, we all get it. But hype trains, something we really should talk about, because Chainsawman is a series where I know for a fact a lot of people have complained about how hyped it was to how it delivered, yes, for everyone who complains there’s likely 2-4 others who think it’s deserving of the hype train, but that aside, why is it that this train felt so much harder than any other hype train I can think of? Both anime and game related, and the only reasoning in my head is most of the time it’s tempered, for games it’s because of how often hype trains fail to deliver, need I mention No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk, both insanely hyped and weren’t it (tho both have gotten better with updates) but even those 2 hype trains were nothing on Chainsawman’s, and I think this may very well be anime’s first real “oh wait a second'' moment for hype trains, because I really can’t think of anything (at least new) that has garnered this much hype, sure a new season of something may get a massive train, but that won’t disappoint troves of people, as and let’s use an intime example, the new Bleach season, I’ve not watched a second of Bleach, no matter the hype, as I’ve not watched it, I don’t care, so it’s not as big. But let’s stop talking about hype trains as at this point we all get the point, let’s talk about the anime, and what causes it to be a letdown, there’s a few reasons, first and foremost is the characters, which is another part of the show that was unreasonably hyped beforehand, and like……not unironically, or like our lovable idiots from Konosuba where the whole joke is how horrible they all are as people, these characters were all just hyped beyond belief. Let’s start with Denji, the main character, our protag, lies more than a few problems, but one thing I really want to touch on is how down-bad he is, now a lot of the humor of the show is brought on by this, but at various points it’s either too much, or feels not in character, especially the whole kiss and such with Himeno, and on that, we absolutely DID NOT need a scene of her vomiting into his mouth, and boy oh boy was I glad that shit was censored, which some people actually complained about jeez. But back to the character in hand, Denji, the down bad nature of him really hurts the show at times, because like many darker shows, or even games, the Fallout franchise would be a good link here too, CSM uses humor to lighten things up, and the juxtaposition of this comedic thing in a show that’s pitch black is also an interesting thing to look at, however the humor being, more often than not “lul, Denji down bad luuuuulllll” really hurts it, FMA(B) has a similar problem with Ed’s (lack of) height, yes it’s fine having a running gag, in fact when done well it can be utterly hilarious, but not when it’s done constantly. As it is here (and in FAM[B]) now it may well be attempting to do the “fail so many times it circles back to being funny” but there’s a big reason that only works as one off gags, imagine an entire show where that’s the joke (that’s rhetorical, because Family Guy does that and it’s crap) but that’s, sadly, what Denji feels like, a character just there to “be down bad” and then whenever it gets a little too dark and a little too serious they hit the “Denji is down bad button” which is really sad because he does have moments of true character, like when he helps Power get her cat back, or how he saves the people whilst also tricking the devil that he doesn’t really care about saving them, which makes it all the more frustrating that he’s got those moments of true character growth, development and just, humanisation, but then 50% of the time he’s just used as the comic relief button. Now that is not at all to say that comic relief characters are bad, because how many brilliant ones out there are there? I’m sure we’re all thinking of 5, 10 in our heads right now, it also doesn’t mean that a comic relief main doesn’t work, it does, but in a comedy series, think KonoSuba, Highschool DxD or Gintama, it works there cause it’s trying to be stupid, trying to be funny, CSM is too dark and serious to have the comic relief be attached to the literal main character. The final episode depresses me even more with Denji overall, cause good lord his growth from the training with Kishibi was sick, like, also unexpectedly smart, this is the kind of thing that’s good in battles, a seemingly lost situation being won due to brians, it was honestly brilliant from Denji and I really enjoyed the growth, and the fact he earned his growth, unlike other shows/movies (particularly Western ones) where the growth just sorta………happens, with no work needed, so full marks to CSM for actually doing that. For this next character I’m completely rewriting this section, because, whilst I felt what I had written made sense, with the new knowledge we had I felt it could be worded better, and in a fairer way to the anime (so don’t no one say I’m just hating cause I ain’t, I want this to be as fair as possible). Kobeni, Kobeni Kobeni Kobeni, talk about the worst introduction any character has gotten ever, she was completely insufferable, I hated her, I wanted her to die, she pissed me off almost as much as Malty from Shield Hero (SO A FREAKING LOT). It takes effort to cry more than Deku does, but Kobeni somehow did it, now I have to give props to the Voice Actress cause that couldn’t have been easy but god daymn I wanted her to stfu, worse again is she was making the entire situation worse, to the point she had to be knocked out by Himeno just to stop making it worse, then fast-forward to Episode 9 GOD DAMN SHE WAS SICK, like WHERE TF WAS THIS AGAINST THE ETERNITY DEVIL KOBENI??? Honestly the author absolutely did her dirty with her introduction, made her so hateable and just one of the worst characters, she has a long, long, long, long road to recovery, but she’s at least taken the first step, the big key now will be consistency, if her awesome mode it just random, I think she’ll be the absolute worst character in CSM, but if it happens under specific circumstances and it’s consistent, she’ll be up there with the best, but it needs to be consistent, think Zenitsu from Demon Slayer, when he’s so scared he falls unconscious, he’s FRIGGIN AWESOME, but when he’s awake, he’s a sniveling mess, sure he may be annoying at times, but it’s okay because he’s consistent, so the main goal for Kobeni will be to be consistent, if she does that, she’ll be a good character, if not…………..not so much. I wasn’t originally going to talk about this character, as I thought, like many, they were a non event, but now I need to talk about Himeno, what a nothing character, she wasn’t even the classic character surrounded by “death flags” like in a game or movie where the one going on about their family…..phoooo, they dying, but she came in, was a bit of a nothing burger for a while, threw up into Denji’s mouth, said she loves Aki, does something awesome, dies, all in the space of what? 3 episodes if you’re generous, and I wouldn’t mention it at all if not for the fact, just before she dies, she has that nice moment with Denji about helping each other’s love quests, Denji with Makima, Himeno with Aki, that was only put there to force the viewer to form a connection and it is the lowest branch of low branches. I can honestly sum up Himeno’s character in a sentence “A shoehorned character who has a sweet moment with Denji to form a cheap connection from the viewer, before being killed off” done, next. The rest of the characters range from non-events to okay, none are challenging anywhere near my favourites overall, but there’s no other real bad ones, in my honest opinion. Aki is prolly my favourite of the series, if not Makima (sorry to all the Power lovers, which includes my bestie xD) but overall it’s not got characters I instantly click with, want to protect, or just love, even Aki took 8 episodes before I was going “yeah, you, you’re my fave here” Makima was quicker, but not as strong, hence why I’m undecided on who I prefer. On the rest of the characters, the introduction of the other devil/fiend members of Special Division 4 was poor, rule 1 of writing, show don’t tell, we just had Kishibe rattling off who they were and what they did to two randos just off screen then it showed who they were and what they were doing, this is far from the worst I’ve ever seen, with some just absolutely telling you exactly who they are, what powers they have and such without even showing them at all, so I can give it props for at least showing us, but it would’ve been a lot more fun, and a lot better introduction if they just popped into the battle and let them show us, none of the exposition, just them being awesome, one of Denji or Power, likely Denji as he’s usually the stupider of the two, as well as being newer to the taskforce, ask “hey who are you” and let them introduce themselves, heck the Angel devil literally did this BUT ONLY AFTER WE WERE ALREADY TOLD WHY TF DID YOU TELL US???? The only time telling even remotely works is when there’s just way too many new characters to introduce thus making showing unviable, think class 1B in My Hero, some were shown, others were told as suddenly trying to show about 15 new characters just isn’t viable, but here it was 4, Shark, Violence, Spider, Angel, done SHOW US, YOU LITERALLY TOLD US THEN SHOWED IT ANYWAY SO DON’T TELL US, LET THEM INTRODUCE THEMSELVES IT’S SO MUCH BETTER THAN JUST AN OLD DUDE RATTLING OFF NAMES AND ABILITIES TO TWO NO NAME RANDOS OFF SCREEN. One last note for my experience with the characters, whilst I don’t think any are particularly stand outs to this point of time, I do really like the growth, especially what I’d call the main trio, Denji, Power and Aki, seeing them become closer, and the end credits of episode 12 where they’re kinda like a weird wacky family, I really like, that aspect of it was really nice and I did like it, and should this continue it’ll be fun to see how much more they grow as characters, and perhaps one of them can actually live up to the hype bestowed on this show. The fakeouts the show does for shock factor is already hurting it, it takes all stakes out of the show, yes we understand Makima, Denji and arguable Power are indispensable, and we don’t expect them to die, even in a show that prides itself on “anyone can die” in the form of Game of Thrones can’t kill certain characters, but this is ridiculous considering how early it is, because it’s just making us go “oh they’ll be fine” and when someone does actually die we won’t be able to accept it because they’re always fine. A fakeout of a character that doesn’t feel indispensable can be really good, Shield Hero did this with Filo before she felt indispensable, but it has to be a one off, because if you keep doing it over and over the plot armor wears on viewers. As viewers we all understand that there’s going to be plot armor, we get it, you can’t just kill the main character, but the trick of good stories is to make you think that they can die, or at least lose something major if they’re not careful, I’d like to talk about MHA as an example here, Deku’s fighting style actively takes a toll on his own body, and it gets to a point where he’s out right told “if you do it again you won’t be able to fight or be a hero” his actions have caused this, that’s a removal of some form of plot armor, it raises the stakes, which WILL NEVER happen if “and then Denji died, BUT HE DIDN’T, then he died again BUT HE DIDN’T and he died again BUT HE DIDN’T” it’s frustrating to watch because the arc at eps 8/9 could be so so so so amazing, but because the stakes have been removed and I’m just left thinking “what bull will they pull to get em out of this” In episode 10 they at least give us a reason why the fakeouts kept happening, with Kishibe saying “The boy is immortal, the fiend is basically immortal” but this is far too late to set up your rules, especially with something as big as this, however with that knowledge CSM enters a lose lose situation, without knowing the fakeouts are frustrating and annoying, with the knowledge they don’t work at all because we, know for sure that they won’t work, of the two I’d rather know and see a more creative solution to add stress, which we should get now that we know for sure Denji’s immortal and Power is basically immortal, which as I’ll state over and over, gives a lot of promise for a hypothetical second season. Then it goes straight back to a fakeout death in episode 11, with Aki, right at the end, I mean come onnnnn, get a different thing to raise stakes, don’t just fake out, fake out, fake out, fake out, now Aki does feel slightly more disposable than any of Makima, Power and Denji, but he’s already lived through one fake out, more is just gonna continue taking any stakes and stress from every situation, you can’t just keep putting characters in positions where they should die, or fake out deaths and expect it to just fly on by with no problems, once, great, twice, okay fine, but three times? Four times? Five times? You’re pushing it, beyond the stopping point, way beyond, it’s just not interesting to watch characters “die BUT NOT” over and over and over, when I started writing this around episode 6, 7 I didn’t expect this to be the thing I talk about the most, but good lord it’s bad, just go 5 minutes without a fake out death ffs, there’s so many ways to convey stakes without needing to do this, I’ve already mentioned one from MHA, and I’m sure y'all can think of so many more, but I think I’ve said enough here. The Animation and CGI vary, from some of the best I’ve seen anywhere, to really poor, now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not one of these elitists who’ll go “WAAH IT’S CGI THAT MEANS IT’S BAD WAAAAAHHHHH” in fact it’s quite the opposite, I think CGI is the next step for the medium, it’s just still in its early steps, but where I do have a problem is when it’s used lazily, it doesn’t have to be fantastic CGI, just don’t be lazy with it, the biggest case of this in CSM, and thankfully the only case of it, in episode 1 where Denji first changes into the Chainsaw and goes crazy killing all the zombies, you can follow along ahead of him because the ones that are moving properly, and the only ones in CGI and not still background images being jittered, are the ones that are going to be attacked, this wasn’t bad CGI by any means, in fact it was fantastic some of the best I’ve seen, just lazy. Outside of that the animation, and CGI, is absolutely fan fucking tastic, like people who know me, know I’m not one to really care about animation most the time, as long as it’s not disgustingly bad (cough Scarlet Nexus cough) I don’t care, and even when it’s good I’m not usually one to notice, but this is like, a whole nother level, like there’s good Animation, then there’s CSM, that’s the levels it’s bringing. Now I don’t want people to think I dislike this show, there is stuff to like, one moment of complete awesomeness was the Curse devil that Aki evoked, like holy crap that shit was awesome, or later in the same scene, the Ghost thing Himeno evoked, also freaking awesome, really reminded me of the artstyle and animation from Madoka, which I absolutely loved. The story itself isn’t bad either, it’s not the best I’ve ever seen, but it’s far from the worst, and from what a friend of mine keeps saying (who, as it’s my review, I will keep anonymous), maybe it’s good I haven’t seen Jujutsu Kaisen yet, as she keeps claiming that CSM is “A way worse JJK” now I can’t comment on the validity of that statement, but I feel I can agree with the ethos of it, in CSM’s story feels very much like a fairly generic Shounen story, which, for me, isn’t bad, but for a lot of people, some of who may be reading trying to decide to watch this or not, may want to keep in mind, especially if that means one is more likely to dislike it. Some other parts of CSM to like include it’s action scenes, they are up there with My Hero and Demon Slayer for some of the best full stop, it’s honestly frustrating because of how good the action is that the bits in between are so poor in comparison, of course no show can be 100% action all the time, else it’d be boring, repetitive and have absolutely 0 story, but a show with such great action still needs something to support it, CSM finally starts adding this late on in the season, it takes a while, but it starts to happen around episodes 8/9 and gets further elaborated on in episode 11, the show was crying out for this sooner, because before this story with the gun devil’s minions, the weird lady who seems to be able to steal powers and her allies (Including Denji with a sword instead of a Chainsaw) it was very much moving from action scene to action scene, which was getting tiring, so I’m very glad to have some more meat, bringing the story behind which I was already slightly invested in, pushing it more to the front, rather than just sitting in the background, and I feel it’s set up beautifully for future story, whilst not being very good in the present season. One more thing to note is Pochita, he is absolutely adorable, and I will get a plush of him, and it does say a lot that the series mascot is basically gone after the first episode barring flashbacks and Denji’s inner monologue and dreams. That is some excellent character design and promotion to have something that’s in the show so little, be so insanely popular. This really feels like a show that’s just set up for, well, more show, I think I’d give this such a higher score if it had more episodes (or just less hype in general tbh) but god damn were there some mistakes, like they could’ve done so many small things differently to make it so much better without feeling like it needs more show, if it never gets that more show CSM will forever go down as “overhyped as shit then just shit” but if it gets it, it very well may live up to that hype just a bit, I don’t believe it will ever match the hype surrounding it, but I think it could be a solid 8 or so rated show from me because I can see so much potential, and maybe why some of the hype exists, but it’s really not all that. I’d like to, just before my conclusion, talk about hype one last time, because I genuinely believe without the immense amount of hype, this review doesn’t exist, the conversations I’ve had with my friend (the one who linked it to JJK) about this show’s flaws and issues don’t happen, I genuinely think that if it wasn’t CSM but Eminence in Shadow, which is a show from this season, with similar types of plot points (not as many fakeouts tho, with there only really being 1 at the point of publishing this, and not only did that fit the character, but also the tone as well as being slightly comedic) but I still like that show, a lot more than this, even with similar problems, which I will freely admit, but the hype of CSM means I feel like I’m noticing all the little things more and more and more, which is snowballing into something a lot bigger than it should have any right to be, because simply, we were all told about how “CSM will be the best show of the year, it’ll be your new fave ect ect ect” Now a question that I have to myself, how good of an adaptation is it? I feel like this could be a much better manga than anime, where pace is better controlled, characters have more room to grow, and I feel like I will pick up the manga at some point, it’s not an urgent thing for me but I feel like I’ll get enjoyment out of it and through these early parts where I had trouble I’ll be able to live with it better under the better pacing of manga. Also without all the hype surrounding it I can set my own expectations which by default will be a much better time for me. TL;DR - Chainsaw Man is a show with way too much hype surrounding it, it’s not all that, except to a very specific group of people, but it is a good show, the hype however killed it a bit for me, it 100% feels like a show set up for a season 2, with the show’s last few episodes being vastly better than the first chunk and everything slowly coming together to actually make you want to keep watching, make a bit of mystery and give you a reason to want to watch it. There is a lot to like about this show that can not be denied, however there’s also a lot to dislike a lot with how it tells its story and how things piece together, the early parts especially struggle a lot. I can’t explain perfectly how I feel about this, if it ends here then I’m hollow, but if it gets a second season (which I find quite likely) and continues the upwards trajectory I feel it could be a very good show, and maybe, just maybe, live up to some of the hype it has had, which was this season’s greatest downfall, too much hype, like I said earlier, I feel this is anime’s great awakening to hypetrains, they need to be tempered else they’ll run out of control and make you hate something even if it’s not that bad, if left rampant, the next time won’t be like CSM, it’ll be like No Man’s Sky, something insanely hyped, that ended up being shit, rather than something being good, but the hype making it feel much more average. One last thing of note, to people who are reading this trying to decide if they should watch it, this is less for the people who like this kind of thing, more for the people who, generally, don’t, if you’re not into Shounen, and you don’t like edgy things, just skip CSM, it’s not worth your time, I don’t say this out of malice for the show, but I like those types of things and really struggled at points, if you’re not a fan of these genres you won’t enjoy it, so watch something you’ll enjoy over this, don’t feel pressured by the hype or how many people love it, watch what you want to. Final rating: 6.5/10 Would I recommend: Only to the right person, and should it get a season 2 I may be more inclined to recommend to a wider audience. Best features: The Animation/CGI, barring the moments I delved deeply into Worst features: The Characters, Certain story points (fakeouts)
I have never seen anything quite like Chainsaw Man. I’m not talking about the show itself, to be clear. I’ve seen plenty of anime, manga, shows, movies, and video games that share similar DNA with Tatsuki Fujimoto’s breakout smash hit. What I mean is, I have never seen anything take over the anime community in the way that Chainsaw Man has. This manga was so staggeringly popular that it shot straight to the top of Anilist’s most popular manga rankings and stays there to this day. Most of the time an anime adaptation brings new attention to its source material, but Chainsaw Man was already the biggest goddamn thing in the otaku community before we even got a single teaser trailer for the anime. Everyone was talking about it, everyone (well, mostly everyone) was praising it, everyone was discussing it to such an extent that for once, waiting for the _anime_ to release before checking it out felt like the hipster choice. As long as I’ve been a part of this community, nothing, and I mean _nothing,_ has reached the silver screen with as much pre-release hype and anticipation as Chainsaw Man. No other anime has made its way into a world where its presence already casts so long a shadow. And that’s kind of a problem. See, I’ve been an anime fan long enough to know that a lot of times, anime fans are the _fucking worst._ Either they’re overly critical of every little detail because they’re looking for excuses to hate a show, or they blind themselves so utterly to a show’s faults that they steamroll over everyone else’s attempts to criticize it with blind fanboyism. And the colossal pedigree of Chainsaw Man was going to make the anime a lightningrod for both of those extremes on a scale we’ve never seen before. On the one hand you’ll have the blind zealots who hype the show up to an absurd degree that nothing could possibly live up to. On the other hand you’ll have the people so turned off by the first people that they’ll look for any excuse to call the show terrible- or even worse: mid. And on yet another hand, you’ll have the fanboys who are so slavishly devoted to the manga and Fujimoto’s vision specifically that they’ll pick apart every last change the anime makes with the kind of noxious incel entitlement rarely seen outside the Snydercut weirdos. And finally, you’ll have the newcomers, the people who haven’t read the manga and are coming to the anime with fresh eyes, who will be so exhausted by the shit-flinging that their opinion on the show itself will be lost amid the toxic sludge of the discourse surrounding it. How can anyone manage to just watch the damn show and appreciate it on its own merits with all that going on around them? But when all is said and done, none of that nonsense matters. The discourse doesn’t matter, the toxicity of certain fans and haters doesn’t matter, and most of all- and I don’t care how angry this makes you- the manga doesn’t matter. Chainsaw Man the anime is not an advertisement for its source material or a greatest hits compilation that only exists to pander to fanboys; it’s a wholly complete work in and of itself. It’s a show you should be able to pick up and watch without engaging in any of the madness surrounding it. And that’s why I’m here today: to cut through all the noise and take this anime entirely on its own terms. I haven’t read the manga, and I’m mostly unspoiled, so I think my perspective will be clearer than most people who’ve already spend upwards of two years marinating in Denji’s Bizarre Adventure and the culture surrounding it. All I care about is whether or not Chainsaw Man, the anime, is an engaging, entertaining, and worthwhile experience all on its own. Because at the end of the day, _that_ will determine its success, not how well it copies its source material or jerks off the already converted. Cool? Cool. Let’s dive in. Our story is set in the modern day, mostly the same as our world except for the fact that devils are real and walk among us, threatening humanity. Times are tough, most people live in fear, and the Public Safety Bureau tasked with keeping the threat of devils at bay can only do so much. And then there’s Denji, one of no doubt countless young people lost and adrift in this confusing, terrifying world, doing dirty jobs and selling his organs just to get by. At age sixteen, Denji has never had any semblance of a normal, comfortable life, to the point that something as simple as jam on toast feels like a luxury to him. But all that changes when an unexpected betrayal ends up with him dead… only to come back to life with the power of the Chainsaw Devil fused into his heart. Yes, just like the show’s title says, Denji can transform into a man made of chainsaws, a cackling maniac capable of ripping through flesh and bone like a one-man industrial slaughterhouse. And that power puts him on the radar of Public Safety, who see great potential in his ability to take on a devil’s powers without becoming a devil himself. Thus, he’s drafted into the front lines of those who track down and slaughter the infernal beasts, tasked with using his power to fight back against devilkind without going so out of control that he needs to be put down himself. And if he behaves himself like a good little boy, he might just get that life of plenty that always seemed so far out of his reach. Is it the most unique premise in the world? Not really. But in execution, there are so many specific details that make this world and these characters come alive. You can practically feel the existential ennui dripping off everyone, the knowledge that they’ve living in a fucked-up world and just gotta do their best to make it day to day with the simple pleasures they can afford. For as raucous and chaotic as the action gets, the most powerful moments in this show are often the quietest. A character goes about his morning in the silence of a sky barely lit with dawn. Two characters in the same car speak volumes in the space between their words. Some of the most heartbreaking sequences involve characters just… sinking into the quiet of night, trying to go about their business unruffled while the weight of their regrets and trauma weighs invisibly down on them. In a world where so many big action shows are allergic to just letting moments _breathe,_ Chainsaw Man is a soothing balm that remembers even the biggest, loudest fireworks showers are nothing without the calm before the storm. But it’s certainly not only doom and gloom. In fact, one of the biggest delights I had with Chainsaw Man is just how uproariously funny it can be. The off-kilter cast of characters all have such distinct personalities, and watching everyone’s unique flavor of fucked-up bounce off each other leads to some moments that left me cackling. And Fujimoto has a real knack for drawing laughs with an unexpected moment of ultraviolence or gross-out humor right when you least expect it. The world of Chainsaw Man is more than a little bit unhinged, and that’s just as capable of being piss-your-pants funny as it is bleak and uncompromising. Life, after all, is composed of multitudes, sometimes barely separated by a moment’s notice before peace breaks into war or war gets smacked on the cheek for being a bad boy and cowed back into peace. That unpredictability ensures that even in its slower moments, this show is never boring to watch. And it makes every victory, however small, hit that much harder, knowing just how much the slightest step up means in a world this uncompromising. But if you asked me to define the _core_ of Chainsaw Man? The thing that makes it so interesting to think about and separates it from all its similar peers? Well, I have one idea. An idea that so few of the people I’ve seen discussing this show seem to really notice, but lies at the heart of basically everything this show is trying to say: Chainsaw Man has some _thoughts_ about sex. See, Denji’s lived such a deprived life that he’s only just now started considering what would leave him fulfilled on every level, not just physically. Now that he’s finally got a regular source of food and water and shelter, his brain’s finally free to start climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and start thinking about what else would make his life feel complete. And because he’s a repressed teenage boy, his first line of thinking is that he wants to touch some titty. Something that he achieves pretty speedily thanks to a bargain with the show’s best character (Bow before Power, mortals, you do not deserve her), only to find out that, well… it’s just boobs. That’s literally all it is. Which isn’t just hilarious because it sends him into a brief manic spiral, but also because it prods at one of anime’s longest and most infamous traditions of fanservice. Anime puts so much stock in boobs, spends so much effort getting its audience to drool over fictional bazongas, that it becomes easy to attach a near religious significance to them. But at the end of they day? They’re literally just boobs. Just sacks of yellow fat attached to a person’s chest. And while it might be fun or pleasurable to cop a feel or two, your life won’t suddenly turn itself around just because of it. Cheap sexual gratification the likes of which anime so often indulges in, Chainsaw Man seems to say, is nothing but an empty distraction from what’s actually making you unhappy. And if you want to actually find happiness, then you’re gonna have to put a lot more work in that a couple squeezes of some random mammary glands. And that’s far from the only way Denji’s relationships with women and femininity are charged with deeper meaning. He actually has a very interesting relationship with sexuality, one that he doesn’t really seem aware of himself. He’s surrounded by women he considers attractive and lusts after them, but he’s got enough emotional intelligence to keep his hornier thoughts to himself and not be gross about it. Yet the promise of sexual favors from his female co-workers is often the biggest motivator in getting him off his ass and into the fray. And it’s… deeply uncomfortable, watching this sixteen-year-old throw himself into pursuing adult women who, even at the best of times, don’t have his best interests at heart. Like, let’s be clear here, Denji is a _kid._ A kid on the older side who was probably forced to grow up too fast, but a kid nonetheless. And it’s clear he doesn’t have anywhere near the maturity to be comfortably involved with anyone, let alone someone close to twice his age. But because most of the adults surrounding him aren’t exactly stable themselves, there’s no one around to tell him how badly he’s risking getting seriously hurt- or worse- by putting so much stock in sex. And because he’s too much of a dumb teenager to recognize the warning signs, he has no idea just how dangerous his relationship with his mommy dommy boss Makima is becoming. The thing is, though… I don’t know how to feel about all this. Sure, the story knows _Makima_ is bad news, at least, and it doesn’t shy away from how predatory her actions toward Denji are (side note, Makima is fucking terrifying and I can’t wait to find out what her deal is). But what about Himeno? You know, the adult woman who _tries to have sex with Denji while he’s drunk?_ Because unlike Makina, Himeno’s resolutely in the good guys’ camp, and nothing really much comes of her- and I cannot stress enough- _trying to fuck a child._ They acknowledge it in a throwaway line the morning after (”You can get thrown in jail for doing something like that.”) and then everyone moves on. And I can’t help but feel like the show’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. Like it’s trying to tell a genuinely affecting story about a stunted teenager grappling with unhealthy sexuality but also indulge in the fantasy of hot dommy mommies being all hot and dommy at the same time. And when I think about how absurdly popular this series has already become, I worry that this kind of wink-wink pandering is part of the reason why. Like it’s selling a kink with juuuust enough plausible deniability to pretend it’s actually “subverting” it so its fanbase can pretend it’s totally smarter and more mature than other shonen when it’s really just selling the same shit with an air of superiority. Or maybe all the barking Makima simps just completely missed the point and everything will make sense down the line. We’ll have to wait and see. What I don’t have to wait and see, thankfully, is just how _goddamn motherfucking amazing_ this show looks. Yes, you don’t need me to tell you that Chainsaw Man is one of the most astounding feats of animation ever put to television. But I’m saying it anyway, because it cannot be overstated enough. This. Show. Looks. Fucking. INSANE. Not just the sheer level of detail in the animation, but the cinematic sweep of the camera, the precision of every edit, the orgasmic fluidity of the bone-crunching action and subtle character moments alike. Bodies shred and rip apart with raucous glee, characters barrel through the city with enough velocity to tear the skin off your face, a subtle shift of a hand or change of expression conveys fathoms of meaning, and the camera draws you into these spaces until you feel like you can taste the blood on the walls and feel the muggy air rustle through your sweat-soaked undershirt. A single episode of Chainsaw Man has more animation and cinematic verve than most TV anime manage in their entire runs. It genuinely feels like you’re watching a movie, that’s how high quality it is. And no, not even the occasionally awkward CG modeling on the devils and the man of saws and chains himself takes away from that sense of awe. Hell, most of the time the CG is fantastically integrated with the 2D elements! What, you’re gonna complain that your divinely blessed shonen adaptation looks like a goddamn movie only 99% of the time? While most non-shonen and non-isekai are lucky to get even a tenth as much? Do you entitled fucking babies even realize how lucky you are? Or what, do you want Mappa’s animators to work themselves even _more_ to death to fulfill your perfect vision? Some people don’t deserve good adaptations, I swear to god. So, is Chainsaw Man the second coming of Jesus? Of course not. But it IS a gloriously gruesome splatterhouse spectacle with some of the most jaw-dropping action ever put to screen and some of the most impeccable care put into making its smaller, simpler moments feel just as momentous as every severed limb and shower of blood. It’s a show that swept me away with sheer confidence the likes of which you almost never see, confidence only matched by the raw passion and talent of the artists bringing its incredible sights and sounds to life. Time will tell if the story truly is as incredible as manga readers have hyped it up to be, or if it’s merely a very good foundation upon which all this deliriously entertaining carnage can be built. But you know what? Even if it’s the latter, it can still hold its head up proudly as one of the finest pieces of sheer entertainment this year in anime had to offer- and considering the competition, that’s saying a lot.
Watching Chainsaw Man feels like engaging with the work of some pervy, twisted genius who spends all his downtime trolling in the dark depth of the sweaty armpits of online forums like 4chan. Set in a world inhabited by devils which appear to be the manifestation of people's fear of things that includes everything from everyday objects like guns and katanas to supernatural beings such as ghosts and fox spirits, the main character Denji is a 16 year old downtrodden bum whose life gets turned around after he befriends and fuses with a chainsaw devil, allowing him to transform into a devil himself with the head of a chainsaw (not to mention chainsaws coming out of his arms too). The premise is either bizarre, brilliant or stupid depending on your point of view. Maybe a good dose of each. There's a certain barrier to entry with this anime: Chainsaw Man isn't just unabashedly shounen with all its questionable shounen logic, it also at times resembles the wish fulfilment wet dream of someone who fits the profile of the protagonist. The lewd humour is excessive when it misses the mark, and stuff like Denji becoming Makima's dog just feels like it's taken straight out of someone's twisted fantasy. On top of that, the horror and action elements in the early episodes comes across as toothless. There is little tension to the horror, just iffy CG animation and extravagant amounts of blood and gore. Meanwhile, the most interesting thing about the unimaginative action sequences is the stupidity of Denji repeatedly punching devils despite having chainsaws for arms. Overall, it's as though the staff went all out crafting the incredibly stylish opening and per-episode endings and didn't leave enough in the tank for the show itself. But somewhere along the series I suddenly realised that I was having a pretty good time watching it. While not all the jokes worked, but many of them are outrageously funny. But it's the particular brand of humour that makes the show stand out - the entertainment value you get bears a similarity to that of watching a high calibre troll in action (as long as it's not you being trolled). The epic shithousery, the willingness to completely trash a serious build up and the constant, easy banter between the characters all contribute to a fun romp of a show. Speaking of the characters, they beat at the very heart of the Chainsaw Man. The series is filled with characters with personalities: Denji and Power as a couple of idiotic two-bit punks, Mikima with her cold blooded manipulativeness, Aki's earnestness, and Himeno with all her messy psychological baggage. The interactions between these characters is effortlessly delightful and the chemistry between them natural. Despite the series general sense of irreverence, these characters sneakily attaches themselves to your heart, and then ... BAM! Shit hits the fan with the force of a bullet train. But just as Chainsaw Man succeeds in drawing me in, it finishes on a whimper rather than a wham. When it comes to shounen, I think everyone's familiar with the trope of long running shounens flowing with all the urgency of a viscous turd. However I'm beginning to think that single-cour seasonal adaptations aren't the answer either. The pacing feels completely unbalanced by what I suspect is the restrictions of the low episode count. Even during its finer moments, I sometimes have the sense that the show is moving too fast, for example the disconcerting way the devil powers in the show jumps from what feels like 10 to 100. And following the explosive climactic highs in the second half, Chainsaw Man wraps up too quickly and too neatly. The payload feels hollow after what came before, and I'm left with a strong sense of "is that it?" at the end. Despite the weak ending, I'm definitely up for watching more of Chainsaw Man. In addition to exceptional character writing, it has this irresistible, lovable rogue kind of charm as well as an awesome sense of style (did I mention those openings and endings kick so much ass?) ... I just hope the next time out we get a two-cour season.
__THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS__ ____ __ABBREVIATIONS/TERMS__ __KA: Key Animation__ ___ Let’s be honest: No one expected Chainsaw Man to be adapted this way. I didn’t read the manga, but what was advertised in the teasers was a gory, bizarre and brutal experience - I mean, c’mon, the name of the show is literally CHAINSAW MAN. So when this was announced to be solely produced by MAPPA, a studio known for having connections to many action veterans like Hironori Tanaka and Keiichirou Watanabe, you would expect this to be a visceral, brutal action spectacle, right? Well… at least I did. What I ended up getting though was very different from initial expectations, and I think now that it’s over, it’s time to look at Chainsaw Man as a whole. Don’t get me wrong with how I started with this review, I don’t want to go on a tirade about why I dislike how Chainsaw Man turned out; In fact, I am very very impressed by the approach Ryu Nakayama, the series director, ended up going with. What I want to emphasize though, is how odd Chainsaw Man is as an adaptation, and how odd it personally was for me while watching. Chainsaw Man, in many ways, is not a normal anime. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/8ef28870041343dc4aa2aad7b6b583a4.mp4) _KA: Aya Yamamoto, Hayato Kurosaki, Keiichirou Watanabe, Kouki Fujimoto, Chris_ # Nakayama’s vision I think the best way to go about it is to talk about the premiere, really. Chainsaw Man’s pilot episode is easily one of the best premieres I’ve seen. It made me interested in the show, immediately sold me on its tone, is stellar as an episode of its own, and showed that Ryu Nakayama not only is a newbie director backed up by a monster staff made out of freelancers in every corner of the industry, but that he himself understood what it means to adapt a work like Chainsaw Man successfully: You need to have a vision, and you need to know how to execute it. Nakayama’s vision is to show Chainsaw Man through the unfiltered lens of a live-action camera. That means realism, live-action-like compositions and framing, emphasis on character acting and natural behavior instead of exaggeration - or to put it short, he wants Chainsaw Man to be cinematic. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/a23b1c0a6862aafb6b1baabb1cf54857.mp4) _KA: Unknown_ That does show in episode 1, where gory action does exist, but the hook is emotional: Large shots showing the miserable environment, a bleak color theme and an absurd amount of character acting ending up outclassing the actual action, while the pacing is just right with atmospheric music playing in the background - Instead of throwing the viewer into an adventurous plot, in the sense of “hope you enjoy the ride”, the series decides to first establish the world it takes place in. Just like filming everything with a camera, exactly the vision Nakayama is going for. img(https://imgur.com/7B3nnTY.png) _A world turned upside down: Only one example of clever utilization of cinematic shots for visual storytelling_ That goes for the action too, which is less flashy and more focused on emphasizing the weight of the slashes and the Chainsaws Denji still has to get used to. However, Chainsaw Man’s first episode still has a slight cartoonish tint, maybe so because of the source material itself, but the boards also don’t try to hide it, with characters being conveniently at the right time and place making storytelling very efficient, a badass build up with the Chainsaws ramping up in volume, an explosive awakening of the eponym of this series. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/0f333cfff240996ef54b6e1b3a8849a1.mp4) _KA: Riki Matsuura, Shun Enokido_ Chainsaw Man’s anime adaptation is walking exactly the line between live-action and anime. While these things seem seemingly at odds with each other, it creates an interesting and surprisingly good result. Chainsaw Man feels lively, immersive and emotionally just gripping. The story is quite absurd and the characters are assholes at the surface level, but with the direction emphasizing the emotional anchor of this series and the world we witness here, the world is immersive and natural despite the absurdity, the characters are likable and easy to get invested into despite them being assholes. I think it goes without saying that this is an immense achievement: Nakayama took on a beloved series with a strong personality, but nonetheless managed to make it his own by adapting it with his own vision. # Ambitious but nonetheless restricted So with a strong pilot episode out of the way, it can only get better, right? Well… Not really. What we got with subsequent episodes was a bit too weird to really put easily into words, but Chainsaw Man was for a while a series where I had no idea what to think about. It certainly has an insane polish to it, let us get that out of the way. CG and 2D mixing is really strong, sometimes seamless, sometimes more noticeable, but it’s nonetheless strong and the team is not afraid to make use of it. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/ab8de15d74b6d92264e4bd5485b01bcc.mp4) _KA: Unknown, Tatsuya Yoshihara, Chris_ The character designs are detailed and fit exactly the bill of the approach of an anime that moves, literally, ALL the time. Helps a bit too to not only have action aces like Tanaka or Watanabe but also Cloverworks animators like Niinuma who are just gods at their craft: character acting. Chainsaw Man moves so much, to the point that in episode 1 people thought they were using CG when it was just natural character acting. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/0608e2b32b106bf4fcd092fc8a22e4f0.mp4) _KA: Takuya Niinuma_ It’s completely alien to the TV anime landscape, and an overly ambitious approach by MAPPA, who wants it to be the ultimate adaptation. I want to emphasize the phrasing “overly ambitious” because MAPPA, even in their size, wasn’t able to helm this project alone. Matter of fact it’s not a skill issue of the staff, as it is very talented, but other production conditions weren’t really that favorable for MAPPA. The first aspect is budget. Freelancers and in-betweeners are regularly paid per cut or per frame they draw. So the amount of unique frames per episode dictates the budget of that episode, no matter how good or bad it looks. In a show which moves all the time like Chainsaw Man, it’s probably not surprising the frame count is off the rails, so the budget per episode is respectively as high too. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/f391c7ad3678fa669f3eec81de3ce92e.mp4) _KA: 10+10, Ligton, Shoushi, Takuya Niinuma_ The difference between Chainsaw Man and previous productions of MAPPA is that Chainsaw Man is entirely produced by MAPPA. Under normal circumstances, many companies like Shueisha, Aniplex, or other big names who have the money assemble to fund an anime together: They form a production committee. The studio receives money from them to create the anime, and also other conditions like deadlines are set by the production committee. With MAPPA producing Chainsaw Man they’re basically free to do whatever they want with it, and they also can pour in as much money as they want, as long as they have it of course. Because they fund this anime on their own, which is not an easy task for an anime studio. This freedom probably caused them to go a bit wild with what they want to do with it - As Chainsaw Man is a guaranteed hit from their perspective and supposedly also a new chapter for MAPPA. But it turns out it’s a bit more complicated than that. MAPPA is utilizing an immense amount of staff for Chainsaw Man. Pretty much all their action aces and veterans, and also a large amount of douga (clean-up and in-between) of both their Tokyo and Sendai studio are working on it. And Chainsaw Man needs this large staff amount, but Chainsaw Man is not the only big title runner MAPPA is going for. Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 is waiting, and while Chainsaw Man is cooking hot in its production cycle there is no way they can allocate the proper staff for the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen. As you might have heard, time is money - They could take their sweet time finishing Chainsaw Man if they want, but as their CEO Otsuka is not a man of passion but one of business, there is the big question how much of a hit Chainsaw Man will be, if there is worth in having such an expensive show cooking for so long, and how worth it is to delay other important shows for it like Jujutsu Kaisen. img(https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fdrunkenanimeblog.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F08%2Fanime-calendar-gif.gif%3Ffit%3D480%252C270%26ssl%3D1&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=d1fc58fed38589bc3a737fa98841a4b5723d3d9234e45bbb24bb2c555b4f5abe&ipo=images) The result is, they didn’t end up taking their sweet time for Chainsaw Man, and even when Chainsaw Man is, considering its initial production circumstances, a special production, it ended up struggling with the problems of your usual TV anime. The schedule got noticeably thinner in the latest episodes, with both staff increasing over time to finish the episodes in time, but also the quality becoming less polished and the trademark of the adaptation, that everything moves, also declined. In fact, it was leaked that Chainsaw Man’s last episode looked a few days before broadcast for some staff to draw a remaining amount of 3000 in-between frames and finish those by Monday. While you can of course doubt a leak, it’s a fact that in the credits they listed a mind boggling amount of 23 outsourcing companies for in-betweening and finishing alone - This is an insane number. So even with Chainsaw Man being over the average standard of a TV anime production, the show feels, from a technical standpoint, imperfect and underwhelming considering the ambition and the staff which worked on it. While staff quantity is not the full picture by any means, it can be interesting to look at it nonetheless, so if you’re interested, I compiled it in this [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1peh7TbwmN3p9Lw6-30sxq3sgZOzMzf_9XWBl0lmZlok/edit?usp=sharing). # Melting pot of sakuga and industry aces Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that Chainsaw Man HAS a monster staff, which showed pretty often. The character acting was always stellar, they also really went out with the devils, drawing them detailed and animating them without relying on stills. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/7a169084585ad044bd1549590ae4a169.mp4) _KA: Unknown, Hayato Kurosaki, Hironori Tanaka, Kaito Tomioka, Takahito Sakazume_ The action had some great highlights with animators like Watanabe or Fujimoto, either going completely nuts like in episode 7 in the fight against the Eternity Devil, or in a more weighty manner like Fujimoto animated Aki vs Katana Man. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/64d9baf9e8e5d4b807aeaf880df7f03f.mp4) _KA: Keiichirou Watanabe_ webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/32c753effc18f0de37f3b147224312d9.mp4) _KA: Kouki Fujimoto_ Drawings also looked mostly really good, with especially looking good when aces like Hironori Tanaka or Takuya Niinuma get their hands on them as animation directors, and as I mentioned before, the animation in general really is excellent, both in quantity and quality. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/aa78102f5062ca1b9bc23ce32bafa5c9.mp4) _KA: Unknown, Hironori Tanaka_ A stand-out are also the EDs, which we got 12 of in total and each of them had a different tone both in the song and the visuals. Newcomers like Ligton, Shoushi and 10+10 which have their debut in the industry here under Nakayama’s belt prove to be very talented and promising, being able to create interesting visuals and ideas on their own. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/04c437f4c1f87c0a7030d247166e7647.mp4) _KA: 10+10, Ligton_ The problem which occurred to me in the run of Chainsaw Man, and finally made itself more clear in episode 12, is that the anime mid-way kinda got lost in the question of what it wants to be, or rather what it is. Nakayama successfully established the right tone and approach for his adaptation in his first episode, but what really happened with it afterward? I want to make clear here: The cinematic approach doesn’t simply mean making expressions less exaggerated like Denji and Power’s argument in episode 3 - It’s a question of boarding and staging scenes in a way it'd look like through a camera lens, effectively making use of it to establish both the characters and the world in an immersive manner and also building more on the characters in an emotional tone. It’s basically what episode 1 successfully did, Nakayama understood how it’s done. Most of the other episode directors didn’t, the most notable exception is Tatsuya Yoshihara. As the action director of Chainsaw Man, as an experienced director with the necessary sensibilities and as a friend/mentor of Nakayama himself, he probably understood Nakayama’s vision and approach the most. Yoshihara not only directed some of the most dynamic action sequences in the entire series but handled many anime-only scenes expanding on the every-day life of our main characters, relying strongly on visual storytelling to tell the story through the camera, not through dialogue. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/fa33da1112635d1b4dad7875868b71e2.mp4) _KA: Unknown, Shinya Ito_ webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/c0674bb14e8d11943ed4ee5cbf1887a9.mp4) _KA: Benjamin Faure_ Aki dealing with Himeno’s death in episode 10 is also really well-directed and proof of Yoshihara’s sensibilities as a director. Gosso also was a good fit for his episode, extending in an uncomfortable way how Himeno is acting like a creep towards Denji from her perspective, while also adding his own style to it and leading up masterfully to the explosive madness the episode offered in the second half. Other episode directors, however, lacked that sensibility for the right tone: This is not to say they’re bad directors, but either they’re just generally holding back and making a not as interesting, but a still decent episode like Kaneko, or they’re just not really falling in line with what Nakayama went for and try to do something on their own, like Tanaka in episode 3. Tanaka is a brilliant animation director, don’t get me wrong, but his episode really wasn’t that impressive in terms of direction, as the tone just doesn’t mesh with what Nakayama went for. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/bf4aabeeab23642ebb5e937babffca4d.mp4) _KA: Unknown, Hironori Tanaka_ Chainsaw Man had a lot of industry aces, but instead of understanding the task, even if it meant they'd have to hold themselves back, they decided to pour their own style into it nonetheless, making Chainsaw Man a bit of a melting pot, and not in a good way. It’s not like Fate/Grand Order’s 2nd Camelot Movie where it’s an intended explosive, chaotic sakuga spectacle where each animator has his chance to shine - it’s an adaptation which tries to be more slow-paced, emotional and cinematic, but some directors refused to fall in line. Nakayama himself also showed again in episode 12 how the cinematic approach of Chainsaw Man looks like, concluding the episode nicely with it’s probably second-best episode, where emotional moments and jokes just worked really well - Chainsaw Man’s anime for sure is at its best when Nakayama is fully in charge. img(https://imgur.com/rTt2Zxg.png) #An incomplete Chainsaw Just like how Denji’s Chainsaw got broken in his final encounter against Katana Man, I can’t help but feel that this adaptation of Chainsaw Man is incomplete. Not only in polish, which is something that could possibly be fixed for the Blu-Ray release, but in how much of a mess it kind of feels in the tone. I personally wish Nakayama could’ve reinforced his position more, because I truly think his approach to Chainsaw Man is excellent, but he just wasn’t able to show much of it except in his own episodes or when Yoshihara was in charge. img(https://imgur.com/i5INytf.png) If anything, young talent shone the most in this adaptation, showing that they are clearly capable of executing creative ideas on their own successfully instead of just mimicking the “sakuga” style of already established creators, while the veterans stuffed in here underperformed. Given how turbulent the production went, I have no idea what the second season of Chainsaw Man will look like - Until then, I might check out the manga. Thanks for reading.
Chaotic with surreal comedy, gore scenes and sexy moments : the long awaited anime adaptation of the Chainsaw Man manga created by Tatsuki Fujimoto has finally been fully released ! Thanks to the marketing efforts of Mappa along with the strong precense of the fanbase, the Chainsaw Man anime was extremely hyped before it's release. Putting aside the rising overhyped/overrated or underhyped/underrated debate, I'm going to try to talk about every important aspect of the Chainsaw Man anime in a review format divided in multiple parts. I deeply think this show has way more depth and meaning than it may seem on a surface level so it'll also be an analysis. Spoilers all the way. ___ __VISUALS__ img400(https://media.tenor.com/Ghg683vBrXcAAAAC/chainsaw-man-csm.gif) _(low ahh quality gif)_ Due to Fujimoto's artstyle and panneling, it must have been a real challenge for the studio to adapt the manga. Some people would say that the downpart about the clean visuals is that it's really different from the source material where the drawings shows folded chlothes, tangled hair, it's a messy artowrk and it looks more dirty compared to the neat and perfect visuals of the anime. What I'd say is that the brilliant part about the animation is the counterbalance they used to arrange the difference between the manga and the anime's artstyle. When you read it, you quickly realise that the Chainsaw Man manga is more than just a manga. It's serialised in the Shonen Jump magazine but it feels out of place, it's cases and bubbles yet it feels cinematographic. It is heavily inspired off western pop culture, using plot devices from totally different demographics (horror movies, budddy movies...). If you look at Fujimoto's work in general this becomes even more obvious. Goodbye Eri barely __looks__ like a manga. The animation in Chainsaw man looks clean but also weird? There's a lot of motion, even when the characters are just talking or doing something in the backgournd there's always motion, so much that's it's a little uncanny. There's rotoscoping, 2D, 3D/CGI. So much use of different techniques and styles to create one thing...Do you see where Im getting at? I think it makes sense for the anime to use such different things to create one unique thing for a manga that uses such different tools to create one unique story. _I'm not justifying bad animation. I admit that there's moments where it looks a bit off, what I'm saying is that it makes sense that the overall visuals looks weird within the context of the source material._ The openning is the litteral and perfect embodiment of this. ___ __OPENNING AND ENDINGS__ img600(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815968088075665418/1057086399616143410/FezrJJ5XoAANS6c.png) I've seen it, we've all seen it. The number of inspirations to make the openning was huge. I think that not only it's a tribute to Chainsaw Man but also to the author. It perfectly encapsulate the variety of references in Fujimoto's mind he uses to create his pieces of work (my earlier point exatcly). I wouldn't be suprised if we learn Mappa asked him his top 10 movie or something to make the op lmao. Obvisously, the music is great and very fitting. It is sang by the talented and popular Kenshi Yonezu, which is yet another proof that Mappa put the small dishes in the big by hiring such a big shot. Well, it's not the most surprising thing Mappa did since they litteraly hired 12 differents band for each ending. Clearly, no other anime has ever done this, it's wild and waiting for the new ending each week was a such a cool experience. The visuals for each of them are mastefully done. The first ending isn't an ending its a film credits wether we're talking about the song or illustrations. The use of different things outside the realm of manga and anime is an exceptionnal addition that perfetcly fits Chainsaw Man. _Side note : it's kinda sad that because of the quantity, a lot of endings will be forgotten, some of them could have been absolutely legendary but ig the fact that they're only one-shot makes them special in a way._ ___ __SUBVERSITY AND SUBSTANCE__ Chainsaw Man is kind of an anti-shonen and it heavily deals on the dominance of the state upon its inhabitants. I think this is more proeminent in the manga but what many thought after watching the first seconds of Chainsaw Man was "what the fuck" ? One of the first line litteraly is "sold my right nut for 100 000 yen". Chainsaw Man is weird. The gap between what is being told and how it's being told is the one thing that really disturbed me discovering the story. Something terrible is explained in a careless fashion thus you don't know how to react. Again, I think this is more true for the manga (at least the first episode) because in the anime, Denji and Pochita are seen as martyrdoms. Due to the osts, pacing and colorimetry (whatever you call it), you HAVE to feel bad for them. Their story is seen as a tragedy, which is true, what happens to them is sad but in the manga it was really up to you to see it that way. Because of how it was told you even thought it was comedic at some point. The first time I read the manga, I remember that at some scenes I legit didn't know how to react. Was it supposed to be funny? Sad? Tragic ? I was thrown off by how weird it was and that was what made me like it in a way. The room for interpretation felt big while the anime be like this IS supposed to be sad and that's it. This is the thing with adaptations, it will always be a __reinterpretation__ of the source material but I dont really have something against that since I only really felt like this for the first episode. Many things that happens in Chainsaw Man can be viewed as comedic or tragic. It's deeply cynical, sometimes you'll think somehting traumatic is too ridiculous to think of it as sad and sometime a "funny" scene will be way too real for you to laugh at. On the paper the story isn't anything original, it's a typical nekketsu shonen but...every rules and norms of the demographic is applied in an extremely __real__ way. Denji is practically an hobo who lives in a garden shed. He barely eats anything and the way his earnings get eaten away by the debts weirdly reminds me of taxes. Shit happens, he's forced to become an official to survive and he starts working for the state, he accepts it because he wants to eat three times a day, confort and stability (getting a little too real, eh?) He develops a new dream, which is touching boobs and he's ready to do anything to accomplish it, even if that implies him losing his freedom and make higher ups earn profit for his work. You can apply the shounen formula to this story because of how it's done but can you apply such a realistic summary on another shounen? I'll quickly connect this to another work of Fujimoto. In Fire Punch, pop culture is a sort of new religion. It is a way for people to disconnect from a sad and bleak reality for something dreamier and more inspiring. Link this to shounen : When you read a nekketsu shounen manga, it isn't supposed to make you think of real life like Chainsaw Man does. It's a little moment of escapism in the week where you see teenagers fighting for their goals. It's inspiring, it makes you dream. It does touch real-life subjects but it's supposed to make you forget your everyday life and embark on an amazing world. Chainsaw Man makes me think of real life. Why's that? img600(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/815968088075665418/1057750534586650755/Screenshot_2022-12-28-21-01-58-343_com.android.chrome.png) Look at Denji, Makima is explaining to him the conditions of his well being and establishes the price of his submission to the system as well as all the inconveniences but he isnt even listening to her, why ? Because he's too focused on the advantages. He's blinded by what he will get despite what he looses. He's a litteral dog to the state as he sacrifices his freedom and life to serv it but is satisfied with it and even waves his tail as long as he gets food, sexual pleasure and comfort. Look at Kishibe, bro is basically like "Well this job is shit, life is shit but I'm an alcoholic and being an alcoholic in this job allows me to hold out plus it pays my drinks" Aki, Kobeni, Arai, Denji, Power, Himeno and Arai litteraly risked their lives and almost went insane for their jobs but are satisfied with it because they're rewarded by a party financed by the office. Kobeni is broken and almost crazed from working in this job and when you ask her why the fuck is she still there she answers that there's a prime at the end of the month. How cynical is that? It is too ridiculous to take it seriously but too real to laugh at. Aren't we like them, accepting getting f*cked by the matrix if it means fulfiling our goals and needs? img(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815968088075665418/1057792093667459174/Chainsaw-Man-Eyes-in-Bag.png) I know this sounds complotist af, but it's interesting really, how much influence we let the state/matrix have influence on us and how much we obey and serve it without realising it. "Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt." To solidify this idea I think it's interesting to think about how the state in Chainsaw Man uses people's fears (=devils) to keep them check and control them. For starters, why do you even obey the state? Answering by another question : what can your consumer self even do without the state? Without it you have no protection against people. You're not even guaranted to find food and by extension to survive. To sum it up, you'll live without comfort, sense of security or even primal needs like warmth or food and it's not easy on anyone to be a total outcasted and not relying on the system. You'll live in aboslute __fear__. It's not me being paranoid when Makima basically says that mafia gangs aren't necessary evil, something that can be destroyed by definition isn't necessary, __she is__ the necessary evil, her and the people she's with AKA the state. What would a world without the security and control of states be like? A __fearful__ world for sure. It'd be similar to a world without Public Safety Devil Hunters who fight the litteral incarnations of fears in Chainsaw man. The state dishoneslty use our fear to their advantage but it's necessary. A necessary evil. img(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815968088075665418/1057800451107598396/weekly-shonen-jump-magazine-numero-16-2021.png) Keep in mind the source material is published in the Shonen Jump Magzine. In a somewhat conspirationist perspective, just like the pop culture cult in Fire Punch, the Shounen Jump magazine allow us to forget real life. It also undeniably makes you think that accomplishing dreams and goals is one of the most important thing in life if not the most important thing as long as it's righteous. To make your dream come true you have to fight hard everyday. If by exemple, your dream is to become a doctor, do everything you can to become one because this is what you want. Study everyday, attend school, do what you're told and work hard. You see where I'm getting at, right? Consciously or not, it justifies perfectly obeying the state as long as your dream is fulfilled. Not only does Chainsaw Man tell you that shounen are lying to you and that the truth is you'll never become a hero, just another random with casual goals and that even when you'll emancipate from your parents or whatever you'll still lose your freedom to the state for a comforting life and you won't be able to leave this situation precisely because of this comforting life but it also tells you that your dreams possibly implated by things like Shonen Jump and such are meant to justify your devotion to the state. You're a slave and no escapism will ever change that. When other shounen makes you forget it, Chainsaw Man brings you back to reality. Insipring characters with values ? Hell nah here are selfish bastards that are purposeless and fight for stupid reasons. An imaginary world? Hell nah this is actual real life. A big flashy dream? Hell nah the dreams of the main character are what we already take for granted. Chainsaw Man always disappoint us in the good way. This isn't being edgy for being edgy when it tells a message and when it makes sense within the story (more on the next section) _“Your necessary evil…is just an excuse to justify your own crimes. Those excuses are unnecessary to society. The truly necessary evils…are always collared and controlled by the state.”_ ___ __CHARACTERS__ The characters in Chainsaw Man are brutally honest and whithout any filters. They lack empathy, just like people in real life but people in real life pretend otherwise to look good, Chainsaw Man isn't trying to look good. The characters are honest about their dishonesty. Human empathy is terribly flawed because humans themselves are flawed. Most of us really only care about ourselves and the people we care about (duh), we're only interested in something else when it concerns or will concern us or if it's interesting enough to pick our attention. The first reaction of Public Safety devil hunters Yuutarou and Michiko when they learned that there was a shooting in Makima's train was "ughhh so we're waiting for naught?". This is sad but when there's an inconvenience we mainly only care about how it'll affect us rather than thinking about the root problem and everyone it affects. How the selfishness of each character is used is very interesting. One of the main point of episode 6 was to create a cohesion between the group. If humans can form bonds in adversity as well as create groups based on values they also simply team up by interest. In a life or death situation, the selfishness of the characters got highlighted. Kobeni wanted to save her life at any cost, Aki wanted to save Denji because he knew he needed him to kill the Gun Devil, Himeno wanted to protect Aki, Denji didn't want to be indembted by Aki and little by little, all their self interests aligned up and concluded into Denji fighting the Eternity Devil. This the moment where they became a team and agreed on the same thing. Human's selsfhiness isn't just a bad thing it, can evolve into something good and in real life, combining multiple self interests is the key to clear a situation. The characters aren't just good to be good but they're not total assholes just like in real life. img(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815968088075665418/1057800965962600488/e9820a51087fb67e2bcb1411ae3f4ed41667378750_main.png) Chainsaw Man also deals with love and affection through it's characters relationships. Inconditionnal love and conditionnal love : if Denji and Pochita's relationships represent inconditionnal love then what about Denji's other relationships? He didn't like Power at first but he considered her as an angel when she gave him what he wanted. Even if it was comedic, at this point of the story, his affection for her depended on the advantages of their relationships. Is it the same for everyone else ? From what we know, Makima only cares about Denji because of his potential as a Devil. I'm not saying she feels absolutely nothing for the individual but the basis or their relationship is Denji obeying to her. If this clause isn't repspected then their relationship would end. The world of Chainsaw Man is a world of contracts and conveniences where everything has a price and when you think about it, both the devils and the state only care about Denji's heart and not him. The opening also raises the question "is love submission" to depict Denji and Makima's relationship. Because of mere lust Denji sacrifices something supposedly pure, his first kiss. The vomit is his punition for doing that, sacrificing "love" for straight up lust always leaves a disgusting aftertaste and that's a representation of how the kiss tasted. Like puke. With it's characters, Chainsaw Man explores human nature and relationships. img(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815968088075665418/1057801529605767188/screen-shot-2022-10-18-at-2.png) The dynamic between Aki and Denji really is well done and it conveys a lot of themes and messages. From an outisde perspective, it sounds great how Aki's dream is to kill a devil in honor of his family and to protect humanity but we discover more about it, this dream is just based on negative feelings such as frustration and selfish reasons such as revenge . The word dream is just a convenient title and cover to satisfy one's desire. It's just like Denji's dream, he was ready to do anything to touch some boobs and the funny thing is that he actually did great good for humanity just to touch some. From an outside perspective he could be seen as a savior, the hunter of those disgusting monsters that threatens humanity when really he only did it for disgusting reasons. How is Aki"s dream better than Denji's when they both use the concept of dream to satisfy their negative feelings and lust ? Can we really compare dreams? This theme is also tackled in the Denji vs the Leech Devil scene. In shounen, fights between the protagonist and antagonist are always ideological. By exemple, when Luffy beats Crocodile, it means that Luffy's world perspective and dream are superior to Crocodile's, they fight with fists for their ideals and the better one wins. As he says it himself, if Denji wins against the Leeche Devil, it will mean that the dream of the Devil was inferior to the mere dream of touching boobs. Yet another way to dismiss the idea of a dream ranking and that someone is better than someone else because of a dream. The separate developpement of Aki and Denji complement each other. Denji lives for nothing in particular while Aki has a reason to live, a reason greater than himself. The fact that Denji never had anything makes him enjoy all the little things in life. I wouldn't say that Denji isn't affraid of dying but since he always live his life to the fullest he can die with no regrets. Aki can't totally enjoy life because he's sacrificing it for the sake of his goal. He refuses happiness and sacrifices his life for vengeance, meaning his vengeance is more important than his life, what was the point of his life if he died without accomplishing it then? You would think Denji has a better way of living but it depends on the perspective. At least Hayakawa has something to live for, he's not like Denji who just lives detached from everyone and everything and merely floats around life without having an actual purpose. Still, in episode 10 Denji's mindset seems better. In a situation where he fears he can't enjoy life anymore (Kishibe said he'll train them everyday) Denji choses to try to find a solution that will allow him to elevate himself from his situation into a better one that fits him. In the same episode Aki just resigns himself into getting in an even worse situation. He can't go back, he has nothing else to live for it's the only way he can keep on living. He decides his revenge is more important than his own life so he metaphorically and litteraly sells his life to the Devil of Future. Fun thing is that if he keeps on making contracts like that, more and more parts of him will become those of devils as he tries to kill his individuality to become a robot only serving his revenge. If he keeps on going he'll be nothing more than his revenge. Do you see the "becoming the monster you're fighting" paradox? It's also symbolised by how he purposely walk into the lion's den to meet the Future Devil. img600(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/815968088075665418/1057750535048015932/Screenshot_2022-12-28-21-00-14-921_com.android.chrome.png) Now his eyes see the future so he can only keep on going. In parallel, Denji develops more and more reasons to live with his new relationships. I'm not saying he feels like he has to live for them but he wouldn't really enjoy a life where he's absolutely alone and have no one to talk to wouldn't he? Though, associating with people ultimately hurt him because living with people is necessary but hard. What if "Chainsaw Man" had a meaning ? The saw cuts and the chain enchains people between them meaning that by trying to link himself to people he's just hurting himself ? This would basically be the hedgehog's dilemma. The hedgehog's dilemma is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs seek to move close to one another to share heat during cold weather. They must remain apart, however, as they cannot avoid hurting one another with their sharp spines. Though they all share the intention of a close reciprocal relationship, this may not occur, for reasons they cannot avoid. This would be a beautiful way to explain Denji's life and encounters as I don't think the scene where he wonders why he isn't crying for Himeno, resulting in him thinking he doesnt really care about anyone overall and then go like "anyways, my manga mags" is meant to be taken too litteraly. I think it's more Denji not understanding his feelings as he never had relationships with people. I'd say the fact that he tries to deflect his thoughts as soon as they could possibly hurt him tells more about his psychology than anything else. img(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/815968088075665418/1057792231077073017/chainsaw-man-tatsukifujimoto-mappa-anime-makima-chainsaw-man-hd-wallpaper-preview.png) I have no transition but I really wanted to talk about the most intriguing character of Chainsaw Man. Obviously, I'm talking about Makima. This woman is a mystery. All the enigma around her is absoluetly fascinating and alluring. She's the only one to break the golden rule of Chainsaw Man characters. She has a filter on. We can't know what she's thinking about and we know nothing of her true intentions. She's like a superiror existnece above everyone else in Chainsaw Man. Her aura and charisma are undeniable and the anime accentuate that very well. Her voice is warm, calm and smooth, listening to her is soothing yet the fact that the tone of her voice never changes is uncanny. She always has a cute, reconforting smile but the fact the she always smiles is unsetling and make her seem unreal. With episode 9 everything changes. What was charming and fascinating becomes terryfing and eerie. Who is she and what does she want? In terms of pure characterization I think she's the best character. ___ __CONCLUSION__ As you could probably tell, I think Chainsaw Man is absolutely great, well written and hilarious. It's one of the best adaptation I've seen and it looks so goddamn great. It's one of these shows that seems stupid and non sensical that are actually ingenious and incredible. It's unpredictable and unique. _I'll probably go back to this review and add things since I haven't talked about everything I wanted to._ I'm very hyped for next season !
_This review was neutered, go check out my manga review for my full expanded/uncensored opinion._ __INRODUCTION__ ‘Chainsaw Man’ is currently the most hyped manga and anime I have seen. With this hype, Chainsaw Man carries a certain weight or gravitas to it, where your expectations going into it expect a certain level of quality to be on display. Much to my disappointment, it did not even scratch the surface of my expectations. __DENJI__ img220(https://i.imgur.com/zuH9Wbc.png) ‘Denji’ is a different protagonist from what we see in other shounen… This is not an invalid point, but in of itself doesn’t make Denji a good character. We first see him at the bottom of the barrel of society, striving for the bare necessity of normalcy, but being kicked down every step of the way. This is interesting and a lot could have been done with this concept, but it is almost thrown out immediately - I’m surprised I’ve seen no one else comment on this. Within the first few chapters and first episode of Chainsaw Man he becomes the ‘chainsaw man’, and with this he has a power that is beyond most people in the series already. Straight after this we meet ‘Makima’, who forces him to enlist within a group of demon killers, and if he refuses he will be killed. A house and food is provided to him, and now he has reached normalcy from his perspective, having the bare minimum of what he wanted. As this happens we also remove the first threat to Denji’s life, being the crime lord he previously worked for. All of this immediate progress creates a clean slate for Denji to build upon, but also negates a lot of what made him interesting to begin with. So what becomes his motivation once he has seemingly achieved everything he wanted? Boobs… Or more specifically, sexual interaction with females. Most of the first half we see him striving towards this goal, only to realize none of his achievements sexually really meant anything, as he does it with people he has no deeper connection to, and so Denji turns to Makima. __ DEPTH/WEIGHT__ Demons have no motivation as they are intrinsically evil and selfish, making a lot of what happens in the show regarding demons feel meaningless. Denji has little care for people dying as we peer into his corrupted morality, making a lot of the deaths in the series feel meaningless, as they hold no weight… This is also shown visually as characters are killed off instantly, and to be fair, realistically. The problem for me is that as I further delve into the series I am not being offered anything that makes me care about what's going on; what am I rooting for? What characters do I care about? What is this story offering me that I haven’t seen before? __CONCLUSION/RANT__ img220(https://i.imgur.com/CuWWjRL.png) What’s driving me crazy is seeing people like ‘Joey, The Anime Man’, who has said various opinions regarding ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ and ‘Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’, pertaining to them being “okay” and “overhyped”, and yet Chainsaw Man is for some reason treated differently… It’s not just him, it’s most people who are seemingly in love with this series, holding it up to some unholy unmeasurable standard, and yet when I watch it, I don’t think it’s that far off what ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ was, or any other hyped shounen that’s come out in recent times… That’s not to say that makes it bad, but it definitely doesn’t make it amazing, and so “above average” really fits the bill for me here. While the animation, art, music, and sound is good, I can’t help but feel like without these things the show wouldn’t have received anywhere near the hype it has… Without this level of hype I think I might have been able to sit down and just appreciate what we have, but this whole experience has left a rather sour taste in my mouth, similar to the taste I get when buying an overhyped triple-A game that happens to be generic or broken. I’m interested to see what the future holds for this series, as we’ve seen shows like ‘Attack on Titan’ transcend their original plans, but in its current state Chainsaw Man isn’t leaving any impressions.
# ~~~Spoilers ahead, beware.~~~ ~~~img(https://media.tenor.com/3DLDSBPczisAAAAd/chainsaw-man-denji.gif)~~~ # ~~~__"So how come I haven't gotten to cop a single damn feel yet?!"__~~~ I think it's safe to say that _Chainsaw Man_ is the biggest anime of the year. Whether you welcomed it with open arms or loathed the hype surrounding it, studio MAPPA's adaptation has certainly left it's mark on the anime community since it began airing earlier this fall. The manga had been steadily gaining ground since it's debut in December of 2018, and exploded in popularity come 2020. It almost feels like a fluke, in a way. Sure, it's mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto had grown rather infamous thanks to his first manga _Fire Punch_, so his follow up gaining traction like this was expected. But _Chainsaw Man_ (which I will abbreviate as CSM for the sake of brevity) has hit the ground running, arguably becoming the most talked about anime of 2022. But again, why is it a fluke? ~~~__Well, _Chainsaw Man_ kind of sucks.__~~~ Best to get that out of the way now. There are several aspects of this anime, mostly on a narrative level, that I think completely shit-the-bed. This isn't to say CSM is a bad show, in fact I think it was one of the most entertaining I've watched this year, but the more I thought about the show past the surface level, the more it began to fall apart. Before I delve deeper into my gripes, I want to start with the parts I liked. And trust me, there is plenty to like. #~~~__Animation__~~~ ~~~img(https://www.icegif.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/icegif-782.gif)~~~ I haven't really watched studio MAPPA's other works, but they're a name I've definitely been aware of. They have a pretty great resume, more recent projects of note being their adaptation of _Jujutsu Kaisen_ and taking the reigns from Wit Studio on _Attack On Titan: The Final Season_. But in a vacuum, how does CSM add up in the animation department? All in all, I think it nails it. Although it is not easy to find a definitive budget online when it comes to anime, I am certain that CSM definitely had a lot of money (and hopefully time) put into it. It can be seen most plainly in it's fight scenes, which are some of the most high octane I've seen this year. Outside of a few times where I think the fights can be a bit over-stimulating, they were pretty coherent and fun to watch. Outside of that, the show generally looks pretty great. Well framed shots, beautifully detailed backgrounds, and generally expressive animation on top of that. I also can't forget to mention the fact that the show has 12 unique EDs for each episode, which only reinforces CSM's try-hard image. MAPPA is pouring everything into this, including some aspects that have been a bit controversial. CSM, much like their work on _Attack on Titan_, uses CGI animation throughout it's episodes. I know many in the community tend to clutch their pearls at the mention of CGI, only further evident in many of the weekly-episode discussion threads on this website. CGI is a touchy subject for a lot of people, and unfortunately CSM started off on a bit of a bad foot. Whether it be the lighting of the scene, or other reasons outside of my assumptions, the CGI in episode one looks pretty jarring on first viewing. I personally think the CGI generally improved later in the rest of the season, but this first look at it definitely left a bad taste in many viewers' mouths. I personally think the use CGI understandable, as to fully animate a character with three chainsaws attached to them sounds a bit tedious and overly time consuming. Combine this on top of MAPPA being infamous for taking on many projects at once, and I think CGI was an inevitability. Does it look good at points? Yes, particularly the fight with the Bat Demon and both fights with Katana Man looked rather good. But it's far from perfect, moments like the first episode and the Curse Demon looking particularly rough, which again is to be expected. I am in the camp that generally supports CGI, and I'm happy that MAPPA is showing that it can look good and be an effective tool when handled correctly. In summary, CSM's animation succeeds on almost all fronts. It's one of the largest reasons to why I said this anime was so enjoyable despite it's glaring flaws. To put it simply, it just looks great. The second reason this show succeeds (and why I think it garnered so much love online) is-- #~~~__Characters__~~~ ~~~img(https://media.tenor.com/Vo44NSr2xn8AAAAd/chainsaw-man-anime.gif)~~~ _Chainsaw Man_ has a pretty large and generally likable cast of characters, but I'm only going to do a deeper dive into three of them. Starting off with the protagonist, Denji. ~~~img(https://64.media.tumblr.com/7135ec624eb6d08fafdec45d7f233b06/89494cae8d1ff0a3-fe/s540x810/66579aec15f9a2c4ff7dabd2508267b03b306838.gif)~~~ Growing up in immense poverty with massive debts to the yakuza, Denji was a devil hunter aided by the Chainsaw Devil, Pochita. Unfortunately, Denji gets killed by a horde of zombies after the yakuza make a deal with the Zombie Devil, but not all is lost. Pochita was Denji's only friend, and he told Pochita that if he were to die, he'd want him to take his body so that he could live a normal life. And that's exactly what Pochita does, fusing with Denji and becoming the titular character of Chainsaw Man. From this point, though, Denji's character becomes much more interesting. He's discovered and taken in by Makima, and recruited to the Bureau of Public Safety. With this he gets a well paying job, an apartment thanks to his (forced) roommate and co-worker Aki Hayakawa, and a woman to obsess over in the form of his boss Ms. Makima. So, faced with all of this, Denji is pretty much satisfied with his life. After growing up in such deep poverty, the fact that he can enjoy the life of a working person who can eat and bathe every day is all he could ask for. To put it bluntly, Denji's main goal is to get laid. He is deeply horny, especially at the start of the series. I think in that way, Denji is honestly pretty relatable. Anyone who's been a young man who has gone through puberty can feel for Denji in his quest to cop a feel. He is incredibly simple, almost to the point of a narrative fault. A character with as small of a goal as this really shouldn't work in concept, yet it somehow does in execution. I think a lot of it is because Denji is decently charming. He's crass, but empathetic. He quickly picks up on his place as an outsider when he learns that he is a Fiend (a devil-human hybrid,) and I think the context of going from such deep poverty to relative comfort allows for him to have such a simple goal in a logical sense. Denji also treats this goal as important, approaching it with such energy and treating it with so much emotional weight that it's almost hard not to root for the guy. But ultimately, I think Denji is just a well written character. This can be seen most easily in his interactions with another character, the Blood Fiend named Power. ~~~img(https://media.tenor.com/Sv8LQZAoQmgAAAAC/chainsaw-man-csm.gif)~~~ Power, much like Denji in certain regards, can be pretty unlikable. She is incredibly self serious and self-centered, talking in a dialect reminiscent of Shakespeare, yet is almost the perfect match character-wise for Denji. Albeit a description many would roll their eyes at, I have seen people online say that Denji and Power share the same brain cell. They are both oblivious, naive, but incredibly passionate. Albeit a bit blurry at first, by the end of the season they remind me of two siblings. I understand the eyebrows being raised at this comment, especially considering the interaction the two have after Denji saves Power's cat, but I think it's the best way I can describe their platonic relationship by the season's end. They bounce naturally off eachother, as they are both incredibly chaotic in their own unique ways. After training together, the two of them are pretty much on the same wave length. The screentime they shared together was definitely one of the biggest highlights. ~~~img440(https://64.media.tumblr.com/552b30631cb1f7bb1cd6b8ebbaecc799/c9a6beee176312eb-23/s540x810/2ca8e477f4bad6f031a9a51a3f42251e7deb1d55.gif)~~~ To round out what I consider the main trio of CSM is the aforementioned Aki Hayakawa. ~~~img(https://64.media.tumblr.com/74e62680ff7eb1ddf33a268d44da95d7/5782faac3ddf75ec-93/s540x810/605a8af839ee013ffe90df946880c7017b81b155.gif)~~~ Aki has been working at Public Safety for awhile now, getting the job because of his quest for revenge against the series' apparent over-arching villain in the form of the Gun Devil. Aki's in a very strange position, because in a narrative sense, I would consider him the dual-protagonist of the entire show. He is the straight man when it comes to the larger cast. He is deadly serious, despite the absurdities that happen around him. Interestingly, to add a unique spin on his revenge angle, the Gun Devil is framed as so humongous of a threat that it's utterly ridiculous for Aki to even humor the idea of killing it. Because of this, he is often labeled naive or stupid by other characters, which I think compliments his pairing with Denji and Power. But to circle back on that dual protagonist comment, I say that because one of the larger (and generally one of the only) arcs in this show is Aki learning to accept Denji and coming to terms with his mentor Himeno's death. Aki is the one that changes the most in this show, and I'm not sure if that's really a good thing. This leads into a larger general issue with the show; Denji is a very static character, and I feel like the show does very little with that. To define it for those who don't know, a static character is a narrative term for a character who changes very little throughout the story. Denji is a good example, as he is pretty stalwart in his goals and doesn't change much in his personality. Aki, on the other hand, is very dynamic. He struggled with a lot of grief over Himeno's passing, and finds closure by the season's finale. In a way, one could think this means Denji isn't an interesting character at all. But Denji is interesting because of his how his ideals reflect onto the other characters. One of the few through-lines I have found for this show is embracing simplicity, Denji being the thesis and Aki being the anthesis of this idea. The ending, where Aki and Denji both take turns hitting the Katana Devil in the nuts, is not only cathartic and humorous, but also imparts this feeling that Aki is learning to lower his defenses around Denji and indulge in these more immature and base desires. But this isn't clear, as is the case for many things in this show, which leads me to my next point-- #~~~__Narrative Issues: Pacing, Plotflow, Character Deaths, and Himeno__~~~ ~~~img(https://64.media.tumblr.com/021ad55334801c67962d078536f2ae36/00aecb7367277d8c-1a/s540x810/f71c5b36773bf08dd6cf1eac4b143191899d0bbe.gif)~~~ _Chainsaw Man_ is a very lean show, narrative wise. The pacing is brisk, almost break-neck fast at some points. I remember watching the episodes week-to-week with my friends, and having this feeling of so much yet so little happening each episode. I didn't mind it at first, especially because the spectacle of the animation was able to fill in the gaps that began to show in the narrative, but now that it's finished I can't help but feel a bit frustrated. I don't think that the show felt rushed at all, but I do feel like there needed to be more stuff in between plot points. The main trio go on one mission with Special Division 4. This adds characters Kobeni Higashiyama, Hirokazu Arai, and the group's eldest member Himeno to the cast. I like the first two characters, the two being so anxious and paranoid that it made them fun to watch. Himeno is someone I will elaborate on later, as I feel like she's a good example for how this show fails in many regards. But again, we get one mission with these guys. Then a short dinner, a short one-on-one with Himeno, and then half of them die. The episodes where this big attack on Public Safety happens feels a bit strange in retrospect, and apparently exists as a dangerous precedent of character death that the manga will return to constantly. And I think this is where a lot of my frustration comes from; why? Why do we get so little time to get close to these characters? CSM is honestly a show I think would have benefited from some filler. Outside of the main trio and Makima, CSM gives very little space for it's side characters to breathe and grow. So when you decide to kill so many of them off seemingly out of nowhere (except for Himeno, but again we'll get back to her,) it makes me question why put the effort into including these characters at all? Character deaths are very tricky to use effectively, and CSM to me seems to use it only for shock value. Compounding with the pacing issues, I also feel like the show struggles to build up a greater narrative. Sure, we get the information about the Gun Devil, but other than a very weak through-line of the Katana Devil being the son of the head Yakuza that Denji killed in episode one, it feels like the plot just kind of briskly moves from one enemy to the other. Especially considering that the Katana Devil and his goons don't show up until about half way through the season. The only over arching aspects I think the show does well is Aki's arc and the general building of mystery and fear surrounding Makima. Just to comment on that last part, I _love_ Makima. She is so delightfully cold and intimidating, and I think the show does a great job at building unease slowly from her introduction and to the finale. Finally, let's talk about Himeno. Mind you, I don't hate Himeno completely. Is it creepy she wanted to screw a 16 year old? Definitely. But I think her core character is pretty interesting. After losing her first partner, she becomes rather smitten with Aki when they first meet. Whether this is because she's just attracted to minors, or because of her deep seated fear of losing another partner, she grows really close with him. Fortunately for her, the show gives her a decent amount of screentime to better flesh out her character. This culminates in a promise between her and Denji; She'll help Denji get with Makima, and he'll help her get with Aki. This is when the two become friends. Now, you may ask, where does this lead? ~~~Absolutely fucking nowhere.~~~ Himeno dies soon after, and Denji isn't effected much by her death. He questions why he isn't sad, answers it himself, and sorts it away all in the span of a short monologue. And this kind of leads me to _Chainsaw Man's_ biggest issue in my eyes; What's the point? Where are these arcs going? After I finish the season, what do I walk away with other than general entertainment that a shonen typically brings? I have been obsessing over these questions, and honestly I've got nothing. I couldn't even tell you the general themes of this show, and that is honestly kind of baffling. Another great example of this is Himeno's final message to Aki: ~~~img(https://wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/chainsaw-man-cigarette.jpg)~~~ The way this is framed by the show, and the general symbolism that cigarettes represent for Aki and Himeno, are both hints to something greater in this cigarette. So I thought about it; perhaps it represents how Aki's addiction to smoking is Himeno's revenge, thus meaning she'll always be present in Aki's life even after her death? After doing some research online, many news outlets believe it is simply a message from Himeno reminding Aki how to kill the Ghost Devil. The general consensus, over all, is that no one knows. And that is a bit mind boggling to me. Things like this cigarette, Himeno and Denji's empty promise, and even Aki choosing to partake in violent revenge against the Katana Devil don't feel intentionally vague, they feel like narrative dead ends. Is this because the show was paced too fast? Or was it that it covered too little in 12 episodes? As an anime viewer, I'm left feeling unsatisfied in many ways. Yet with all that said, _Chainsaw Man_ is incredibly fun to watch. Its animation is some of the best from this year, it's characters are decently charming, and it's fights are exhilarating and creative. It's a spectacle, and a great one at that. But when you go past the fluff on the surface, there is very little substance to find underneath. CSM's characters and concepts feel trapped in a plot that is honestly pretty amateurish in lots of ways, and that is incredibly infuriating to me. I know _why_ this manga and anime have taken off; it's because of the characters. People love them, you see tons of fan art and gifs all over social media. So why do they have to be trapped in a story that I feel like does zero favors into helping them truly shine? Does the show need some filler, more breathing room to allow the viewer to get attached to the characters if they're going to be so quickly taken away from them? Perhaps a different kind of narrative could have worked, maybe a monster of the week. The premise lends itself to that kind of concept decently well. But overall, the narrative structurally is deeply flawed, and the whole show suffers for it. But I think it only suffers for it if you choose to think about it. I've got plenty of friends who don't engage with media as deeply as I do, and they love this show. And honestly I'm jealous of them. There is a lot to like in _Chainsaw Man_, and I think my tolerance and ability to excuse it's shortcomings is simply not as strong as others'. As it stands, though, CSM appears to be mostly spectacle with very little to say once the 12th ED rolls.
***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*** I don't know what to think of this somewhat pathetic return to the 90s to fill up a critical lack of inspiration. To make this horribly vulgar decade a model, we must have fallen very low and this is probably the case, which ends up making a turd like this occasionally float up to the surface. We will say that even if it means taking models to compensate for a complete absence of creativity and a visceral lack of imagination, it is perhaps not the worst idea in the world for a TALENTED MASTER OF HIS CRAFTS to turn to the Devilmans and the Parasytes of his childhood (even something more recent like Dorohedoro), imagine that one day, we make rehashes of these damn cutlery people.... HaHaHa... can you see the nightmare from here? What is annoying, above all, is not being able to offer anything original or aesthetically coherent in an action series. The men have ridiculous haircuts and the women are painted in vomit colors with scars on their faces, period, it's terribly embarrassing and it's not the CGI and faux POV shots that will make up for much... The use of CGI use is cheap, and the expressions of the characters are rigid, after seeing the mediocrity of the manga's illustrations, it was perhaps complicated to adapt... So much so that it couldn't prevent this wet firecracker from selling fewer DVDs in Japan that the new Bleach series and an umpteenth sports anime. The Americanized, comics style this series verges towards also obviously has its fair share of ridicule with the super-powered Junkman and the ''demons'' he fights, each seedier than the other, competing in hideousness and childish attributes. And that's when you realize that everything is ruined, that the LITTLE CHAMP :) at recess has no longer just become the privileged or even unique spectator of all the cultural abomination of the twenty-first century, he draws and produces TV now, I don't really see how it could ever get better ... Of course, this is not the case, a story of rare crudeness, a complete absence of stakes, a hero beyond dullness, a flagrant inability to tell a story, and the whole thing proves above all to be a pretext for an accumulation of disgusting creatures straight out of a diseased brain. And this accumulation of clumsy themes... a new stupid thing is introduced with each episode, it's exhausting... No doubt EVERYONE will identify with the mollusk of a protagonist, who starts off being an orphan monops with testicular cancer with more misfortunes than a POC in an indie film. Herbivore men everywhere will, no doubt, be inspired by his quest to touch boobs, which probably will help their self-confidence :) ~!He also pisses us off by giving his 20-something evil overlord hard trick worker real superpowers with no limitations, absolutely at odds with everything else, and so, fundamentally useless. The man-bun guy with a broom up his ass we see in every Shonen and the psychopathic Zero Two ripoff are both as grotesquely useless.!~ ~!Afterward, it goes quickly haywire but in acceleration, with a little touch of creepiness, zoophile allusions the author seems to be fond of, and other joyous fuckery of bad caliber ... Let's cast a modest veil over the sadly famous episode of the vomit kiss no doubt inspired by Lucifer Valentine and rush on the big piece: the Katana Man arc, probably the ugliest and most ridiculous fight that I have seen so far... No doubt that it will delight REAL ANIME FANS, but this is animation, the nonsense, it's acceptable in short bursts, not 3 episodes with all sorts of nonsense and gratuitous gore. New ridiculous devils come out of nowhere to fight zombies out of nowhere, a devil let itself be killed by the man-bun asshole and hands him the one-eyed 2 DARK 4 U WAIFU cigarette, while Denji defeats the dull knife man with a lame gag stolen from Monty Python and kicks to the nads. Just like a child playing with his action figures, spilling ketchup everywhere.!~ This revolting proliferation will of course be described everywhere as prodigious genius or even as thunderous imagination, and so much the worse if the gratuitousness of these monstrosities is useless, so much the worse, also, if the nonsense much more often demonstrates the wretched poverty of the imagination than its deployment and that the absence of the slightest overall rigor here seems to be the golden rule. I could have felt more Holidays warmth in my heart to give it a 3, I could have also given it a 3 to get it higher than things of bad memory like «Guilty Crown» and «Black Clover». I could have given it three for the faint premise this anime had of being a sympathetic Shonen with a rare road trip-like premise. But I finally won't... I'll give it the just treatment of the recycling bin. Just like the one given to the two or three MAPPA animators who had to spend Valentine's Day keeping Makima's asscrack tight per butt shot.
Chainsaw Man's (anime) issues are largely an inevitability of its blockbuster status. Its edge is a bit dull, which is both really weird (deviating from shounen jump norm was a big part of its immediate appeal as a comic) and not weird at all (of course it would happen, it's _how this works_). ~~~img820(https://i.imgur.com/QEmoXyN.png)~~~ The driving force behind the adaptation is, following [Fujimoto's interests](https://letterboxd.com/syukoshiomy/list/tatsuki-fujimotos-canon/detail/), to capture "film" as something more ambitious and three-dimensional than what anime tends to offer, but it mistakes "film" for a specific unifying trait rather than the diverse well of inspiration it really is. Film, it turns out, means _prestige_ film. Serious film. Washed-out, moody film. Blue and light orange. Rack focus. It's a very coherent aesthetic, [well executed](https://www.sakugabooru.com/post?tags=chainsaw_man+) despite the usual production issues and never settling for 1:1 recreation; difficult to actively dislike, but lacking tonal flexibility. The manga takes advantage of its chapter-to-chapter structure to widen its range, while the lack of music, SFX and color helps its different elements cohere in a dry ambiguity that allows the reader to dwell on their own approach to the emotion of each moment. It's "real" because it's doesn't drown anything out; always darkly funny and hilariously sad, channeling film in its sense of time and space, its essence. It's a fundamental design choice, while the anime treats tone as color tint, a difference that becomes especially apparent [before and after every episode](https://youtu.be/_flKbsZoAHg). Most of the OP/ED sequences approach the material with the level of creativity and confidence required to _really_ re-imagine Chainsaw Man as film. They get to the core of characters and spaces not just through color or Cinematic™ shot composition, but also line, texture, material and every other building block of animation. They also represent the [B-movies](https://cdn.animenewsnetwork.com/thumbnails/fit600x1000/cms/interest.2/190724/sadako-vs-kayako-tv-spot.png.jpg) the series itself refuses to acknowledge despite their relevance to Fujimoto's vision. I can only dream of what the anime would look like if all that style was weaved into its fabric instead of attached to its limbs as a testament to the sheer size of the IP. webm(https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/4aa5bba059a282492e461ef6afd251ca.mp4) What we have now is a very solid product that the team has every right to be proud of. It has its own strengths: [a quiet melancholy that suffocates the world and everyone in it](https://i.imgur.com/P4hO3gj.png), people fighting it in [fleeting shows of humanity](https://i.imgur.com/WjSE8Ng.png), an eye for [fast, brutal violence](https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/64d9baf9e8e5d4b807aeaf880df7f03f.mp4) and a lot of [individually incredible images and sequences](https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/2f3406c17eee6944f87b1380e070665d.mp4). When the tone and content match and [the cinematic approach clicks](https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/0608e2b32b106bf4fcd092fc8a22e4f0.mp4), [it's beautiful](https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/fa33da1112635d1b4dad7875868b71e2.mp4). It's good enough to get people to care about the manga and, honestly, that's enough for me to be happy, but still, I can't help looking back on the EDs and [fan](https://twitter.com/teiyoshiki/status/1350721323102715905?s=20) [works](https://youtu.be/0oXc3Poyph8) and wishing that unhinged, freeform enthusiasm for a medium could really go somewhere. (It did go somewhere. It's Bocchi. It's Bocchi the Rock.) ________________ _Thanks for reading! You can comment on this review [here](https://anilist.co/activity/498719951). It's not a very comprehensive look, but I think a "big" anime like this one speaks for itself when it comes to technical prowess. I should mention, if only here, that there couldn't have been enough time to make the series as the varied, experimental thing I wanted. It's easier to create individual sequences in different teams than to coordinate a FLCL-type affair, especially in like two years. The team had an assignment and they delivered, it's just that circumstances called for a disappointing approach._
~~~img220(https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/chainsaw-man-anime-750x536.jpg)~~~ So, we finally received the first Cour of Chainsaw man, one of the most hyped manga is now animated. __~~~~~~~~~Synopsis~~~__ If you are interested in a dark, twisted, action packed gory anime series look no further. Chainsaw man is pretty much a showing of Denji our MC life. Growing up as an orphan Denji is forced to do whatever is needed to pay off a debt that was involuntarily given to him from his late father. After a bad encounter with a devil, Denji is now turned into a devil himself as Chainsaw Man. After being turned into a devil he now is recruited by the mysterious Makima to work with the Public Safety to hunt devils. When offered food, a place to stay, nice showers and the chance of getting with Makima how he can say no. ~~~img220(https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/chainsaw-man-nomikai-party.jpg?q=50&fit=contain&w=1140&h=&dpr=1.5)~~~ __~~~Characters~~~ __ So let us start with the characters and sheesh do this anime has a bunch of characters, but first let’s focus on the main characters which there are about four. I will start with my favorite Power; the best part of the anime is not just the action it is the comedy as well. With Power a fiend teaming up with Denji, you are almost going to laugh at a scene every time within this anime. Not to mention both living with Aki, it is hilarious. Now with Aki he’s Denji’s first partner, the more serious character of this anime. Aki immediately has a fight with Denji thinking he is not ready to be a Public Safety Devil Hunter. While the anime continues, he starts having more faith in Denji and even realizing that not all Devils are necessarily evil. The very next character is Makima, she has a very mysterious vibe to her. Not only mysterious but extremely dangerous as well after witnessing the gun devil arc. Everything is really calculated with Makima, which is a clear sign of her being the main antagonist in the story. Now regarding Denji our MC, I find it amazing how he still has a good heart within this anime. I get he is a basic person who just wants tasty food, a nice bed, and a hot shower but the number of times he is backstabbed in this anime is astounding. Maybe being immortal comes with the ability to easily forgive? There are other characters which we can get into but that also leads to devils and fiends and more characters which will be talked more about next season. ~~~__Animation and Music__~~~ To be completely honest the art style in the manga just does not do it for me. Idk I just do not like it even now reading on the latest chapter so when I learned that Studio Mappa is animating the series I was happy. They have done amazing work not only with the devils and character designs but even with some scenes with just a great backdrop. The story is a dark genre anime so you are typically not supposed to see a bunch of color you would see in a slice of life anime. Most scenes that are in a room have minimum light. I appreciate this the most Mappa using darker shades of color to keep with the tone of the anime. Now actions scenes are just incredible, this is the cream of the crop of the anime and Mappa exceled with providing us top tier action scenes. Just watch the Kobeni action scene! youtube(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2Q-yuMx80) Now musically I love the opening of the anime, I do not think they could have done the intro any better, it was perfect. Now with the ending there are 12 different ending songs which is different. Of the 12 songs it is pretty much a hit or miss for me I like about 6 out of the 12 but the 12th ending is my favorite. __~~~Summary~~~__ To conclude, this is one of the few anime where I have read the manga first and I will say the adaptation is spot on. The anime is great action packed and gory and even funny however I must say it did not leave me wanting more, due to me knowing what was going to happen next based on reading the manga. There is a point in time where in a sense you do not know what the actual plot of the story is, you are just watching the everyday life of Chainsaw Man. After speaking of the cons this is still a great introduction to the series and is carried by the cast and the non-ending possibilities with devils and characters with devil contracts. (Side note) can we get a Pochita side story, or something to show some love to my dawg. I recommend this anime with a - __You should watch.__ img220(https://beebom.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Cute-Weakened-form-of-Pochita.jpg?quality=75&strip=all) __For those who don’t know scores of 80+ get a “you should watch recommendation"__
This review is spoiler free. For those joining for the first time, hello I go by myvelouria and I love Weekly Shonen Jump. I’ve spent many years now captivated by the stories they’ve helped put out into the world. And I always told myself I never wanted to be “one of those people”. The ones who are deluded by the idea things were better years ago and automatically look down their nose at anything new Jump puts forward. I would like to imagine that I’ve succeeded in avoiding that mentality. I enjoyed “Kimetsu no Yaiba”, I liked “Jujustu Kaisen” enough to review it, for newer releases I enjoy “Dandadan” and “Witch Watch” in particular. Jump is a magazine that just has a way about itself, the people running it know how to spot and cultivate talent. And I think my best reviews are ones where I discuss either their manga or the anime adaptations of said manga. Enter “Chainsaw Man”, the 2022 adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga that began serialization in 2018. The anime is no doubt one of the most watched and talked about releases of that entire year. And to the manga’s credit it was very popular before the anime began, amassing over 20 million copies sold as of November 2022 and winning the 66th Shogakukan Manga Award and the Harvey Award two years in a row. All eyes are on “Chainsaw Man”, which will be abbreviated to CSM for the duration of this review. So I know I’m in the minority when I say that it isn’t what I consider the best of this era. It’s been a while since I’ve come across a work that gives me so many complex and mixed emotions. There’s many things I dislike, yet what I enjoy the most about it are essential to the story. It hasn’t been since I reviewed “The End of Evangelion” that I felt I was taking a big risk by reviewing an anime. Fujimoto, much like Hideaki Anno, has said he received death threats over the direction he took the manga and due to that I want to emphasize I bear him no ill will. In fact, I continue to read the manga because there is good in it and I want to see him flourish. But I have to admit the road has been rocky so far. img600(https://i.imgur.com/YEEq9c1.png) While it might seem senseless to offer a plot synopsis to one of the biggest titles of the year, for formality’s sake here it is. CSM is the story of Denji, a teenage boy born to extreme poverty in a world inhabited with Devils. The Devils embody many things, be it abstract concepts or physical objects. Depending on the level of fear a Devil has over humanity, the stronger and more imposing it becomes. Humans will sometimes forge bonds with Devils in exchange for use of their power while others work to eliminate them from the world, some even manage to do both. In Denji’s case, following a near death experience with the Zombie Devil, he strikes a deal with his only companion the Chainsaw Devil he named Pochita. In exchange for Pochita’s life Denji is able to live again and transform parts of his body into chainsaws effectively becoming the Chainsaw Man. This gets the attention of Makima from the Public Safety Devil Hunters. Her arrangement with him is simple, he gets to finally live a life where he’s taken care of in exchange for working for her. Where this takes Denji you’ll have to keep watching to see. img600(https://i.imgur.com/Z9KdO8k.png) Before I address my issues with CSM I do want to highlight two things I enjoy and that would be Denji and Power the Blood Fiend. Through all of my problems with Fujimoto’s writing and art I do think he hit on something good in Denji. Something important about his character that I feel is lacking in several modern Jump protagonists, even though I like them, is that he’s amoral. You look at characters like Izuku or Tanjirou and they’re serviceable characters, but they’re too wholesome. The best characters from Jump have always been flawed as people, but we enjoy them because their positive traits make up for that. Denji is someone who was given a raw deal in life and grew up incapable of having his most basic needs met. This is something that ultimately informs his entire character and it’s difficult to hate him even in his most selfish and dimwitted moments because the audience recognizes what fostered it. Denji isn’t an inherently bad person, he’s someone who was deprived and had to prioritize survival above all else. Pochita was his only beacon of light in a world of darkness that was relentless in its cruelty towards him from the very beginning. Now that he has reached a point where he has lost Pochita, but gained more stability, he is free to pursue things that were previously unavailable to him. More specifically, women. Some people want to brand him another pervert character in anime, except that feels like selling Denji short. Again, we know the cause of his behavior and he is far from a character that exists to play out straight male fantasies. Every sexual encounter he attempts at having results in some form of dissatisfaction for him. What Denji really seeks is companionship, but he's been so limited in his understanding of people that he only recognizes these desires at their most base level. Part of his growth is realizing this fact and being able to build better connections with those around him. It plays into Jump’s fondness for stories built around friendship and does so with success. I would make the case that he’s one of the best Jump protagonists in recent years, sitting comfortably behind Momo Ayase from “Dandadan” as my favorite from this modern era. Fujimoto still has to deliver on certain promises he's made in the manga’s more recent developments, but I have confidence there’s greatness ahead for Denji. With Power, simply put her character is fun. So many CSM characters are serious and it’s essential that we have somebody that livens it up. She and Denji make a strong duo because they’re the characters with the most passion. And much like Denji I found Power’s flashback to be the right fit for her. The story of her and Meowy is one that hits at just the right moment with her as at that point we were starting to get to know her. First impressions of Power present her impulsiveness and conceited behavior and then she tries to betray Denji kicking off a story that helps display even she has some sense of humanity. Recognizing that she truly cares for this cat and how it helped her develop a sense of compassion, even if she is limited in how she presents or even understands it, revealed she is more than the comic relief. She and Denji have a good level of dimension to them because we recognize their struggles while also seeing them approach life in a way that isn’t chronically sulking about it. Their seiyuu have been really nailing them so far too. I was surprised to see what little experience Kikunosuke Toya has outside of voicing Denji, you wouldn’t know because his performance hits on everything that it needs to. Fairouz Ai as Power was the one I was most excited about going in thanks to her great work as Jolyne Kujo in “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean” and she doesn’t disappoint. In fact, I would say most of the seiyuu perform their roles well. I don’t like all of them, Makima’s voice feels too young for her character, but many of them do right by their respective roles. img600(https://i.imgur.com/mQQsA6m.png) What about the rest of CSM’s cast though? I wish I could say there was more that I enjoyed on the level of Denji and Power. I’m rather surprised that Aki is as popular as he is because I find him to be one of the more cliched characters in the story. He is a stoic young man motivated by revenge that has to monitor Denji and Power via external pressures, effectively being the third in our main trio. I have been wondering why his character fails while characters like Megumi Fushiguro from “Jujustu Kaisen” worked for me, but I think it boils down to the general nature of Fujimoto’s writing. While Gege Akutami’s work is self-aware I find Fujimoto’s to be far too serious for its own good. Put a pin in that because we’ll circle back to it later, but there is something to the rest of the cast that feels hollow because of this reluctance to give the series more levity. Aki could have been a more interesting spin on a familiar archetype if he was allowed more opportunities to show different sides of himself. We do at times get to see his domestic side, which is nice, but it just isn’t enough to make him feel like more than a series of tropes. But that’s only Aki, what about the anime community’s belle du jour Makima? I’ve honestly never found her impressive. People have expressed surprise at the direction her character goes later on, I don’t think it’s shocking at all. And the anime makes it even more obvious, I can’t imagine walking away from this season believing she has pure intentions. An issue I kept running into was that my knowledge of how the manga played out held me back from feeling invested in most of the show, something that I haven’t had a problem with in other adaptations of manga I read. And while I don’t know what the anime could have done to remedy this, I do know the blunt manner in which they framed Makima did little to improve matters. She’s always been a bland character who’s popularity bewilders me outside of the obvious appeal people have towards her design and the sexual undertones of her behavior. Other characters like Himeno or Kobeni were negatively impacted by my preexisting knowledge of the plot, I just struggled to care in all honesty. Himeno is only allowed so much of her own identity away from her relationship with Aki and Kobeni, frankly, is annoying in most of her scenes. I understand why some people are drawn to weak willed characters, but in this example it becomes almost exhausting to keep hearing her wibbling. Earlier this year as I was reading the new manga chapters I developed a perfect phrase to describe my issues with CSM, its edgy to the point of laughable. Fujimoto to his credit does try to offer some comedic relief through characters like Denji, Power, and even Kobeni. His jokes don’t always land, comedy is very subjective like that, but sometimes it is enjoyable to me. Unfortunately, I feel we don’t receive moments like this enough probably because Fujimoto explicitly designed the series to not feel too much like a Jump manga. I have a lot to say about that topic and I’ll start by stating that it hurts CSM in my eyes and almost comes across like it feels embarrassed about where it comes from. I don’t need it to be overly goofy, we don’t have to go into “Dragon Ball” territory, but I would have appreciated it if he embraced the obvious camp elements of his own story some more. He clearly takes inspiration from B-movies, yet he takes so much of his story deadly serious when a major part of the appeal of those films is their ridiculousness. “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” gets it right by playing between absurdity and sincere character drama and I wish that sort of tone was present here. And, unfortunately, the anime fails to make whatever moments of comedy we’re given stick their landing. In CSM characters like Power just say their lines with the assumption the audience thinks it’s funny. No build up, no interesting presentation, the characters just say their dialogue and the scene plays out like any other. It’s so dry. And again, I know comedy is subjective so some will probably still enjoy this, but I found the gags to fall apart either because of inept direction or a desire to preserve its hard edge. Someone will surely point out that CSM’s goals aren’t to be a comedy, this is a tragedy so I shouldn’t expect buoyancy. I could agree with that except it’s clear Fujimoto, and by extension the anime, are trying to offer you comic relief in places so I think the criticism is justified. img600(https://i.imgur.com/Q6U9Flw.png) CSM is an anime that clearly had a lot of effort and ambition behind it, but I feel the general presentation of it works against what it could have been. Going off my last point, it aims so much in the direction of drama that it hurts the moments of humor we’re allowed. And then when it works with the dramatic elements of the manga it feels so heavy handed. A great example comes within Aki’s flashback. It’s one of those scenes where everything feels picturesque and quaint until it’s bludgeoned with tragedy and pain. I didn’t like this in the manga and the anime didn’t help. This is a type of scene that reads as trying too hard, much like a dramatic cut to black at the end of a movie. I would even go so far as to say that it comes across as juvenile in its attempts at jarring the audience. I’m not left feeling particularly moved by all the death and trauma within the series because it is presented so forcefully. The scenes that do feel most impactful wind up being the more subdued moments like Denji pondering if he would feel sad if Aki or Power died. This matters quite a lot in terms of understanding Denji’s character, I greatly prefer it to seeing Fujimoto and the people at MAPPA make a spectacle out of everybody’s pain. Thankfully, there are quieter moments like that all throughout the series and I think they work. But when the moment strikes for CSM to do something on larger scale it does too much. In a way it goes so far that the writing begins to feel callous. I understand he wanted to keep this from feeling too much like a regular Jump manga and I think his idea to execute this was through things like dramatic intensity and violence, but this is Jump we’re talking about. img600(https://i.imgur.com/zxrXz74.png) The current state of Jump tends to give people the impression they are basically the manga equivalent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a comparison I find too aggravating to properly explore in this review. But if you go back into Jump’s history you’ll see that there was a time where explicit violence and cooler protagonists was not just common, but the expectation. “Fist of the North Star” was a defining manga for the magazine where you regularly saw character’s heads explode, cave in, be ripped to shreds, and all in graphic detail. Kenshiro rarely, if ever, smiled. And the story was loaded with almost mythological style drama while being fully aware of itself as a “Mad Max” pastiche. Moving away from that manga there was, of course, “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure”. Hirohiko Araki uses body horror and gore so effectively because it manages to strike on so many emotions, be it repulsion or fascination, while still feeling at home in its world of heroes carrying the burden of justice. And not once, through any character death or mutilation, was I ever left with the impression of “Jojo” as a grim series using cheap gimmicks. There was also “Bastard” which features a bloodthirsty protagonist in a heavy metal inspired fantasy land who wants to make the world his sexual playground. Others like “Space Adventure Cobra” and “City Hunter” weren’t especially violent, but they were fairly sexual and carried an edge to them without sacrificing a sense of fun. The point I am trying to make is that CSM having a lot of violence and some sexual content doesn’t make it groundbreaking for Jump. By the time Fujimoto was born “Fist of the North Star” was finished and "Jojo” just started “Diamond is Unbreakable” which has Angelo savagely biting a dog in the face in its first few chapters. Even CSM’s themes are reminiscent of other Jump stories. Many will say it’s about the importance of human connection and they’re correct. But how is this different from “the power of friendship” that so many anime fans harp on about? I like stories about the importance of relationships, and this is an aspect of CSM’s plot I appreciate considerably and think its woven well through Denji’s character arc. I’d even argue it handles it better than some other famous Jump properties like “Naruto” did, but I won’t pretend it isn’t working off a very classic shonen theme. Now I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying CSM is inferior because “Fist of the North Star” already exists or that it’s bad because it’s built around a common shonen message. What I’m trying to communicate here is that many aspects of CSM do feel at home in the magazine that cultivated it, regardless of what Fujimoto or others might assume. If a major selling point is that it’s “anti-Jump”, then I’m sorry that feels very ignorant. img600(https://i.imgur.com/Q4jKscb.png) Now that I’ve discussed the story, characters, and themes what about the anime’s production? The most obvious talking point would be MAPPA’s animation. It’s certainly impressive and fluid, I wasn’t expecting it to be this seamless. However, because CSM draws so much of its identity from its grit I think the animation style works against that. Characters don’t have a lot of impact or weight in the fight scenes, which is disappointing as someone who adores that sort of thing. It also uses CGI in ways that stand out too much. There’s some first-person shots where the backgrounds look detached from the character models and the Devils have that awkward chug that I mentioned when I reviewed “Lupin III: the First”. But more than that, the animation feels so focused on looking beautiful that it smooths over the designs too much. Fujimoto doesn’t have my favorite aesthetic, but there is an almost scratchy element to it I appreciate. By eliminating that I think the anime loses some of the original art’s appeal. Having the characters be this glossy while pulling the same contorted faces from the manga is just strange. And if there’s one thing I immediately found bothersome it’s the color palette. The manga art has a loud and vibrant sense of color, again perhaps taking inspiration from old horror movies. I wanted the anime to utilize this so badly, but instead we have a color palette akin to what you might see in a slice of life show. If they weren’t going to let Denji’s hair be DayGlo orange then I would have liked a darker, colder palette. One that could evoke a sense of graininess seen in old films, but instead it’s very unremarkable and further smooths out the manga’s edges. It’s ironic that a story trying so desperately to make itself look bold and daring would end up with an anime that still feels this concerned with conventional beauty. And yet, at times like when Himeno is in bed with Denji, it’s putting in so much effort to look alluring that it starts to look unattractive by giving their faces too many details. I’m sorry, but I don’t need to see Himeno play with Denji’s lips like that. I recognize that the people behind the scenes wanted to make this a spectacle that puts MAPPA’s other anime to shame, certainly does well enough to make me forget the abysmal moments in “Yuri on Ice”, but because the visual style clashes against the source material I can’t actually argue it was the best decision. I’ve said in the past that the Jump anime with the best animation was “Yu Yu Hakusho” and believe it or not I stand by that because its designs, colors, and animation all work cohesively with the source material and compliment it. In CSM it’s an edgy story with these Makoto Shinkai style backgrounds, some rotoscoping and CGI, soft lines, and this high school slice of life looking color palette. Because we’re still not done, let’s talk about the music. I find a lot of it to be very generic. The opening in general reminded me of “Jujustu Kaisen”, and I get that MAPPA produced that too, but it doesn’t make sense with CSM. If you want the anime to stand out from the pack, why aren’t you taking more risks with the music? When I read the manga I listened to the Misfits a lot and while I never expected them to use music of that intensity, I was hoping it would take some inspiration from alternative music. Granted, sometimes it does. They change the closing in every episode and a few do use heavier music and more outlandish visuals. These pockets of footage drive home how much of a missed opportunity it was to adapt the material like they did. CSM’s music is overall not memorable and it is another area in which they go against the intentions of the source material. Fujimoto didn’t want to make an overly Jump-like manga, but the anime uses music that doesn’t propel it away from the other action anime of today. It really holds back whatever unique tone the anime aims for. And I can’t recall any of the tracks outside of the opening and some of the closings because they just left no impression on me. img600(https://i.imgur.com/QCEFpiv.png) CSM is a difficult series for me to discuss because I do see where the appeal lies, and there are significant things that succeeded for me. But I know other aspects of it left me indifferent or even disappointed. However, I do recognize how the manga and anime are able to reach others as they are. A lot of anime fans want a harder edged anime that takes itself and its themes seriously. The animation, regardless if I think it suits the story, is impressive. I already praised Denji and Power, as have others. They’re popular for a reason. While the appeal of the rest of the cast is lost on me, I do know a lot of fans feel strongly about them. In a way this feels like a situation where a lot of what didn’t suit my tastes will please another’s. If this is Jump for the people who don’t like Jump then maybe it was never going to catapult to my favorites. Sometimes a work of art just isn’t designed with your preferences in mind, that doesn’t make it bad art. Very rarely do I encounter something that manages to do so many things I dislike, just to turn itself around and make it right in other areas like I do here. Perhaps this will always be my relationship with CSM, there are worse things than that. And I keep returning to the manga every week because I want to see it grow. I want to see where Fujimoto takes his characters and I think he has plenty of good ideas in him. With the anime I will tune in for further seasons because I want to see how they’ll approach the rest of it. I don’t want to seem like I’m backpedaling after some pretty harsh criticism, there is a part of me that likes CSM and wants to see it get better. You won’t see me arguing this is perfection and one of the most important projects in the last five years, nor will it land in my top favorite Jump properties, but there is enough to make me keep coming back. If you haven’t seen the anime yet I encourage it, don’t let me be the only voice on the subject for you. Experience it with your own eyes and find your own conclusions.
[Chainsaw Man](https://anilist.co/anime/127230/Chainsaw-Man/) já vem sido comentado mundialmente desde o final de 2020, já se destacava mesmo a dois anos atrás por sua única história e personagens sinceros, e o fato de ter se sustentado até o 2o semestre de 2022 sem ter perdido o hype e continuar sendo um mangá a ser discutido em meio a tantas obras boas e famosas no caminho é impressionante, ainda mais levando em consideração que naquela época só haviam 97 capítulos disponíveis, completando o primeiro arco da saga. [Tatsuki Fujimoto](https://anilist.co/staff/119917/Tatsuki-Fujimoto) não é um "ninguém", suas obras como [Fire Punch](https://anilist.co/manga/87170/Fire-Punch/), [Sayonara Eri](https://anilist.co/manga/146983/Sayonara-Eri/), [Look Back](https://anilist.co/manga/136807/Look-Back/) e [Yogen no Nayuta](https://s4.anilist.co/file/anilistcdn/media/manga/cover/medium/bx97600-fEIZyenj4c1o.png) são de destaque até mesmo antes do sucesso global de Chainsaw Man no cenário, que curiosamente não é sua obra escrita mais recente, porém, Fujimoto tem fama por suas oneshots e side stories, como a coletânea de [Fujimoto Tatsuki Tanpenshuu](https://s4.anilist.co/file/anilistcdn/media/manga/cover/medium/bx139855-dQnn5sPNrNLk.jpg), sendo [Chainsaw Man](https://anilist.co/anime/127230/Chainsaw-Man/) e [Fire Punch](https://anilist.co/manga/87170/Fire-Punch/) suas únicas obras extensas em formato de mangá (também é do autor a Light Novel [5-bu de Yomeru Kyougaku no Last Monogatari ](https://anilist.co/manga/128576/5bu-de-Yomeru-Kyougaku-no-Last-Monogatari/) A adaptação para anime de [Chainsaw Man](https://anilist.co/anime/127230/Chainsaw-Man/) foi o mais próximo possível do perfeito. O CGI não ficou estranho e "akward" de se assistir, panels icônicos foram mantidos, cenas de luta ganharam um tempo de tela muito bom (coisa que o [Fujimoto](https://anilist.co/staff/119917/Tatsuki-Fujimothttps://anilist.co/staff/119917/Tatsuki-Fujimoto) não costumava explorar tanto) e seguiu um rítmo constante em seus 12 primeiros episódios. Com certeza impressionante vindo de apenas 38 capítulos adaptados. Isso não é nem metade do primeiro arco da historia! Pude experienciar assistir ao anime com o mangá em mãos, e era surreal, as vezes eu parava de olhar para tela e ia acompanhando os diálogos no mangá só com as vozes dos personagens em japonês. ~!img(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1044066117464883201/1061639637220737085/20230108_092049.jpg)!~ Chainsaw man tem uma essência não-característica da [shonen jump](https://www.google.com/search?client=opera-gx&q=shonen+jump&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8), e a [MAPPA](https://anilist.co/studio/569/MAPPA) prometeu entregar o anime fiel ao mangá, com sangue, mortes brutais, sem censuras; e cumpriram com o acordo. Toda a construção dos personagens ficou incrível, não foi como em outras adaptações onde eu sentia que estava conhecendo personagens novos, como se o anime e o mangá fossem coisas muito diferentes, [Himeno](https://anilist.co/character/144596/Himeno), [Denji](https://anilist.co/character/130102/Denji), [Power](https://anilist.co/character/137079/Power), [Makima](https://anilist.co/character/137080/Makima), [Aki](https://anilist.co/character/137081/Aki-Hayakawa), todos pareciam ser meus amigos de longa data, e isso é reconfortante, fui acolhida pela intensidade dos personagens, uma emoção diferente da que o mangá transmite. A única coisa que eu particularmente senti falta do anime, foram as cores vibrantes características das capas dos volumes publicados ([perceba como a capa neon e cheia de informações da um toque caótico interessante a obra](https://anilist.co/manga/105778/Chainsaw-Man/)) e uma trilha sonora mais presente. Provavelmente a intenção era dar a sensação de seriedade quando não haviam soundtracks na cena, mas sempre imaginei as lutas com um hard rock de fundo ou coisa do gênero. Batalhas como a contra a [Hebi](https://anilist.co/character/174275/Hiru-no-Akuma) e a [Sawatari](https://anilist.co/character/174264/Akane-Sawatari), por exemplo, seria interessante uma ost pesada com uma pausa na cena icônica do Aki falando "Kon" para a [Raposa](https://anilist.co/character/290671/Kitsune-no-Akuma) Mas supriu todas as minhas expectativas gerais, um excelente trabalho por parte da [MAPPA](https://anilist.co/studio/569/MAPPA) e um grande passo na indústria e qualidade de anime daqui para frente, com certeza.
__Plot __ Chainsaw man took its time to establish the characters, their background and the world they are living in. In every episode we learn more about Denji, his powers and motives are made crystal clear. We also get to know how Public Safety operates: contracts with devils, the hierarchy and even the great cost of working there. As the show progresses, we see that it is not so much about Denji anymore but the group’s collective effort to defeat the Gun devil, a notorious devil that some Public Safety workers have beef with. The show takes us through the day to day task of defeating devils and Denji’s love life which runs parallel to his job. One of the main conflicts in the show is Denji’s desire to live a simple, normal life and the dangerous nature of the job which is veiled by this desire. The pacing was a little slow at the start, especially the meowy arc. However, it mostly picked up in the last 4 episodes during the surprise attack on Public Safety. It was here when I felt Aki became more of a main character as he had to reflect that his life was at stake and his revenge was really worth fighting for. We can also see a sense of responsibility in Denji and Power as they strive to beat Kishibe to become better devil hunters. One thing that I found annoying was the slow moving scenes and stagnant frames which contributed to the slow pacing of the show and made it boring to watch at times. Nevertheless, a reason for this is to give it a cinematic experience as pointed out in other reviews. At the end of the day, the series ended on an action packed note. There were some random clips as post credits to keep us excited for a potential next season. __Characters__ There were a variety of characters, not in terms of personality, but in terms of species instead. There were humans, half human, half devil, good fiends, bad fiends and nice pet devils like pochita. I particularly liked that they gave some of the enemy devils character and depth. For instance the bat devil and his “girlfriend”, the leech devil. This is what sets Chainsaw Man apart from other anime that involves devils or spirits. The show portrayed Denji as ‘down bad’ as possible and this heavily contrasted the serious nature of killing devils. Makima intrigued me the most as she clearly wears an innocent mask and her true intentions are unknown. Knowing more about her is what I'm looking forward to in the next season. Nearing the end, we get a teaser of her powers and it is seen that she is incredibly powerful. Other characters, particularly the other devil hunters come and go. You might expect them to make the main cast but they eventually get killed off which is a little disappointing. As someone who does not read the manga, I did not see some of these coming. __Animation__ The animation was alright and nothing extraordinary. The fight scene was done well and we were given the gore and blood that the show promised. Facial expressions of fear and terror were captured well, especially for Kobeni. If Billboard had a chart dedicated to anime, then Kick Back would definitely reign at no.1 for a good few weeks. The visuals also managed to encapsulate the chaos in the show as well as Denji’s lust. Chainsaw Man is one of the few shows where I never skip the OP. The EDs were very enjoyable too and each one matched the theme of that respective episode. The visuals for each ED were unique and you can tell a lot of effort was put into it. I even made a rank list for them [here ](https://anilist.co/activity/500247748). These captivating EDs is what makes Chainsaw Man something more than just a typical shounen anime. To be frank, I did not get the hype of the show but I feel it is a good watch. The show has its quirks thanks to the characters and the devils. Yet, it is able to include a serious tone which gives the show depth and meaning.
~~~I have a bit of a habit for writing incredibly messy reviews just to get my feelings on an anime or manga out there, but with _Chainsaw Man's_ identity... I feel like the messier the review, the better to be honest. __Note that spoilers for the anime will be covered in this review.__ _Chainsaw Man_ was an anime that remained on my radar for a while, even earlier than the anime was confirmed. It was a manga that suddenly popped up everywhere, _Shounen Jump’s_ new rising star. I had been curious for a while, but due to not having a solid source for reading manga at the time, I never got around to checking it out. When the anime PV came out, I did get this overwhelming feeling of “I’m just watching from a distance compared to a lot of people”, but I still held my interest. Seeing the staff on the project also made me slightly excited to see what was on offer, especially with Kensuke Ushio (composer: _A Silent Voice, Devilman Crybaby, Ping Pong_) on the music. But my interest didn’t go any deeper, I never did check out the manga, so I ended up just biding my time until the anime came out. _Was it worth the wait?_ Relative to the expectations I ended up going in with, it’s hard to say. Even with the staff really appealing to me, through word of mouth from friends, I did end up going in with pretty low expectations. Though I struggled through the middle of the cour, I liked the setup during the introduction, and everything from episode 8 going forward was also really good. It’s a good piece of work, and though MAPPA’s had… an interesting track record for the last few years, I think they handled this one nicely. I obviously have no position to say if it’s a good adaptation or not, but from an anime-only perspective, I did end up enjoying what _Chainsaw Man’s_ first cour had to offer… Now, let’s step back a little. I don’t want this review to be a simple slog of _“this is what I liked about it, this is what I didn’t”_, that’d be far too boring, especially for something like _Chainsaw Man_. There’s something more specific I want to talk about. Chainsaw Man has a noteworthy aspect: Based on what you usually see before you actually delve into _Chainsaw Man_, not a lot of people could blame you for thinking that it’s another shounen anime/manga with no substance and just people fighting. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, _Chainsaw Man_ strikes a very interesting balance between fast-paced, bombastic action sequences… and intricate moments of normalcy. The action sequences? At some times, they’re very gritty, framed in a way that makes them look “realistic” without straying from the very obvious nonfiction, featuring some more “rough” character art in a way that matches the manga (I, once again, have no position to talk about adaptation quality, but I have seen enough of what the manga looks like to compare the art style), and other times? They’re psychedelic, relying on visuals that verge on insanity. Denji’s long battle with the Eternity Devil in the hotel arc is a great example of this. Both of these types of sequences are backed with punchy, fast-paced soundtracks that kept me on edge and complimented the action on-screen like it was a simple task. The contrast between those and the aforementioned moments of normal can be absolutely staggering, especially when placed right next to each other in an episode’s structure. These moments feature generally “softer” character art, with colours that bleed into the more subtle line art around the characters, rather than just solid black lines to separate them from the backdrops. Another subtle element in the scenes of this format is some small, intricate bits of character animation, such as Aki’s oddly detailed morning routine in episode 4 and Himeno’s drunk stumbling in episode 8. The shots in these sequences are borderline cinematic too, which feels like a play on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s widely-known love for western movies… which would not be beyond Chainsaw Man’s anime, considering the opening consisting of movie references (and that one _Evangelion_ reference). I mentioned the Ushio’s OST previously while going over the presence it has in the action sequences, and there’s a reason for that: The OST does a really groundbreaking job complimenting the contrast between these two types of scenes. This makes a lot of sense, given Ushio’s track record, and how he moves from the action packed music he put out on _Ping Pong_ and _Devilman Crybaby_ and that intricate, beautiful music from his work on titles such as _A Silent Voice_ and _Liz and the Blue Bird_. Chainsaw Man’s OST feels like a homage to both sides of Ushio’s music, a trend that continues from his previous work on Naoko Yamada’s (director: _A Silent Voice, K-ON!, Liz and the Blue Bird_) adaptation of _Heike Monogatari_, featuring a mix between these two types of music that hinges itself entirely on just how much contrasting tone Chainsaw Man has on various story beats. This could not work on every single anime out there, and not every composer out there could pull it off so well even if they had the right anime for it. Ushio’s touch when it comes to music is special, and _Chainsaw Man_ bears the perfect atmosphere for his work to not only come to life… but also share some of that life with the work it’s being applied to, elevating that work in the process. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about this through a musical perspective, but I said before that the contrast in musical tone is a compliment to the contrast in tone with the story beats, dialogue and also the visuals of the anime, so there is plenty more to discuss on this topic. The dialogue, naturally originally written in the manga by Fujimoto, and then adapted to anime screenplay by Hiroshi Seko (screenwriter: _Mob Psycho 100, Attack on Titan, Vinland Saga_), was a big element in this contrast; from guttural yelling, comedic taunting and “battle cries” in action sequences, to carefully crafted heart-to-heart conversation in that normalcy, without ever feeling like I was sitting through unnatural dialogue no matter how fast it moved from one tone to another. An example that sticks to me is the dialogue of Aki/Denji’s battle with the Katana Devil in episodes 8 and 9, with some very… raw and human delivery from Kikunosuke Toya and Shougo Sakata respectively. The moments here full of very well-crafted battle dialogue are great, but one of the best moments… is the break in the fight, and Aki’s heavy panting as he has to stop and process the death of Himeno. The loss of another partner to a person who still hasn’t had their emotions driven out by the soul-sucking nature of being a Devil Hunter that the series features so much discussion about, and still cries over every dead partner, even when everybody else just sees it as part of the job. There is a reason this contrast is so important to me; while _Chainsaw Man_ is definitely a work that does a lot better at handling massively contrasting story beats than a lot of anime, it’s certainly not alone in a realm of works that do it really well. The reason this factor of contrast means a lot to me, the writer, is because the anime/manga series _March comes in like a lion_, a series that revolves its entire story around this idea of contrasting tones between story beats, is… to spare a long explanation, the piece of media that saved my life. That is a story for another review, that I may potentially write as a follow-up to my rewatch of the anime last year, but in general, that is why I’m always on the lookout for other stories that do it. I honestly didn’t know _Chainsaw Man_ was like this before going into it, so I’m very glad it ended up having that kind of plot structure. I know a lot of people prayed on the downfall of _Chainsaw Man_ with this anime adaptation, and maybe even I jumped on the train for a little. While I don't think it's fully connected with me emotionally yet, I do think the constant hate just because "it's mainstream" or "the fans are annoying" is undeserved. If a fresh take on the presentation of major _Shounen Jump_ anime adaptations is what you desire, then _Chainsaw Man_ is the answer you seek, even if I personally don't think every aspect of it is for me. img(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmCej9JaAAM_hck?format=jpg&name=large) By the way, ZUTOMAYO's _Time Left_ is the best ED. I will not elaborate.~~~
[SPOILER REVIEW] [WARNING: LONG REVIEW] A review from a fantastic season for anime, I have yet to review others, but I am getting to that as soon as I get over my procrastination. So anyway, as expected, let's continue for todays review of Chainsaw Man. Be sure to know that there will be spoilers ahead and soon there will be a non-spoiler review as well, let's get on with it. Chainsaw Man is about a young homeless boy named Denji struggling with daily life after his father and mother died and has to repay debt by killing these monsters named Devils with his devil companion Pochita. After an altercation with his boss that gave him the debt as a young child, Denji was eventually betrayed and killed. This caused his companion, Pochita, to fuse with Denji to save his life in exchange for Denji to show Pochita what his dreams will be like. Denji then turned into the anti-hero part human part devil known as Chainsaw Man. Things go rather uphill and downhill from there. Animation: There was a controversy about this when Chainsaw Mans first episode debut happened, but not only that, but leaks from Twitter happened as well before the episode even aired, which then caused people to criticize how jarring the 3D animation part looks and created some hate among the fandom before it even aired. Behold how much the Twitter mob was proven wrong once again when the show came out. I will say that the 3D animation is great! Not amazing though, but the hate was above and beyond to an extreme level. The 3D animation looks great for the majority of the show and sometimes people can't tell if it's 2D or 3D, but there are some slightly off points of when the 3D shows itself but it is not common, the most of you'll see from it is surprisingly episode 1. Yes, the episode where people first watched to get a wide view of Chainsaw Man. Not to say it was bad, but compared to the rest of the season, the 3D animation in episode 1 is mediocre, but shall not worry as it gets astronomically better after episode 1. The only parts where I saw the 3D being off a bit was Denji talking and slicing zombies after he defeated the Zombie Devil and when Katana Man got mutilated by Curse Devil. But besides that, there were no other issues regarding the 3D animation. Now going on ahead to 2D animation, it is phenomenal. Probably the greatest anime has looked, it is like an actual movie but instead it is a 12 episode adaption with more coming soon. The expressive movements and the vibrant, yet slightly realistic colors and animation is what does it for me. Every scene with characters doing any movement has passion and soul put into it. Every scene, every movement whether it be walking, running, eating, sleeping, hell even just standing up has so much amazing animation work put into it, I cannot praise it enough. Whats best is when 2D and 3D collide creating some of the most hype fight scenes I have seen in quite a long time. What gets me the most is the fast pace and the camera movements following along the characters when fighting. Most anime have a lot of dialogue in between fight scenes which I am not a big fan of in my opinion, but Chainsaw Man rarely ever does, not talking just fighting and I find that great on my part. Even setting my bias aside, the animation would still be amazing with the fight scenes with the cliche of characters talking mid fight, but it hasn't happened a lot, another example of this is Jujutsu Kaisen, made by the same studio. Animation 9.5/10 Story: Now many debated on this subject, saying if Chainsaw Man has the greatest story of all time and I say, no. Not saying the story is bad, but saying it's the greatest of all time is a huge stretch, but it is definitely a great one. As it is only season 1, I expect this to be more of a prologue than anything and while it may not be true, it still has me intrigued. I am quite aware that things will be even crazier in the inevitable season 2, but for now we only critique these 12 episodes sadly. The story has quite a bit of arcs that last 2-3 episodes, but with the clear main plot and story being Denjis journey. Denji who was once a poor boy who was malnourished, covered in disease, and longed for human interaction and touch suddenly became a member of society when he met a woman named Makima, who promised to take plenty care of him as long as he is part of her team. Denji then struggles to contribute to society after Makima took him under her organization known as The Public Safety Unit. As the story goes along, we see him interacting with other people than Pochita or his boss, which lead to some mistreatment. Along the way, he made friends, enemies, and "lovers". But there is another important aspect and that is the secondary main plot point being the Gun Devil. After slaughtering 2 million people one day, The Public Safety Unit is frantically trying to solve the case of the Gun Devil, being possibly the most dangerous devil of them all. Makima recruits Denji and his co-workers Power and Aki to solve the case, but it is also along with other known characters with Aki's partner Himeno and two new recruits Kobeni and Arai. The Public Safety Unit uses all its power to find and defeat the Gun Devil. These two big plot points intertwine into a big storyline, which some may say it is a cliche or generic shonen story. Well, I see something bigger going on in the horizon from this 12 episode anime just by speculation of where it is going, I am going to stick around and watch where the story goes. Story 8/10 Characters: Quite possibly the second best thing about Chainsaw Man is its characters. Many characters of Chainsaw Man are three dimensional and has sides to every one of them including the good, the bad, and the ugly. All of them have struggles, stories, arcs, and personalities that make you want to see more of them as soon as they appear on screen. Denji is the most fun characters I have seen in anime in a long time. Many characters in Chainsaw Man reverses the same cliche anime tropes that make characters feel like cardboard wood AHEM Tanjiro AHEM AHEM Midoriya AHEM. Denji is a low mannered, uneducated, and confused goofball that I can't help but laugh and enjoy his shenanigans. Denji isn't very innocent though as he has no problems killing civilians that are in the way (the guy in the car when he threw him at Bat Devil), has a rather harsh or careless attitude around other people, thinks about sex and titties every chance he gets. But what gets Denji to be a sympathetic character is he doesn't know how to live in society and how to interact with other people due to isolation and being poor for most of his life. Denji questions his moral values at some point, he tries to understand emotions and why or how people do things. Denji questions relationships and how to properly deal with them as he doesn't feel the same kind of love towards other characters such as him feeling underwhelmed when he touched Powers boobs for the first time because he doesn't feel love in a romantic way. Makima uses Denji for her own to do her bidding. She constantly manipulates Denji by seducing him and promising him sexual things like sex, touching boobs, or kissing, but will only let him if he does what she wants. Denji being vulnerable, naïve, and literally a adolescent 16 year old boy and what he thinks on a daily basis is what intrigues me about him as a character. Denji gets mistreated a lot in the show and it can be quite disturbing or infuriating at times. This brings me to another character, Power. Power is what the characters call a Fiend, a fiend is when a devil and human fuse, but has more devil characteristics than a human. Power is Denjis partner in the organization and both go devil hunting or other adventures together. Power is rather a violent, hyper fiend that likes to mess around with Denji. She is selfish, arrogant, prideful, and an asshole towards most people including Denji at times. While she does have these characteristics, she also can be a fun, ecstatic, and funny to be around. Although, she doesn't have human emotion, she also has another side to her surprisingly. Although she is racist towards humans and devils (a funny joke told by the author), she finds comfort and love in animals. This is evident to her pet Meowy, Power put her life on the line and joined with humans just so she can rescue her cat from the Bat Devil. This can indicate that Power can develop human emotion, but she has to be very attached to the person, animal, or thing. This can be interesting for character development. Another thing is Denji and Powers dynamic as a team. While Power showed disinterest in him, blames him on her wrongdoings, and sacrificed him off to Bat Devil to get killed, she also developed some sort of feelings towards him. As the two characters are on screen more, they are showed to be more platonic with each other and almost have a sibling relationship, which is weird because Denji touched Powers boobs at some point, but it was during when Power was still disinterested in him. Power has quite possibly have the most character development potential out of all the characters. Now to get the whole trio, we have Aki. Aki is a character who is serious, hard working, and a person who never gives up, literally. He has sheer fucking will the entire series. Although, he looks and sounds quite boring, but like any character, he has other sides to him. While Aki may seem to be mature and well grounded, he is also very innocent, immature at points, and is more emotional than any character even if he seems stone faced. Some may say, including myself, that Aki is adorable as he at some point defended Himeno when she was slapped by a civilian who's loved one died by a devil and he goes back at her by sticking gum on her, he refused to smoke cigarettes (eventually does because of Himeno), Aki adjusting his looks around Makima because he has a crush on her, being a gentleman towards Makima, and secretly cries when a partner of his dies. Aki is many things but being a bad person is not one of them, in fact, I would say he is the most pure soul on the show. With a lot of psychopaths around him, he stays and adjusts just for his goals. While Denji was suffering from poverty and Power being feral and primitive when she lived in the forest, Aki had a loving family. He had a house, family, and food, but it was quickly stripped away when his whole family died from the Gun Devil in mere seconds. His whole motivation and drive is defeating the Gun Devil and doesn't care if he ruins his life doing it. He would jump in a pool full of gators if it was necessary to defeat the Gun Devil, this man doesn't care. He even contracted with 3 devils just to get one step closer to the Gun Devil. Fox Devil took away his arm skin, Curse Devil took many years off his life, and Future Devil guaranteed an amazingly tragic and fun ending for Aki when he looked into him. All this to Aki, including him being the leader of the trio with the crazy Denji and Power, but it didn't stop him from his goal at all. While Aki was an asshole to Denji at first and also physically hurt him, soon he also found a slight liking to him. Denji and Power like to make fun of him a lot, cause a mess in his place, and pulled pranks on him (at some point they put cat shit on his nose while sleeping according to the author), which made Aki more like a father than anything when they are home. Aki is shown to like them in a way, which is shown more in ED 12 when they were shopping at the supermarket. OKAY, we got the trio, phew, that was a lot but you know what makes this list?? Makima. Makima is the main antagonist of the show and is easily cold, manipulative, and harsh at the moment you first see her. She looks rather calm and positive at first sight, but something about her demeanor, mannerisms, and the way she talks and stares into your soul is what makes her chilling. From her manipulating Denji, her making Power back off in fear (which is not a good sign because Power normally doesn't care when people get mad at her), nonchalant when civilians die, and her hinting about something bigger when it comes to her ideas. It is said by 2 characters, one telling her how much she anticipated the deaths of her comrades, which she didn't answer or when Kishibe called her a liar when she said about feeling sympathy for victims and stop devils once and for all. Makima is also a psychopath because she has little to no emotion. She smiles through 90% of the show or shows a blank expression throughout the show. Only twice she has shown to have another expression and it is when she was slightly frustrated when she had to clean up the mess from a devil that Denji and Power killed due to property damage and when she was death staring a man after he touched her. Makima is such a chilling villain, you never know when she is gonna do something heinous and psychotic. She doesn't kill people straight away, she only does when she needs to only for her to get her own goals. Her goals are still unknown. Now, side characters included Himeno (although she has a slightly bigger role than the others), Kobeni, Arai, and Kishibe. Kobeni and Arai are minor roles, but even they have some character to them. Kishibe is a fucking chad and I'll never get over how he beat Denji and Power like nothing with the most stone faced expression ever. Now, Himeno is a sympathetic character, but has done bad stuff, but since she has a sad life before and ahead of her, her actions make sense although it isn't an excuse. She made Denji drunk and sexually assaulted him, was irresponsible with her drinking habit, and pressured Aki to smoke even if he never wanted to. Himeno is also jealous of Makima as she gets crushed on by the men Denji and Aki, Aki being Himenos love interest. But as much as she is a morally bad person, she is also a sympathetic person and cares a lot about Aki to the point where she drops her senior act at one point and asked him for help and started panicking which is out of character. Her death feels so heart stopping because she never fulfilled a great life and never achieved her goals at all. What's worse is she gave it her all, yet it didn't stop Katana Man and it felt like all of it was for nothing. The point of the character deaths is no matter how big or small of the role they get, they can die at any second of the show, they are not invincible. This was especially heartbreaking for Aki as he looked up to her all his life and once he looked over what's left of her, there was nothing but her clothes. PHEW this part was by far the longest and by what you see, it definitely deserves a 10/10 for Characters. Voice Acting: Denjis voice actor is told to be his first major role in the sub and it is crazy because his performance was crazy! His voice sounds like an immature teen while also sounding raspy as hell which fits his character a lot, his vocal performance goes to the max when Denji turns into Chainsaw Man with psychotic laughs, giggles, screams, and taunting towards enemies. This applies to Power's voice actor as well, although her voice actor does have some experience with her being Jolyne in Jojos Stone Ocean. Power's voice actor captured the hyper and insane personality of Power that is similar to Denjis with the careless attitude and rasp. Aki is the opposite, being the character with the most sense and discipline, his voice is calm and soothing with also a fatherly tone to him (evident by being roomates with Denji and Power), his voice actor nailed it especially the more emotional scenes. Makimas performance is no different to Aki's with a calm and soothing voice, although you can sense something else in her. Mysterious and sinister is what she sounds like beneath all that calmness. Her voice actor captured a sense of being unsettled by her because of her calm voice, the difference is that her calm and soothing voice never changed a decibel, her voice stays the same throughout the show. When Makima is being threatened you can hear the tone of her voice being the same, but it shows the difference when she is saying things like "Everyone's wives, children, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, all of them, their eyes" when she looked at the bag she gave the Yakuza member, it is chilling. Her actions and words say otherwise with her calm demeanor. Everyone did amazing vocal performances in the show with Kishibe getting Jujutsu Kaisens, Nanamis voice actor (hot as hell) and I'll never forget the whimps, cries, and screams of Kobeni, seriously I think her voice actor strained her voice after that performance. Sub 10/10. Now here comes the controversy....DUB. Yes, I have watched both dub and sub and I am here to say that Chainsaw Mans dub is...not bad at all. Quite the contrary, the voice cast is actually pretty good although here are some few hiccups. While Aki had a higher calm voice, Aki has a very low voice in the dub which sometimes can seem too try hard with the low voice. It grew on me after an episode or two though. Denji's voice actor is also a little lower and sounds generic with dub actors, but his delivery on jokes is spot on. His vocal performance is hilarious when he is either horny or is goofing around, he is by far the funniest I have heard besides Reigen from Mob Psycho 100. Powers can be a little cringe to people who haven't heard dub much but her performance is great as well, she kept the rasp and drove it to 100. I also like that Powers voice in dub has medieval vocabulary shown which can be funny, by far my favorite quote from the dub is; Kishibe: "how did you feel when your comrades died?" Denji: "It's whatever" Power: "I said OH they're all dead now", her delivery of that line was everything. Everyone else did a good job, with only their voices a bit lower. To my surprise even Kobenis dub delivered well too. With only a few hiccups here and there it was a good dub, better than most. Dub 9/10 Soundtrack: Many know that Chainsaw Man has not 1, but 12 different ending songs!! Chainsaw Man has a wide variety of music and songs that it is just too hard to choose. Although I expected a more death metal approach with the music, I was pleasantly surprised with the diverse songs. Some sounded like rock, some pop, some emotional and slow, some lofi sounding, and some cute. It was so good and you know what's the best part?! Most of the music and songs absolutely SLAP. Some were obviously lower than other but almost all of them were so damn good!! The intro song also goes FUCKING HARD! My favorites were ending 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, and 11 with the rest being slightly lower but still a good time. The background music and beats go hard too, a lot of them being ambiance sounding. When a scene is bleak and depressing, the music will be the most depressing I have heard with the deafening sound that makes your body chill up. By far it was the part where Makima got shot in the train which transitioned to a cursed lullaby sounding music when the other characters are being silently killed without notice. You already know the answer to this question and that is, Soundtrack 10/10 Art Style: The art style of Chainsaw Man is similar to Jujutsu Kaisen with realistic movement but insane character design. While everyone has a realistic hair color, Makima has pink hair which shows her distance from the crew. The eyes of Power and Makima are unique and beautiful. The Chainsaw Man, all the Devils, and Katana Man look insane and I absolutely love it. Although one small thing, I expected the show to be a bit more colorful to be honest, the show looks rather more cinematic and realistic than the manga. The manga covers are so bright and colorful which then I expected the show to be more creatively colored like Mob Psycho or something like Ending 3's art and color. It is not horrible per se, but that was what I expected, what they chose with is still great and I have no bad feelings about it whatsoever. Art Style 9/10 Well it seems you have reached the end. I apologize for making this a whole damn book, but I wanted to pour out all my thoughts about this show (you can clearly tell I like it). I won't be surprised if you didn't read the whole thing, but that's a-ok by me. By far my most longest review and I hope you stick around for more coming these days for Fall Anime! Till then, see you on the next review. Chainsaw Man Rating: 9/10
I thoroughly enjoyed watching the anime Chainsaw Man. The story is pretty basic, but I found it enjoyable, nonetheless. It was filled with lots of funny moments and great fight scenes that kept me entertained. I'm really looking forward to a season 2. The Chainsaw Man anime has brought viewers many stunning animation effects, including vivid colors, exquisite character design, and impressive visual effects. In addition, the plot of the story is also very gripping, helping viewers to get involved and follow the protagonist on their journey. The main protagonist, Denji, is a Devil Hunter who has fused his heart with Pochita, a chainsaw. He now has the ability to bring the chainsaw from his body, which I found to be a really cool concept. The demons in the show get their power from people's fear, which is unique and interesting. Denji acts like a dog and doesn't have much knowledge of the world around him, but he does want a simple life with beautiful hot girls and good food. The characters in Chainsaw Man are great. Denji, Aki, Power, Makima, Himeno, and Pochita all make up the cast of the show. The animation and art designs are top-notch, and the music fits perfectly with the action and atmosphere of the show. Overall, I had a great time watching Chainsaw Man and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good anime to watch. Don't except a super in-depth story, while some characters do have a better back story than others, there is still things we don't know about some of the characters past that may change in the future for anime only watchers. Still, for now it's an enjoyable experience to watch. I don't regret watching it. As someone who hasn't read the manga, I can't really compare it to the anime as I have only watched the anime. I have heard there are some things that fans of the manga were upset about and wanted to change. I can understand the frustration when it comes to something you enjoy and having it be changed out of the blue without it making much sense, would definitely upset me. Still, I think on its own the anime stands for itself very well. I wouldn't say it's as good as attack on titan or demon slayer which both have amazing animation but also have a very good story, or what I would consider to be a good story that keeps me on the edge of my seat wanting more. This is definitely a universe that I would never want to be in if I'm being honest lol. I'm sure some people would disagree with my opinions on the show, but I had a good time watching it and that's all I could really ask for. Soild 70/100 [Audio Version Podcast ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6rdqYg3iOxNtYFFcQbeAJS?si=3793f7f1be2049d8)