Review of Chainsaw Man

The first season of the CSM anime is done, and it's pretty uneventful thus far due to the slow pacing and depressing tone. The adaptation decided to be a bit of a slow burn and take its time to establish the protagonist and general atmosphere. It's a strange decision considering that the manga is fairly fast-paced by comparison and has a high emphasis on campy action. Instead of focusing on the fun parts, the anime decided to go for a more serious tone similar to a social drama and spend a lot of time on showing Denji walking through the streets or lying in bed whilelooking sad and so on. It picks up a bit of speed in the second half but still feels uncannily slow compared to the manga.

This also shows in the focus of the animation. The action scenes are fine except for the overuse of (bad) CGI on the main character, making fight scenes with him a bit of an eyesore. The choreography of the battles is also mediocre at best for modern shounen standards. The slice of life parts on the other hand, where characters just talk to one another or walk through the streets or do their morning routine *cough* or groom minors *cough*, are animated with absurd detail to the point I'm wondering why this effort wasn't spent on making the action scenes look good instead.
The comedy is similarily strange as it's played very straight to the point it's almost unnoticable that certain scenes are supposed to be comedic, like when Denji kicks Aki in the balls or when Makima fed Denji some noodles. I didn't expect it to go full chibi-style, but it seems to not even try to present the comedic scenes as funny.

The coloring of CSM can also be described as bland. They go for a very realistic style, and by realistic I mean lots of gray.
So generally, this is one of those adaptations that tries to make everything realistic and depressing in tone and appearance, and honestly I'm not sure if I like that. But this will highly depend on what you like about the source material and how you interpret it. I interpreted the manga as a campy schlock gorefest with a schizophrenic style that has the main goal in being unpredictable, fast-paced and fun, but it seems like the director of the anime saw it more as a slow-paced drama that takes itself very seriously.

So if I had to describe this adaptation thus far in one sentence, then I would say it's a schlocky shounen story that tries to be a Scorcese drama. The characters aren't really deep or interesting enough to support that type of presentation, the comedy consists of toilet humor and barfing and most of the future run-time will be filled up with mindless action. I can respect the ambition to make it more than a fun gorefest but I don't think the direction it's going is utilizing the strengths of its source material.