Review of Chainsaw Man

The fun of the Chainsaw Man series is the absurdity and fast paced action that comes from high octane violence and dark comedy which Tatsuki Fujimoto delivers a masterclass on via the manga. However, the Chainsaw Man anime is a dry and slow paced mess compared to the source material. I never thought I would be bored watching CSM, but every episode sort of felt like a chore to get through. The animation is wonky and inconsistent, and I have to say I disliked the use of CGI. It felt lazy and out of place. The soundtrack was the worst oversight for me. A lotof scenes felt silent and lacked impact due to the poor judgement of the audio team. They spent so much time and effort into developing a new outro for each episode, why couldn't they put half that energy into development of decent background score? I've seen this criticism a lot before watching the series but now I can firmly say I agree with it - the decision to depict the CSM world through a hyper-realistic lens as opposed to an absurdist comedy shows poor understanding of Fujimoto's intention. I truly hope they take a different direction for the second season, because the first was not impressive whatsoever to me.