Review of Chainsaw Man

*This is a review of the ANIME only and does not reflect my opinion on the manga) I went into Chainsaw Man very hyped. Of course, I knew that I was going to naturally have some bias. I feel it’s easier to have a bias when you’re adapting two visual mediums (manga —> anime) vs, say, a book into a movie. As such, I was trying to figure out whether the show was actually good or if I was just biased because for the most part, it copied the visuals of the manga pretty well. However, as the episodes progressed, I realized that the directing styledidn’t work. To me, CSM read like sort of an “indie” type manga, and the anime didn’t deliver that to me. Certain scenes that I felt had a lot of meaning in the manga weren’t given the same importance and/or brushed over completely. Some of the shots were pretty stationary and didn’t convey the same sense of dread. I know it’s not fair to compare a show to it’s source material, so I will say if I had watched this show as a stand-alone, I probably would not have finished it. There was something about Fujimoto’s pacing and weird framing that made it a great read.

Animation: I will start by saying that the animation for a 12 episode series was insane. It was obvious they invested a lot of time and budget into this. However, I feel like as if they were a kid who had just gotten a bucket of candy on Halloween - they were too excited and went overboard. By this I mean they over-animated scenes that did not need to be. Scenes like characters walking, dawdling in the background, or very small secondary actions were animated practically on 1s and it felt like a visual overload. It was to the point where action scenes didn’t feel particularly special because EVERYTHING was animated in the same way. This is not a dig on the technicalities of the animation itself, but in the way they distributed it throughout the series.

*The OPENING song and animation is amazing. Also every single ED song. Bangers. Every single MAPPA animator deserves a kiss and a good night’s rest.