This Week in Anime

Anime Movies Chainsawing Hollywood Theaters

Lucas
The Chainsaw Man movie is definitely da bomb rather than a box office bomb! In fact, this movie's success is already causing some pundits to speculate on the ripples it might have across the anime industry.

As an anime pundit who's been a fierce proponent of the Chainsaw Man manga and staunch critic of the anime, I couldn't be more eager to add my two cents to this discourse! What dimension of this development should we tackle first, Coop?

Coop, you are far more even-tempered and cordial when it comes to this given topic than I am. Though I will readily admit that the Chainsaw Man anime deserves to exist, it clearly had a lot of passion and skill poured into it, and anyone who is harassing the director or petitioning for the first season to be re-animated is wasting their time and should get a life. That being said, I hate the Chainsaw Man anime! And I've hated it since the first episode, where it entirely gives up on trying to convey the visual and thematic spectacle of Denji transforming into Chainsaw Man for the first time. In the manga, this scene depicts Denji literally rising above the forces that were oppressing him through the power of incredible violence, allowing him to escape the darkness he had been living in. Fujimoto's artwork and paneling perfectly convey this feeling, with Denji physically above those who have been harming him, and him being the only white spot in an otherwise black background. The anime instead adapts this moment into a very dull, if gore-heavy, fight. Presumably, the politics of this being a MAPPA production also hinder the original text's politics. This is a silly example, but in the manga, Denji specifically mentions how his new, evidently union, job provides him with basic quality of life elements that he's ecstatic about, while the anime has him simply humming in the bath. If unions cannot even be mentioned as a joke in the CSM anime, I do not trust any iteration of this work to deliver on the harsh social critique that plays a significant role in my love of the original manga. While I understand that the production team wanted to give the anime more "heroic" visuals to align with the theatrical inspirations behind the series, why did they make Denji look shredded? Firstly, he's very intentionally supposed to be a borderline emaciated little freak, and second, this artistic direction really pulls away from the unique, sicko-mode visuals that made the manga stand out originally.

I know that all of my frustrations with the CSM anime stem from the fact that the Chainsaw Man manga is likely one of the best comics ever made and that Fujimoto has a unique mastery of the form that makes it difficult to translate to a medium like anime; but I can't help but feel like MAPPA's attempt at an adaptation made it more palatable for a wider audience rather than highlight what made the work mean so much to so many in the first place.

My only pushback to your point is that I don't think part two of Chainsaw Man is commenting much on the anime and that the plot points that focus on Chainsaw Man now being a public figure instead stem from the popularity of the manga, which Fujimoto was already starting to explore in Just Listen to the Song.

But to your broader point, I agree that MAPPA does not seem like a great steward of this industry, nor Chainsaw Man as a franchise. Though, and perhaps paradoxically, there are a lot of really talented people at MAPPA who can create excellent works of animation, like Zenshu, when given the freedom. Hell, I'll even say that the third ED to Chainsaw Man, "Blade Length: 200 Million Centimeters" by Maximum the Hormone, is to this day the greatest compact pitch for the series and a great encapsulation of what makes Chainsaw Man amazing.

As for Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I'm glad it's doing well internationally and pray that a greater amount of this revenue will end up in the hands of the people who painstakingly slaved over this incredibly lavish movie; but I don't think this film will be a catalyst for an industry shake up.

And now we're getting to the friction at the core of any MAPPA-produced Chainsaw Man project. While Chainsaw Man addresses many themes, at its core, the first part of the manga is about how capitalism and capitalistic societies exploit people in vulnerable positions and alienate them to the point that they can barely connect with others in society. MAPPA, perhaps more overtly than any other studio, seeks to utilize popular IP to maximize revenue.

These mentalities are fundamentally incongruent and, for as prestigious as MAPPA's works can be, I don't think a studio like this is capable of capturing what makes Chainsaw Man work as a story.

If nothing else, I think Reze Arc's success will finally quash the talking point that the supposed low DVD sales of the first season of Chainsaw Man means that it was somehow a flop. Chainsaw Man was huge before the anime and remained huge after the anime. The movie topping the box office likely has more to do with October being a slow month for movies than a signifier of any industry shifts.

There's undoubtedly a fine line between a collaborative movie-going experience with others and one that detracts.

If I can take this to a political and sociological level (as I want to do), people's poor movie etiquette is a direct consequence of COVID-19 isolation affecting many people's mental health and causing folks to forget how to participate in polite society. Factor in that a lot of anime fans already have "protagonist syndrome" and the result is a distracting amount of CSM movie-going audiences being the bad kind of rowdy.

This continues the trend of Chainsaw Man being a cultural inflection point; though this is perhaps the most meta and unintended social topic it has brought into broader discussion yet.

A dog who looks like he'd have the texture of a kickball, that's who!