THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

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ABBREVIATIONS/TERMS
KA: Key Animation

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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.
▶ Video
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.

▶ Video 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.

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.

▶ Video 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.

▶ Video 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.

▶ Video 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.

▶ Video 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.

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.

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.

▶ Video 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.

▶ Video KA: Keiichirou Watanabe▶ Video 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.

▶ Video 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.

▶ Video 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.

▶ Video KA: Unknown, Shinya Ito▶ Video 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.

▶ Video 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.

#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.

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.