Is there anyone in the anime industry more blessed with the mandate of heaven than Tatsuki Fujimoto right now? Not only has he basically created the biggest blockbuster of the century with Chainsaw Man, he's gotten two attempts to give that manga the most generational adaptation treatment possible. Same with his one-shots, which got more people than I thought was possible gushing over non-serialized manga even before Look Back got turned into one of the most subtly beautiful anime films ever made. And now, a whole collection of anime studios have collaborated to bring eight of his pre-fame one-shots to life, each with its own creative team and wildly different vision. It's like every single member of this industry has agreed that everything Fujimoto releases will get nothing less than the gold star treatment from them. And I'm not complaining, because god damn does his work deserve it.
So, the 17-26 in the title is a reference to Fujimoto's age: all the one-shots adapted here are stories he wrote between those ages, cutting off at 26 when he started writing Chainsaw Man and proceeded to explode onto the global stage. All together, they're something like a pre-history, ideas half-formed and starting to coalesce that would later blossom into the more richly developed tropes and fascinations iconic to Fujimoto's work. But since I'm a Chainsaw Man anime-only, my analysis on these works' relation to his future endeavors stop there. I'm just here to talk about each entry on its own terms, and the weird, often wonderful rides they took me on.
1) A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin' in the Schoolyard: This is the most overtly Chainsaw-esque short of the bunch, with its grotesque and bizarre monster designs and gristly violence portrayed in lurid detail. It's a painfully nihilistic story about humanity wiped to near extinction by aliens who view them as livestock... only for those aliens to copy human culture from them, appropriating what makes us special while reducing us to prey. It's funny in a way that makes you feel bad for laughing, absurd and over-the-top yet grounded in tragedy almost too big to process. And its wildly bombastic animation captures every jaw-dropping, heart-stopping moment of it. It's a little too eager to telegraph its big twist, and it starts an unfortunate trend among these shorts where most of the big character bonding moments are shoved into flashbacks rather than experienced in the moment, but it's a fantastic start to the project. 7/10.
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2) Sasaki Stopped a Bullet: Ugh, this one was a dud. It's this weird, uncomfortable tonal car crash about a high school boy trying to stop the teacher he's crushing on from being raped by her stalker, and it drags out every moment with viciously uncomfortable dialogue and aesthetics so inconsistent it feels like you're watching a different anime every shot. It's like it's rubbing your face in its own ugliness and expecting you to laugh at the discomfort. But I just wanted to throw up. 3/10__
3) Love is Blind: Mother of god, I couldn't stop laughing here. Imagine the rom-com belligerence of Kaguya-sama mixed with the art-deco visual madness of Monogatari, throw in the slapstick lunacy of Nichijou, and you've got an absolute riot of a short about a guy refusing to let an increasingly absurd series of happenings interrupt his attempt to confess to his crush before he graduates... if only he can work up the courage to say it. 7.5/10
4) Shikaku: A female assassin with a childish-but-genuine sense of right and wrong is called in to assassinate an immortal vampire who's bored of life and wants to be put out of his misery. It's the most genuinely romantic entry on this list. I am not joking. 7.5/10
5) Mermaid Rhapsody: If I didn't know this was a Fujimoto work, I would've assumed it was some third-rate hack's attempt to copy Makoto Shinkai with none of the talent that makes Shinkai work. Lazy, pandering slop with a terrible romance, overwritten narration that substitutes meaningful character moments for exposition, and some truly butt-ugly compositing. 3/10
6) Woke-Up-As-A-Girl-Syndrome: Is it a trans allegory? Or just about how much it sucks being treated as female in modern society? Whatever it is, it's probably the most visually beautiful of the bunch with an arresting pop-art aesthetic that delivers the writing's pitch-black humor expertly. It's a shame the ending is so gender-essentialist after such a promising start. 6.5/10
7) Nayuta of the Prophecy: What if your little sister was prophesized to destroy the world? How would you balance your love for her with the fear of what she might become- and what she already might be? That's a compelling hook to build a gristly, gruesome family tale out of. Unfortunately, this is the same director as Mermaid Rhapsody, and if the compositing was already terrible in that one, good god does it double down here. It's legitimately hard to look at this one with its smeary bloom effects and vomit-inducing blending style. And then it treats physically abusing your little sister as a happy ending. Skip. 3.5/10
8) SIsters: So this is 100% the precursor to Look Back, right? Two female leads, one fiercely jealous of the other's artistic talent while the other just wants to live up to the first one's expectations... the seeds were absolutely planted here. Very glad the underage nudity and vaguely incestuous undertones didn't carry through to the "final" version. 7/10
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