Chainsaw Man and the Art of Adaptation

Chainsaw Man is kind of a weird manga.

A lot of that is clear from its first volume's cover: the campy B-movie title, the splashes of neon-green blood, the strikingly silly design of a chainsaw-sprouting Devil wearing a button-up shirt and tie. Yet what looks from the outside like little more than an exercise in hyperviolence is one of the most layered and interesting series on the market, one that contains intense emotional moments, savvy interrogations of capitalism, frank talk about teenage sexuality, some of the most compelling imagery in modern comics, and, yes, plenty of grime and gore. It's a lot of unexpected things in a small package—and somehow, we live in a world where it became a Shonen Jump megahit to the tune of twenty-three-million copies in circulation. 

It's strange that this story, of all things, has become a poster child for the modern manga blockbuster, but in some ways, it's unsurprising. The story's weirdness is up front in a way that is fascinating instead of confusing, and its gory premise plays into shounen genre conventions that are sure attract legions of young readers, even as the manga often subverts and satirizes those exact tropes. Beyond surface aesthetics, mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto has a killer sense for storytelling, filling his pages with hook after hook that provide plentiful reasons to keep reading and maybe tell some friends. Fujimoto's previous serialized manga, Fire Punch, had already made a bit of a splash; it was only a matter of time before his pop-art sensibilities caught on big time.

Now, with the first season of an anime series on the books, I think it's safe to say Chainsaw Man has officially made it. Because Chainsaw Man didn't have just any anime; it had one of the biggest anime of 2022, a beautiful, cinematic, cleanly animated, and faithful recreation that often adapted the manga's dialogue and panels beat for beat. 

This is fascinating to me because I think Chainsaw Man, the manga, is fundamentally unadaptable. 

I'm exaggerating, obviously. Everything's adaptable when you get down to brass tacks. Chainsaw Man has odd moments, but it's got an understandable story and a presentation that never crosses into the untranslatable abstraction of experimental comics like Super-Dimensional Love Gun or Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. That's all without getting into the fact that the mainstream anime industry is built around adapting manga and light novels, and that industry veterans have been working on adaptations their entire professional lives, so of course they can get the story about a guy sprouting chainsaws on screen.

But I want to dig a little deeper. Is getting a story on screen all an adaptation should seek to do? Just tell the same story, beat-for-beat, while adding some voice acting and music? Is that even possible?

The truth is that adapting from one medium to another is always a transformative act, one that necessitates changes to the fundamental essence of a work. Even in visual mediums as closely linked as comics and animation, it's impossible to perfectly replicate the experience from one to another—a comic is a series of static images that can be digested at the reader's own pace, while animation is audiovisual and temporal, created by images and sounds played in a sequence out of the viewer's control. Beyond that basic fact, every part of the move from page to screen, from the pacing of individual scenes to the sound design and character art, necessitates impactful choices that, no matter how small, can ripple out and cause vast differences in tone and feeling. 

In the case of Chainsaw Man, the anime's choice to pursue faithfulness and down-to-earth realism comes with repercussions both subtle and seismic for how the story feels. Here, I'd like to dig into the mechanics of how the anime chose to adapt its source material and what that means for one of the biggest new media properties of the past decade. 

Because the manga may be weird, but in its quest for faithfulness and realism, the anime itself may be even weirder.  

1. The Manga

To understand the anime's adaptational choices, we need to analyze what made the manga tick in the first place. 

That's a tall order for me personally. Chainsaw Man is one of my favorite manga, and I truly think Tatsuki Fujimoto is a once-in-a-generation talent. Unraveling every part of what makes this manga so good within a single section feels impossible when I could spend an entire essay taking apart a single chapter.  

So here, I want to focus not on the entirety of what defines the manga, but instead on the most unique elements and quirks that I don't think easily translate to an anime adaptation (or, at least, that perhaps didn't translate to this adaptation). That means I'm going to be breezing through some obviously great details, like the excellent writing and Fujimoto's stylish, attention-grabbing character designs—they may be clear reasons why the manga became such a juggernaut, but they basically made it into the anime as-is. 

With that in mind, I think there are four main things that contributed to the manga's unique genius:

1. The Art Style

Probably the most basic yet central part of the manga's identity is Fujimoto's artwork, which feels unique among modern Shonen Jump/Jump+ titles. Rather than the clean-cut appeal of My Hero Academia or the hyper-detailed linework of One Piece, Chainsaw Man favors a gritty, sometimes sketchy approach for its character artwork. Lines can be scribbly, characters go off-model, and the effect only increases for close-ups and moments of high intensity. The backgrounds (especially buildings and cityscapes) can be more detailed, especially in action scenes where a sense of place is needed, but just as often they're covered in deep shadows and blurs, putting the focus more on the character drawings. It's a style that can give off a rushed and unpolished first impression, but that rawness is a strength, capturing motion, emotion, and viscera far more effectively than any layer of polish could.

The character designs themselves (Pochita nonwithstanding) are relatively tame, mostly eschewing shounen manga's impossible hair and tall-eyed cartooniness in favor of relatively realistic proportions, body shapes, and even mouths. That's not to say the manga is devoid of all stylistic shorthand, like sweat drops or the way characters' noses aren't drawn from certain angles, but you're not going to see any chibi interludes or XD reaction faces. At least compared to his contemporaries, Fujimoto's overall artistic vision feels closer to reality than fantasy, even for the most outlandish moments in the series. 

This semi-realism extends to how Fujimoto captures action and movement. More often than not, and especially for his biggest action scenes, the artwork and scene composition look less like a standard comic panel and more like a photograph, or a still taken from a movie. You can see this most clearly in his repeated stylistic quirks, like heavy motion blur on limbs when characters perform quick movements, but it's also apparent in the way he constructs action scenes around singular moments—which is to say, each panel is typically devoted to actions happening in a specific instant, and it's rare to see panels that imply a longer passage of time, like double-takes or multi-hit attacks. The compositions feel like presentations of precise moments in time, as if Fujimoto was observing each scene with a camera in hand.

When you combine this with Fujimoto's excellent sense for panel composition, posing, and black-and-white contrast, you get action scenes with senses of immense scale and speed, strong hero poses drenched in Pollock-esque blood splatters, and enough gore to make a Berserk fan blush. These big scenes feel cinematic, but also kind of scuzzy, the type of artwork that would belong on the cover of a 90s horror magazine. Yet when it's time for the manga's frequent jokes or dramatic moments, Fujimoto's art carries those just as effectively without losing the sense of realism and tactility that makes the story feel believable. 

Perhaps most importantly, that sense of sketchy realism makes Fujimoto's frequent ventures into the surreal and horrifying incredibly impactful. After all, immersing readers in a world that appears similar to their own makes the aberrations more apparent. This is part of why his Devils feel so compelling—not only are their designs unnerving, with bulging eyeballs and appendages sprouting from places they shouldn't, but Fujimoto's realistic style makes them feel dramatically integrated with the world, which makes them feel real. Similarly, for the more surreal moments, a simple trick like using a flat color for a background can have a massive impact when sandwiched between scenes of high detail. That juxtaposition between the believable and the unbelievable is a central tenant of what makes Chainsaw Man tick.

2. Paneling 

These are sort of arbitrary categories, because paneling is a crucial, inseparable part of what we could label as manga artwork. But I think this is important enough to call out on its own—if there's one central strength that makes the Chainsaw Man manga feel unique to read, I think it's this.

So much of what the manga is trying to do is surprise readers and subvert expectations, from its dumbest jokes to its biggest emotional beats and coolest action moments. This means every part of the manga's written and visual construction works to purposefully guide the reader into a sense of status quo, or to manipulate them into thinking things might turn out a certain way, only for the rug to be pulled out from underneath a moment later. Fujimoto uses every trick in the literal book to achieve this, from repeating visual cues to manipulating the size and shape of individual panels to hiding reveals and punchlines behind the turn of a page. 

Sometimes the effect is obvious, like how Aki's journey through an infinitely looping hotel floor is conveyed with panels of the same rectangular size and layout. Fujimoto also loves to have characters and objects pass through panel lines, such as the inspired moment when the Curse Devil's finger appears in the comic's margins as if emerging from spacetime and plinks Aki's sword into Katana Man. Fujimoto is conscious of the effect intentional paneling can have on readers, and how manipulating and even calling attention to the panels themselves can be used to tremendous effect. 

All of this is before we get to Chainsaw Man's famous splash pages and double-page spreads, the moments where Fujimoto uses an entire page (or two) as the canvas for a single, huge panel. When used well, these types of pages have a totally unique effect—readers will get used to consuming smaller panels on previous pages, only to turn the page and see the action spill across the entire reading space. The effect of these splashes and spreads feels to me like hiking up a mountain, squeezing through a crack between rocks, and stepping out onto a huge overlook. The literal scope of what's visible in your field of view has expanded. Many manga and comics have used these techniques to great effect, but in my opinion, Chainsaw Man has some of the most creative, visually striking, and impactful splashes and spreads in the game, and it uses them frequently. 

For a perfect example of all these techniques early in the run, let's look at the introduction of the Fox Devil. At the end of a gory set of one-on-one fights, protagonist Denji charges his opponent, the Leech Devil. We first see a close-up of his chainsaw impaling the Leech, making it look like he's won, but over the following panels we "zoom out" to see that the Leech Devil has also impaled him. As it looks like Denji's about to be eaten, something unexpected happens: a hand reaches up, the fingertips slightly breaking the bottom panel's frame. On the next page, a splash, the hand forms into the shape of a shadow-puppet dog encircling the Leech Devil. 

In the moment, there is no context for this seemingly random set of events—the reader doesn't know whose hand it is, or what it's doing, or why it's happening. None of this has been explained yet. But turning the page, readers are greeted with answers in the form of two consecutive splash panels. The first reveals the hand's owner: Aki, Denji's partner, who is saying the word "Kon." The second introduces the Fox Devil itself when a giant fox head with swirling, demonic eyes materializes from thin air, breaking through the righthand panel lines, and consumes the Leech Devil.  

There is no dialogue explaining this. Fujimoto is trusting readers to piece together these seemingly disconnected images into "Aki saves Denji by summoning a Fox Devil that eats whatever he puts his hand over." Yet he can afford this trust because his technique is so intentional. By relying on rock-solid visual storytelling fundamentals and ordering the panels to be confusing at first glance, he knows the impact they will have when the pieces come together in the reader's mind, like structuring the punchline to a joke.

This reliance on splashes and spreads creates a particular challenge for the anime adaptation, because paneling is perhaps the most difficult single element to translate from manga to television, at least in terms of its effect on the reader. Splashes and spreads are a literal widening of the canvas in a way that is unique to comics, where there can be as many or as few panels on a set of pages as long as they fit the paper. You simply can't do this on TV, where every image presented is expected to conform to the same size. Sure, it's possible to change aspect ratio mid-episode to simulate the effect, but unless you're Wes Anderson, it's tough to do in a way that doesn't feel arbitrary.

Adaptations for splash pages and spreads typically have to think outside the box to come close to capturing that coming-to-the-mountain-overlook effect, often using pans, heavy animation, or very intentional blocking and storyboarding. Just lingering on a particular moment can sort of hit the mark. But at the end of the day, there isn't much that anime can do to perfectly replicate it. Given Chainsaw Man's frequent and intentional use of these panels, it's clear that any adaptation has to change something here. 

3. Pacing

On a macro level, most Chainsaw Man chapters have a scant twenty pages (including cover and back pages) to get their stories across—a restriction shared by many serialized manga. But while plenty of stories in the shounen genre space let fights drag across chapters and volumes, Chainsaw Man makes the decision to cram as much eventful, impactful information into each chapter as it can. This leads to almost every chapter containing something that's designed to leave an impression, whether that's an action scene or a dramatic twist or a big joke. This quote from Minovsky on Twitter about how the manga takes "wild swings because it's somehow one week away from cancellation no matter how much of a hit it actually is" feels right—Chainsaw Man is doing nothing in its short chapters if not trying to hook readers.

In practice, this means that dialogue is relatively light and functional—not much room for expository monologuing—and that the actual images do a lot of the heavy lifting. As I mentioned when talking about the art style, these images are often uncluttered and focused on precise actions in a single moment of time, making them especially easy to parse. And as I covered with the paneling, there's a relatively large number of splash pages and spreads throughout. All of this is pretty fast for readers to consume (unless the reader is a weirdo like me who lingers on panels to soak in all the little details), especially compared to other manga with more dialogue or information-dense panels. 

What this amounts to for pacing is that most chapters can be finished quite quickly. Indulge me in some fast and loose numbers here: I timed myself reading a few chapters at a leisurely pace and came to an average read time of three minutes and fifteen seconds. Word counts per chapter can vary, and I'm a fast reader, so let's round that up to an average of five minutes for one chapter. 

Doing some quick math, that puts us at about 485 minutes total to finish the whole series, or roughly eight hours. That may seem on par with the six-to-eight hours it takes to read the average novel, but consider that the average novel is 300-400 pages, while Chainsaw Man averages around 190 pages per volume, and there are eleven of those. 

In short, Chainsaw Man moves fast, and this has a direct effect on the storytelling. With such a hooky premise and short, breezy chapters, this is a series that encourages bingeing and really feels like it's flying by in the moment. It also means that every panel is incredibly valuable storytelling real estate, and fortunately, Fujimoto has a knack for writing economy that makes it work.

This brings me to one of the biggest strengths of the manga: characterization and backstory. With space at a premium and exposition light, characters are often fleshed out through their actions in the story's present, while important backstories are delivered through flashbacks that take up no more than five or ten pages at a time. Like the rest of the manga, these backstories are delivered with minimal dialogue and internal monologue. It's relentlessly efficient: characters' goals, strengths, and weaknesses are all clearly communicated in a tiny amount of time through elegant paneling decisions and affecting turns of phrase. 

Fujimoto has a gift for minimalist pathos, in getting you invested in the characters in the least amount of pages. That often involves setting up the characters as how they present themselves before diving into what actually makes them tick and laying their true selves bare. Think of Power's early backstory, when she reflects on her affection for Meowy: "I love blood. The taste. The smell. Feeling death. And... and... I recently discovered for the first time... that blood is nice... and warm..." She gets nine total pages of flashbacks across the first two volumes, yet all Fujimoto needs to beautifully sum up the entirety of her character is twenty-four words, two pages, and admittedly a lot of ellipses.

Fujimoto does this constantly. Aki's childhood backstory takes ten pages, and it's complete with a miniature character arc, rug-pull reversal, and crucial exposition for the main plot. Himeno gets more material spread across a couple volumes, but even that's tied together with Aki's backstory. In every case, characters major and minor receive the exact amount of lip service they need—no more, no less. To do it any differently would be to change the essence of how the story reads. In fact, in an adaptation striving for faithfulness, one might be tempted to replicate those character beats exactly.

Yes, this is foreshadowing.

4. Tone Hopping

This is a little more abstract than the previous points, but it's no less crucial to the story's success. Throughout its run, Chainsaw Man has the ability to flip on a dime from apocalyptic horror to emotionally grounded flashbacks to crude jokes, sometimes within the same chapter. It reminds me a lot of Bong Joon-ho's filmography, especially The Host's famous funeral scene, which transitions from deep grief to slapstick comedy so subtly that you almost don't notice it happening. The difference is Chainsaw Man's juxtapositions are usually anything but subtle, which is what makes them so effective—the incongruity of tones makes the shifts feel more impactful, and they work in the same way as those paneling tricks I described earlier, by catching the audience off guard with shocks and surprises.

Denji himself is often the root of these tone shifts, given his lackadaisical attitude towards the monstrosities he faces and his oversized reactions to the prospect of touching breasts or kissing. As with all parts of the manga, these things aren't just there for pointless jokes (well, usually). They exist because Denji's story is one of rising from deadly, impoverished circumstances and being forced to care about the apocalypse when all he wants is the normalcy and affection denied to him early in life. So those detours from boob grabs to death-filled backstories to eating gross toast aren't just accidental whiplash—they're the entire point. 

But also, crucially, they work. These moments are funny, thrilling, and deeply felt, and all of these things are all the more so because of the story's willingness to jump between them and commit to the shifts every time. The manga's greatest characteristic isn't that it attempts to be funny and weird and sad one after the other, it's that it accomplishes all of those things. This ability to execute so many different modes in such compelling ways, and to therefore appeal to different people for completely different reasons, is key to the manga's success and its unique identity as a shounen that's not just a vehicle for bunches of battles.

This is part of what makes the anime's approach so very odd.

The Anime

There are, like with the manga, a bevy of intentional choices large and small that went into the making the Chainsaw Man anime, from the seiyuu voicing each character to the tiniest micro-decisions about key animation corrections and in-betweening. On that note, I'd be remiss if I didn't point you towards Sakuga Blog's excellent writeup on the first three episodes, which features one of the smartest animation fans out there going deep on the production particulars. 

But here, I mainly want to hone in on the high-level adaptational decisions that I think have had the biggest impact on the way the anime has panned out. The show makes three critical choices that ripple out to every facet of its presentation: 

Firstly, it adopts a cinematic art style that emphasizes clean, on-model linework, realistic lighting and coloring, and a bevy of post-processing filters and camera-like effects.

Secondly, it is a faithful adaptation of the manga. Broadly speaking, there are few substantial cuts or additions, and the material is often adapted to a T, with storyboards and layouts taken directly from manga panels.

Thirdly, the material is covered at a relatively steady pace.

If you've kept up with both the manga and anime, you already know where I'm going with this: Chainsaw Man the show, both despite and due to being a faithful adaptation, winds up feeling very different from the manga. This is not to say that the anime is bad—it accomplishes some truly great things I'll talk about later—but its very approach often contradicts large swaths of what made the manga work in the first place. So that's what I want to focus on first: the ways this adaptation makes for a strange fit for the material.

Realism and Cleanliness

The anime makes a directorial choice to smooth out all the rough, sketchy edges of the manga's artwork and turn the presentation into something more akin to a polished, horror-themed battler like Jujutsu Kaisen. The funny faces from the manga are deemphasized, there aren't as many stylistic diversions into the manga's surrealism, and most of the proceedings feel very grounded in a facsimile of the real world. From Sakuga Blog's article, it seems like these were very intentional choices by the show's higher-ups—an artistic preference from director Ryuu Nakayama, and a debatably pragmatic desire to replicate popular trends and make loads of money from MAPPA producer Keisuke Seshimo.

Whatever the intent behind it, there are lots of little things that contribute to the more realistic feeling. This is most obvious in the show's lighting and coloring, which hew towards washed-out earth tones and away from stylized departures into unrealistic palates. The common manga trick of not drawing the background for certain panels (and instead replacing it with a solid gray or halftone) isn't replicated, meaning characters are always placed within their extremely detailed setting. You could even extend this to the show's minimal background music, where diegetic sound frontloaded while Kensuke Ushio's atmospheric score is used sparingly. Combined, the end effect makes everything feel a bit more real in a way that deemphasizes the surreal. 

The cleanliness side of things is most obvious from the anime's character designs, which are of course taken from the manga but presented with polished, precise linework. The way those characters move is also realistic, conveying grounded motions while steering away from cartoony acting and facial exaggerations. Perhaps most obvious is the show's occasional use of CGI character models—definitionally the most on-model version of a character design, given that the models can't be deformed or exaggerated as easily. Whether hand-drawn or CGI, the character art prioritizes staying on-model and rarely deviating from the sense of reality the show is trying to create.

Although these things are departures from the manga's crunchier style, hone of these changes are necessarily bad; as they say, it's all about the execution. It's just that the execution isn't always flattering in a one-to-one comparison. Most obviously damning are the fight scenes, which can sometimes feel stiff and sluggish, the opposite of the manga's incredible splash panels. Compare the first episode's zombie fight with the same scene from the manga and you'll see the difference—the manga explodes into a two-page black-and-white spread of grindhouse gore that looks cool as hell, whereas the show's action feels a little methodical, often putting its stiff and uncanny CGI front and center. 

There's a reason why the show's most exciting fights are the ones that feature more stylized cuts of animation, rather than a motion-captured Denji slashing at random goons. Action in animation often requires exaggeration and a bending of reality to feel exciting and special, which is a thing that the Chainsaw Man anime's approach makes difficult. The manga's carefully designed hero shots seem difficult to capture in motion without some creative thinking, and some amount of CGI was probably unavoidable given the complicated character designs, but the crew at MAPPA nonetheless had some growing pains finding a balance.

The other major effect of the show's approach is on the tone, which tends to land squarely on the serious and somber side of things. The show does some inconsistently good work with its more dramatic material, but it falters hardest when aiming for comedy. Again, humor is a crucial aspect to the original story's success, and its struggles in the anime have a lot to do with the show's pacing (which I'll be talking more about soon), but the art design has a direct effect as well. 

To illustrate, let's look at one of the manga's funniest early moments: the scene when Denji kicks Aki in the balls. The manga utilizes some of the techniques I've outlined above to make the joke work, like leading in with a deceptively quiet moment featuring smaller panels, making the first knee to Aki's groin a tall panel hidden behind a page turn, and then switching to goofier, simplified faces for comedic effect. It's all built around misdirecting the reader's expectations for how the scene will play out, catching them off guard with a surprise, and then hammering the physical comedy home with funny posing and expression work. Good stuff!

The anime can't perfectly replicate these paneling tricks, but even so, there are lots of ways it could communicate Denji's kick and Aki's pain to make it funny. Other productions might change the background to an expressionistic solid shade, throw on a dramatic spotlight effect, or distort Aki's face to look even more pained and surprised—all common anime techniques. But the show mainly portrays the events in the same order as the manga, with the main interpretive moves being an inserted cut of Denji running toward Aki (which takes away from the manga's surprise reveal) and slow-mo on Aki's pained expression. There's little about the scene that's directed to feel funny—the drab background, realistic lighting, on-model expressions, and metered pacing all feel of a piece with the rest of the story, rather than a departure from it like in the manga. The show does make one move in the name of comedy by including a ding sound effect whenever Denji's foot connects, but even this is a direct interpretation of the manga's in-panel sound effect. Your mileage may vary with all of this—humor is incredibly subjective—but for me, this adds up to a scene that just doesn't feel as fun to watch as it did to read. 

Given that the show decided to adapt most of the manga's humor and action beat-for-beat, it's hard not to wish for a looser stylistic approach at times, one that emphasizes the manga's grindhouse grit rather than trying to paint over it. It's easy to imagine an adaptation closer to Mob Psycho 100, which foregoes realism for kaleidoscopic visual feasts and ambitious action scenes, or even Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which has a semi-realistic baseline style that explodes into flamboyant color for dramatic effect. Animation is a medium with limitless visual potential, one that allows for pointed departures from reality, which means the pursuit of grounded realism puts a limit on what it can portray. For a manga defined by its sense of adventure and experimentation, realism is a major change.

Pacing and Faithfulness

Paragraphs ago, I mentioned that reading an average chapter of the Chainsaw Man manga probably takes about five minutes on average, meaning the entire series would take eight hours to complete. Let's compare that with the anime. The first season is adapted at a steady clip of a little more than three chapters per twenty-minute episode (I'm not including openings and endings, and also not counting the premier, which covers the triple-length first chapter). Since the first twelve episodes got us through Chapter 38, it seems likely that there's enough material for a thirty-episode series in total at this pace—roughly three seasons, or perhaps two seasons and a movie.

Here's the important number: if they adapt the whole manga at this pace, the entire series will run about eleven hours. Even before openings, endings, and the like, that's an entire feature-length movie longer than it takes to experience the manga in full. 

We've already talked about how the manga's being adapted very faithfully, which begs the question of what's taking up so much extra time in the anime. The answer is not that much. Yes, there are a few new scenes added in the anime, as well as a couple small manga scenes that were removed (specifically from Chapter 2), but for the most part, what we're seeing is the exact same material from the manga presented on screen. It just moves slower.

Some of this is unavoidable. Spoken dialogue (especially acted dialogue) will always be slower than reading text on a page. But there is also an intentional decision from scene to scene to space things out and linger on the lines—after all, if they wanted to, the anime's production team could make the dialogue move as fast as The Tatami Galaxy. That choice for dialogue is just one part of the overall effect, because they also choose to pad the episodes with atmospheric direction, to linger on fluidly drawn motions and movements. Tiny panels that Fujimoto drew for flow might be expanded into five-second animation cuts, and three-page fight scenes might last minutes at a time.

On an individual scene level, the pacing has some surprising effects. Perhaps the apotheosis of this is the infamous boob-grabbing scene, where Power allows Denji to fondle her chest as a reward for saving her. In the manga, this was a masterpiece of awkward anticlimax, a scene that palpably (pun not intended) conveyed how brief and unrewarding the encounter felt to Denji. Yet in the anime, it's drawn out for over a minute and bolstered by thumping background music and generous animation. It almost feels like the anime was trying to sell the scene as legitimate fanservice, rather than the subversion of fanservicey tropes that the manga was clearly aiming for. The anime's pacing doesn't just drag some scenes out—occasionally, it misses the manga's entire point.

A couple central dramatic beats, especially some of the character backstories, also feel like they lack impact compared to the manga. Let's look at the portion of Power's backstory at the end of the Bat Devil fight. This scene is composed in the manga to contrast how Power treats most animals (food) with how she treats Meowy (friend). This effect is communicated without dialogue by the small, stock-photo-esque panels introducing each animal and the narrow, rectangular panels of her eating, contrasted with the big ending panel of her smiling at Meowy.

In terms of what information is presented in what order, the show animates this scene closely to the manga, down to the rhythm of presenting a living animal immediately followed by Power eating it. However, it takes liberties with the individual shots, spending time to animate each step of this sequence. We linger on Power drinking from a decapitated bird and summoning an axe to fight a bear, then end with an even longer shot of her talking to Meowy as he climbs on her. This is part of the show's broader tendency to fill in the gaps between certain manga panels while steering away from creating totally new scenes. This might seem wise, yet in this instance, the manga's version is powerful because of the things it leaves out. Only the important information is present in the manga: a bird exists, now it's food; a cow exists, now it's food; a bear exists, now it's food; but then here's Meowy, a creature outside of the cycle of killing and sustenance that defines Power's life. The anime displays this same information in the same order, lovingly expanding upon each moment, and yet it doesn't quite capture the full effect of the manga, the specific contrast that Fujimoto highlighted.

This effect also feels pronounced for me in Aki's backstory. In the manga, this was one of the first scenes where Fujimoto's storytelling economy really impressed me, getting across an entire family dynamic, minor character arc, and unexpected ending in a scant ten pages, all while tying into a conversation between Makima and Denji in the present. 

This exact scene—again, beat for beat, line for line—is recaptured in the anime while extended to two minutes, and yet instead of feeling like an impressive feat of storytelling craft, it feels just serviceable. There are a few added shots—a perspective shot of cold hands, a moment of snow blowing off a pine tree, Aki's little brother waving before going into the house—but nothing substantial. This scene in the anime truly looks beautiful, but in this longer format, where the exact same information is presented over a longer period of time, the sheer faithfulness to the manga sometimes makes the anime feel sparse. Fujimoto writes and draws with economy to get across a lot of story in a brief page count, but when that same material is drawn out across minutes of air time, it feels like there's something missing. If nothing is added to a scene except for the time it takes to complete it, can you say that anything has been added at all?

This builds like a nesting doll into what we see in the anime: individual scenes tend to run a bit long, which means each episode can't fit in as much material, which means the big plot developments come slower. On a macro level, episodes sometimes come out feeling like the team simply superglued multiple chapters together, rather than reworking the material so each episode has a clear arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Fujimoto's individual manga chapters are structured to deliver information and action at a specific drip, usually before ending on cliffhanger endings, but these episodes often end arbitrarily, cutting off arcs unresolved in the middle. Perhaps some viewers might've felt the pacing was better if the Bat Devil fight finished in one episode, or if Aki got to talk to the Future Devil in Episode 10 instead of lingering on all those slow walking scenes.

When we zoom all the way out, the broader picture of the anime we've gotten becomes clear. This is a show that looks cinematic and polished, that's extremely faithful to the manga, and that often meters out the source material more slowly without adding anything substantially new. It's a show that feels very realistic, which is an important piece of what made the Chainsaw Man manga work in the first place, yet just one piece. In the show's pursuit of those things at the exclusion of everything else, it loses some of the grimy, weird, and brilliant sides of the original that made it more than the sum of its parts.

The Future

I should probably clarify that I still think the anime is great.

In the time it's taken me to write this piece, a Japanese petition to redo the anime garnered headlines when it broke 2000 signatures, and there's been a bunch of dubious discourse about the show having "bombed" because it posted low first-volume Blu-ray sales numbers. These largely feel like bad-faith discussions based on significant misinformation about how the modern anime industry works, but it's inescapable that this show's adaptation has been controversial in some spaces. 

So even though I just spent a few thousand words talking about what has been lost in translation, I want to reiterate what I said earlier: adaptations always require change. I truly respect that this show has a strong directorial vision and has committed so completely to it, even at the expense of some things manga fans hold dear.

Because when the show's approach works? Boy howdy, does it work.

To start with the obvious, the show looks gorgeous. This was obviously an ambitious and well-supported production, to the extent that such a thing can exist in modern TV anime, and it shows in the incredible, generous animation and filmic camerawork. The action scenes and stiff CGI smooth out as the show goes on, allowing individual animators to flex on high-octane animation cuts and choreography that deviates more often from the manga. And all throughout, there are little touches and production details that draw you in as much as they set the tone—the rings on beer glasses at the bar, the post-processing effects on the neon city signs, the deep shading and color work in nighttime scenes. For some moments, like Power and Meowy laying on the roof of a house, the pseudo-realistic approach lends the show an ethereal, larger-than-life quality that adds to its poignancy.

The realistic tone extends past the animation and proves to have some interesting advantages elsewhere. Denji in the manga came across as a gremlin basically from the get-go, yet I found his his more muted anime portrayal (both his animation and his voice acting by Toya Kikunosuke) to be more immediately sympathetic, a more consistent and believable human being. And on a similar note, I have nothing but great things to say about Kusunoki Tomori's unexpectedly soft-spoken Makima and Ai Fairouz's pitch-perfect Power. Even the slow moment-to-moment pacing, for all the ways I think it's a flawed approach, has had the interesting effect of emphasizing certain thematic notes that I hadn't picked up before, like how Denji's early motivation to cop a feel is a twisted mirror of Power's deep, unspoken yearning for connection.

When all of these clear strengths combine, we get moments that are undeniably compelling in ways that can match and occasionally outpace the manga. The vending machine scene where Denji agrees to save Meowy in exchange for touching Power's chest is cleverly adapted, using quick back-and-forth cuts to build Denji's fake change of heart to a funny crescendo. The thumb-biting scene surpasses the manga in sheer steaminess, with Makima's delicate hand animation and ASMR-style voice delivering a sensuality and tactility that few anime achieve. Shun Enkoido's remarkable sixth episode, covering the hotel arc, leans into the manga's horror elements to great effect—its dense storyboards and determined pacing build a sense of increasing tension that reaches a fever pitch for the climax, which takes full advantage of some grotesque animation for the Devil's body-horror transformation and Kobeni's knifepoint meltdown. And much of the more dramatic material, especially Himeno's graveside flashbacks and conversations with a younger Aki, are well served by the show's slow, mournful pacing and deliberate color palate. More than anything else, this is the area where I think the show is most poised to succeed in the future: there are plenty of painful moments coming, and the show seems very willing to capture those and let the audience steep in those emotions.

Really, the main lingering qualm I have with the show is its devotion to faithfully portraying the manga's material onscreen with very few changes. For me, it's the thing keeping this adaptation from being a true classic instead of just a really good show. Fortunately, as we've gone on, that precise faithfulness has been bent more often, especially as the show has allowed entirely new material to be added. 

Most of these new parts have been the best parts of the series for me. Sometimes they're small—a still frame in Episode 6 showing Himeno staring at her own reflection in Aki's blood, communicating the responsibility she feels about his getting hurt. Sometimes they're much bigger—Aki's nearly two-minute morning routine from Episode 4, featuring lavish, careful animation of him making coffee and doing laundry, captures the tidiness and no-nonsense responsibility central to his personality, as well as establishing a relaxed tone before Power's rude interruption. These aren't just reinterpretations of shots that we saw in the manga, the way Power's animal-killing spree was earlier. These are new moments that are being used to deepen the show's thematic points, to tell us more about these characters and provide new points of connection with them. They aren't just additions to the story—they're enhancements.

Assuming this show gets a second season (and there's little reason to believe it won't), I can only hope it continues giving its animators, storyboarders, and directors more room to interpret and expand on the material. Because the best part of this first season, and perhaps the best episode of television from 2022, is Goshozono Shouta's transcendent Episode 8, which handles the manga's first major pivot point by significantly departing from the source material. It begins with a brand-new scene, a slow, beautifully animated reinterpretation of the previous episode's cliffhanger from Himeno's perspective, bringing her beautifully to life even as the framing and animation portray just how un-sexy her blackout drunk come-ons to Denji are. Many of the following scenes utilize cinematic techniques to amazing, intentional effect—the most obvious may be the post-processed dolly zoom when Makima puts her sucker in Denji's mouth, but I also love everything about Makima's train ride, from the pan down the car when the train is introduced to a just-barely-in-frame weapon before a certain big moment. Yet it's the episode's second half that really hits home: the montage, with Kensuke Ushio's mournful lullaby contrasting the impending violence; the full cuts to black for the first appearance of the Curse Devil; and then, of course, the ending. In the episode's final minutes, as the Ghost Devil's many arms emerge from the darkness and Himeno's voice takes over, the scene we see play out is radically different from the source's sharp brutality. It is a moment that is beautiful and grotesque in equal measure, and one that is deeply, lingeringly sad.

This eighth episode brought a lot to the table in its twenty minutes, capturing a mixture of lust, discomfort, violence, beauty, and pathos all in short order, and in ways that were often completely new to the show. In deviating so hard from the manga while leaning into the aspects of the show that already worked well, it built something that felt more faithful to the soul of Chainsaw Man than any episode before it.

Chainsaw Man's first season has finished, and the show will almost certainly continue. Regardless of how it happens, I can only hope future adaptations will follow the lead of Episode 8, because that is the adaptation I think the entirety of Chainsaw Man deserves. Yet even if its second season delivers more of the same slow, realistic, faithful adaptation, I think it'll turn out okay. The manga still exists, after all, here to give plenty of readers the punchy first reading experience that hooked me and so many others. And in its pursuit of realism and faithfulness, the show gave us something just as capable while being quite different—two windows into the same piece of fiction, two different angles of a story seen through a transparent prism.

I'm glad there's room for both to exist.