Chainsaw Man

Watch Episodes

Add to My List

Add to Favorites

Alternative Titles

Japanese: チェンソーマン

More titles

Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 12

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Oct 12, 2022 to Dec 28, 2022

Premiered: Fall 2022

Broadcast: Wednesdays at 00:00 (JST)

Producers: dugout

Licensors: None found, add some

Studios: MAPPA

Source: Manga

Genres: Action, Fantasy

Theme: Gore

Demographic: Shounen

Duration: 24 min. per ep.

Rating: R - 17+ (violence & profanity)

Statistics

Score: 8.51¹ (scored by 831,292 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #130²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #77

Members: 1,508,797

Favorites: 46,805

Available At

Official Site

@CHAINSAWMAN_PR

Resources

AniDB

ANN

Streaming Platforms

Crunchyroll

Netflix

More services

May be unavailable in your region.

8.51

Ranked #130Popularity #77Members 1,508,797

Episodes: /12

Synopsis

Denji is robbed of a normal teenage life, left with nothing but his deadbeat father's overwhelming debt. His only companion is his pet, the chainsaw devil Pochita, with whom he slays devils for money that inevitably ends up in the yakuza's pockets. All Denji can do is dream of a good, simple life: one with delicious food and a beautiful girlfriend by his side. But an act of greedy betrayal by the yakuza leads to Denji's brutal, untimely death, crushing all hope of him ever achieving happiness.

Remarkably, an old contract allows Pochita to merge with the deceased Denji and bestow devil powers on him, changing him into a hybrid able to transform his body parts into chainsaws. Because Denji's new abilities pose a significant risk to society, the Public Safety Bureau's elite devil hunter Makima takes him in, letting him live as long as he obeys her command. Guided by the promise of a content life alongside an attractive woman, Denji devotes everything and fights with all his might to make his naive dreams a reality.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Edit

Background

Chainsaw Man was released in four volumes on Blu-ray and DVD from January 27, 2023 to April 28, 2023. It adapts chapters 1-38 of the original manga.

Episode Videos

Edit

Related Anime

Adaptation:	Chainsaw Man
Other:	Zanki, In the Back Room, Jouzai, Dainouteki na Rendezvous, Fight Song
Sequel:	Chainsaw Man Movie: Reze-hen

Tsuda, Kenjirou
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Seshimo, Keisuke

Producer

Nakai, Yuusuke

Assistant Producer

Nakayama, Ryuu

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation

Koizumi, Kisuke

Sound Director

Edit

Opening Theme

"KICK BACK" by 米津玄師

Edit

Ending Theme

	"CHAINSAW BLOOD" by Vaundy (eps 1)
	"残機" by ZUTTOMAYO (eps 2)
	"刃渡り2億センチ" by マキシマムザホルモン (eps 3)
	"錠剤" by TOOBOE (eps 4)
	"インザバックルーム" by Syudou (eps 5)
	"大脳的なランデブー" by Kanaria (eps 6)
	"ちゅ、多様性。" by ano (eps 7)
	"first death" by TK from 凛として時雨 (eps 8)
	"Deep down" by Aimer (eps 9)
	"DOGLAND" by PEOPLE 1 (eps 10)
	"バイオレンス" by QUEEN BEE (eps 11)
	"ファイトソング" by Eve (eps 12)

More theme songs

Reviews

Apr 9, 2023

TheNinthRequiem

Recommended

Chainsaw Man is not overhyped, not in the slightest. I’ll repeat it again for the people in the back. Chainsaw Man deserves the hype and is every bit as good as it’s made out to be. Maybe it doesn’t have as many universally appealing ideas as Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen. And its much more prickly exterior might serve as a barrier to entry for fans that have grown accustomed to the generic shounen-type stories that are regurgitated every season like that once-cute now-tiresome Christmas ornament that your family brings out every year. But I believe that it is exactly that prickly exterior derived from ...

Open

Gift

Dec 27, 2022

fidelinator

Mixed Feelings

Funny

What by all rights should’ve been the anime of the year, turned out to be nothing more than just another bland adaption led by a corporate oriented studio like Mappa.

The focus of this review won’t just be anti-Mappa rhetoric, as I’m sure people are tired of all the unneeded controversy surrounding their last couple adaptations, and I myself don’t really see Mappa as some anime boogie-man and do enjoy some of their adaptations. Chainsaw Man just wasn’t one of them. I love Chainsaw Man, and this review might be viewed by some as just another unsatisfied manga reader hating on the anime, but hear ... me out.

My biggest issue with the anime is the totally uninspired and bland direction and art direction. Take one look at the volume covers and official colored version of the Chainsaw Man manga. What do you see? Vibrant, saturated colors with dynamic poses, something with clear artistic taste and passion. While in the anime, the viewer is greeted with a mute, desaturated color palette that leaves zero impression on the viewer and simply abides by Mappa’s trend of using such color palettes. Now, some might say, dull and grey colors represent the harsh and dystopian setting of the Chainsaw Man world. But ask yourself, is this creative? If you go to Pinterest and search up pictures of east-Asian streets and alleyways, something I highly recommend, you’ll find beautifully shot images of these places all with vibrant colors that do an even better job of displaying the dystopian setting. Now I’m not saying it should look like the Wano anime in One Piece, where the colors are purposefully cartoonish, just something resembling a more Cyberpunk aesthetic. And why not? The official colored manga is colored like this and it looks great and removes nothing from the story. All Mappa’s greyish colors do is make any frame from Chainsaw Man look like any other anime, with no distinguishable features besides, like, the characters. Specifically, it would’ve been mostly fine if the boring Mappa-style colors were limited to just the environment and regular scenes, but fight scenes? I think they should take notes from Toei on this, using color and dynamic lighting to amplify the visual impact of fight scenes, because, let’s be honest, Chainsaw Man’s fight scenes rely heavily on spectacle and insaneness, would greatly compliment the anime adaptation and actually make it an even better experience than the manga.

On that note, this anime, literally, and I mean this, does not add anything new to the Chainsaw Man experience. Except music, but we’ll touch on that later. In the first episode alone, during the first action scene, the viewer is greeted with an obvious CGI Denji, whose animation alot of the time just looks plain unnatural and overdone. 2D anime doesn’t usually have that much movement, and suddenly introducing a heavily dynamic 3D model into the scene really distracts. Especially when that 3D model is suffering from aliasing. The choreography during the fights is honestly pretty good, but they do take some creative liberties (which I completely support, if it’s done better than the manga), where they do their own shots and angles instead of adapting the manga 1:1. They do remove some rather iconic panels from the manga in their adaptation, and seeing how most of the anime is just a 1:1 adaptation, with some variations in angles and detail, all I can ask is why? Why remove some of the iconic spectacle if you’re going to keep everything else?

The cast. I did say my biggest problem was the direction and art direction, but the thing that annoyed me the most was the cast. Why does Makima sound like a 12 year old girl? Are they trying to make her sound cold and emotionless with a superficial element of kindness and an inviting nature? It would’ve succeeded, if Makima literally wasn’t built up as this dominating and controlling (hint hint) figure who Denji essentially treats as his master. Whenever she says something like “I don’t need a dog who says no.”, why should anyone take her seriously when she sounds like a child? When we had that rather explicit scene with her and Denji in the office, with great emphasis on Makima’s physical appeal, I just personally didn’t buy it. One of the worst things an anime can do is fail at creating convincing characters, which is what they did with Makima, who is arguably the most important character of the story besides Denji. And on the topic of Makima, why did they make her smile during the train scene and the scene at the mountain shrine? That was an unneeded change that just simply screams cheap attempts at creating a “creepy” character. “Oh wow, she’s smiling, but doing a totally nefarious thing, how original!!!”.

Now many of the cast members are perfect castings in my opinion, like Aki and Himeno. Denji is fine but I wouldn’t mind if they changed him. Now where the real spice touches my tongue is Kobeni. Kobeni’s voice acting performance, and I don’t say this lightly, is genuinely the worst performance I’ve ever heard in my life. It actually pained me to sit down and listen to them butcher Kobeni’s character like this. She’s originally built as this timid and shy girl, something like Sengoku Nadeko, but with a comedic twist, while the people at Mappa thought it would be funny to have her be the loudest most obnoxious, physically ear-damaging character I’ve ever seen on screen. The worst example of this is the scene where she goes “ehhhhh?”. Mappa probably thought this would be the funniest moment in anime history. It wasn’t. Even in her non-dramatic scenes where she’s just talking, she sounds so synthetic and fake. Obviously this is just a personal gripe, and butchering just one character isn’t the end of the world for an anime adaptation, it was just something that needed to be said.

The music is great. The opening visuals are awesome, and the endings are some of the most artistically creative and passionate things I’ve seen in any anime. Does that add to the anime experience? Somewhat. But mostly it removes from it. Why? Because when you start an episode and are greeted with something with clear artistic vision and creativity, like the opening, and immediately afterwards you go back to the bland and lifeless animation of the actual anime, it feels like a slap in the face. Mappa definitely was qualified to make Chainsaw Man, they proved that with the opening and endings, but they chose not to make it anything substantial, and instead went with a safer approach that would appeal to the most amount of people.

And here’s where we get to the meat of the story. This anime is lifeless, corporate, and feels like an adaptation made to make the studio money, and to sell more of the manga. It doesn’t feel like a passion project directed by artists, because it isn’t, it’s just another mass produced piece of media meant to appeal to the greater anime audience. I think the opening song itself is proof of this, I’m not going to go into whether or not I like the song, and openings don’t really have any relevancy when it comes to the quality of an anime, but choosing an artist who’s known for making songs for My Hero Academia is something that in my opinion paints the direction behind the anime in a bad light, as it just proves to me they’re going with the safest approach possible with this adaptation. And they are. There’s genuinely more creative vision and innovative approach in the action scenes of the Wano anime of One Piece than there is in Chainsaw Man. There’s a couple cool shots here and there, one I really liked was Denji doing the Levi Beyblade thing when fighting the zombie devil. A lot of the time though, it’s just CGI models smacking each other with their hands.

So in conclusion, this anime is definitely carried by its source material, it adds nothing new and does absolutely nothing that justifies it being worth watching after reading the manga, which honestly, just makes it a failed adaptation overall, and in some cases, like the ear-torture voice acting of some characters, it makes it a worse experience. Why is it like this? Money. A safer approach to an adaptation makes it more popular and easier to consume for most people. Chainsaw Man honestly didn’t need this, if we look at the manga sales at its peak, it could’ve easily been an amplified and crazy adaptation, something like OPM season 1, and been just as popular, but it ended up being a washed down version of Jujutsu Kaisen, in terms of adaptation quality.

What about the people who haven’t read the manga? Well, if this is your first time experiencing Chainsaw Man, the anime does a decent job at recreating the first time experience from the manga. Personally, I would still not find it as good of an experience, as the voice acting and bland color scheme and lifelessness of this adaptation would’ve been bad regardless of if I read the manga or not. I would’ve given this anime an 8/10 if I hadn’t read the manga. Because, honestly the source material is really good. The characters, the world, the fights, the political allegories and subtle but deep character arc of Denji is something I look for in any good piece of media. And honestly I mostly touched on my negative opinions of this anime during this review, which revolved around its quality as an adaptation, and not as a full piece of media.

Tldr: The anime adds nothing new to make it worth watching, it’s a lifeless and soulless adaptation that could’ve been an artistic marvel but was made to be an easy to consume piece of media, some of the voice acting is horrendous, and the music is good. As an adaptation, it’s quite bad. If you haven’t read the manga, it’s quite good, yet I still wouldn’t hold it as highly as its source material with this level of adaptation.

Open

Gift

Dec 27, 2022

Marinate1016

Not Recommended

Chainsaw man is the fulfilment of shonen, the zenith of the medium, the apex of creativity…. At least that’s what you thought I’d say, right? In reality, chainsaw man is nothing more than a cheap gimmicky shonen that plays on the horniness of teenaged males, relies on shock value and uses flashy animation to make people overlook the mediocre plot.

For the past 2.5 years now, I’ve heard nothing but incessant hype from CSM stans on twitter and Reddit about how this series is so peak and so gas etc etc., and like most of the things these kids hype up these days, this was overblown. ... It seems like all MAPPA have to do is give kids some sakuga and nice designs and people lose their minds.

The whole idea of a dude getting manipulated by women into doing their bidding simply by being promised sexual favours or a boob grab is so painfully stupid and dull that I genuinely wanted to throw my remote at the tv at points. I love fanservice in anime, but this wasn’t just that. It was something way worse. Throwing up in a dude’s mouth during a kiss, grabbing titties while on a literal shitty toilet, etc. etc. it’s like the show relies on shock value consistently to keep it going. That didn’t resonate with me at all.

Then there’s the makima simps. As I said earlier I’ve seen people hype up this series for years like it was the second coming of Christ and a massive part of that hype was the Makima dog walking memes/cosplays and just general thirsting over her character in general. Of course when we finally got to the anime and got to see her I was underwhelmed. She’s a conniving manipulative obviously evil character that has really no redeeming qualities. For the life of me I can’t see how people fell for her. Even her design is OK at best. This really extends to all the girls in this series too. It’s almost like just how Denji gets manipulated, so too were readers/viewers of this series into falling for these toxic women.

The first half of my review makes me seem like a hater.. well I am. But I still will always give credit where credit is due. There are some scenes in this show that will absolutely knock your socks off and leave your jaw on the floor with how beautifully rendered and animated they are. Some fight scenes in Chainsaw man are just exquisite works of art. We’ve come to expect this from MAPPA and it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the production levels are top notch.

The CGI is pretty wonky at times, but for the most part I think it worked well. The 2D animation and art is obviously incredible. Voice acting castings were good with the exception of Makima who for me had a voice that didn’t really fit her. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it just doesn’t sound right.

Chainsaw Man is one of the most popular anime in recent years and truthfully I can’t understand why. Other than the MAPPA sakuga and Fujimoto twisted fetishes, I don’t see much to speak of from the anime. The story feels like an early 2000s generic shonen rip off that relies on shock value and gore as its primary tools. I know this won’t be a popular opinion or one that receives a lot of backing, but I just don’t think this show is very good. It’s not even top 5 of this season, nonetheless the year.

Chainsaw man gets 6 out of 10.

Open

Gift

More stacks

Interest Stacks

Cultural References and Memes

by Cestlavie_

50 Entries · 617 Restacks

Modern Anime Doesn't Suck

by Ash_li

50 Entries · 162 Restacks

The 50 Most Favorited Anime on MyAnimeList (One Entry per Intellectual Property)

by arinthach

50 Entries · 7 Restacks

More recommendations

Recommendations

View All

More news

Recent News

'Chainsaw Man' Gets Sequel Anime Movie

The Jump Super Stage Red at Jump Festa 2024 announced a sequel anime movie to the television anime adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man manga on Sunday...read more

Dec 16, 2023 10:45 PM by Vindstot | Discuss (45 comments)

'Chainsaw Man' Announces Supporting Cast

The official website of the Chainsaw Man television anime announced on Friday six additional cast members. The anime series adapting Tatsuki Fujimoto's action a...read more

Oct 7, 2022 6:35 AM by DatRandomDude | Discuss (22 comments)

More discussions

Recent Forum Discussion

Poll: Chainsaw Man Episode 2 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) anime-prime - Oct 18, 2022	1,140 replies	by PokefanPT »» Yesterday, 11:39 AM
Poll: Chainsaw Man Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) YoshePlays - Oct 7, 2022	2,656 replies	by PokefanPT »» Apr 25, 12:11 PM
Blu Ray sales aren't everything CreepHazard - Feb 1, 2023	39 replies	by EastIndiaCompany »» Apr 25, 7:30 AM
Poll: Chainsaw Man Episode 9 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) anime-prime - Dec 6, 2022	581 replies	by Dark_zarich »» Apr 21, 10:51 AM
Poll: Chainsaw Man Episode 7 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ... Last Page ) anime-prime - Nov 22, 2022	730 replies	by Dark_zarich »» Apr 21, 9:49 AM

Chainsaw Man

Alternative Titles

Information

Statistics

Available At

Resources

Streaming Platforms

Synopsis

Background

Episode Videos

Visit MALxJapan
MALxJapan -More than just anime-

Related Anime

Characters & Voice Actors

Makima

Power

Denji

Hayakawa, Aki

Reze

Higashiyama, Kobeni

Pochita

Himeno

Angel Devil

Kishibe

Staff

Opening Theme

Ending Theme

Reviews

Interest Stacks

Recommendations

Recent News

Recent Forum Discussion

MoreTop Anime

MoreTop Airing Anime

MoreMost Popular Characters

Chainsaw Man

Alternative Titles

Information

Statistics

Available At

Resources

Streaming Platforms

Synopsis

Background

Episode Videos

Visit MALxJapan MALxJapan -More than just anime-

Related Anime

Characters & Voice Actors

Staff

Opening Theme

Ending Theme

Reviews

Interest Stacks

Recommendations

Recent News

Recent Forum Discussion

MoreTop Anime

MoreTop Airing Anime

MoreMost Popular Characters

Visit MALxJapan
MALxJapan -More than just anime-