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.
