Chainsaw Man Review

The craft is not in dispute. MAPPA's production is expensive and deliberate, with film-grain compositing, handheld camera simulation, real-world lens artefacts, and choreography rendered with a physicality that puts it in the top tier of recent television animation, and the Katana Man chase is a genuine sequence. The problem is what that approach costs. Fujimoto's manga runs on abrupt tonal collision, a joke landing one panel after a decapitation, and the anime's cinematic register smooths those cuts into something sombre and even, so Denji's stupidity plays as melancholy rather than comedy.

Replacing a single recurring opening theme with a different ending song each week is a clever idea that fragments the show's identity rather than building one. The voice direction is restrained where the material is loud. Power, the best character in the manga, lands about half the time. What remains is a beautifully made adaptation that misreads its source's rhythm, a stranger and more frustrating failure than a cheap one would have been.