Chainsaw Man: (2022) (Full Season) (Anime)
April 7, 2023 9:38 AM - Season 1 (Full Season) - Subscribe

Following a betrayal, a young man left for the dead is reborn as a powerful devil-human hybrid after merging with his pet devil and is soon enlisted into an organization dedicated to hunting devils.

Netflix
posted by porpoise (7 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I like this one. The art is technically good, stylistically strong. Gory but with levity. Interesting premise.

Anyone have recommendations for similar? Asking for a friend who also enjoyed the Cyberpunk spinoff anime.
posted by porpoise at 9:39 AM on April 7, 2023


Anyone have recommendations for similar?

Just the description of this sounds kind of similar to Dorohedoro (also on Netflix), but I don't think I'd call that cyberpunk-y.
posted by LionIndex at 10:05 AM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]


Anyone have recommendations for similar?

I don't have an exact match to those, but maybe one of these would have enough overlap that your friend would enjoy:

- Akudama Drive was a 2020 anime that is cyberpunk with style and violence for days (but with characters that are a bit more archetypes, though with meaningful payoff)
- the new Trigun Stampede for the visuals and deep stakes mediated by humor (though that is more scifi + western, and less grounded in modern)
- Jujutsu Kaisen is another wildly popular manga adapted to anime with amazing animation (but less humor)
- Demon Slayer is more of a traditional Japanese setting + demons with amazing animation (but has some anime tropes and anime-style humor)
- Attack on Titan is intense with definite gore with huge titans who eat people and seems to be making a commentary about the motivations behind war (but has only very occasional levity, has not yet finished, and I think season 2 is a bit of a low spot before it picks up again)
posted by past unusual at 11:48 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]


Dorohedoro is probably the closest to CSM, but Fujimoto’s pretty tough to match when he’s bringing his A-game, and CSM is his leaning-into-commercial-viability A-game.

The team behind the anime is a 50/50 mix of MAPPA’s best and their most-promisings - and yeah, the director was one of the latter group from the Jujutsu Kaisen team.

Akudama Drive has a faint bit of attitude similarity (early Tarantino), and is steeped in cyberpunk, but in terms of style/substance it’s a pretty shallow single season anime-only affair. Both Chainsaw Man and Dorohedoro are drawing from deep, deep wells of WTFery in the source material.

Some context without giving anything away: CSM’s first 7 anime episodes are the manga’s prologue chapters, a generic shonen power fantasy headfake that Fujimoto used to get his story published in Shonen Jump. What follows after - from episode 8 through a hypothetical episode 36 in a hypothetical Season 3 - is the viewer equivalent to falling down an endless flight of stairs. From that big inflection point, the story is just non-stop rugpulls: if you think “oh, I recognize what’s going for here,” you’re likely about to be proven wrong.

But yeah, Fujimoto is probably the closest thing to a Mozart in the world of manga currently. Impossibly good, impossibly young, and this is the only time he’s made a real push for commercial relevancy. There’s just not going to be a lot like it out there.
posted by Ryvar at 1:42 AM on April 8, 2023 [3 favorites]


Oh and if, god help you, you’re actually into Chainsaw Man’s precise flavor of awkward teenage sexuality, then Gleipnir is basically like distilling that and injecting it straight into your veins. Unfortunately its promising initial burst of WTFery proves superficial and it’s clear the story got away from the mangaka.
posted by Ryvar at 1:49 AM on April 8, 2023


Aki making coffee is very aspirational.
posted by betweenthebars at 7:29 PM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]


The production quality of both the Aki making coffee scene and the Himeno post-binge sequence (from 18:05 to 25:50) are aspirational for any studio not named ufotable. MAPPA’s really been gunning hard for the #1 slot ever since their turn at Attack on Titan, with Chainsaw Man their most aggressive push to date… but one look at Demon Slayer’s new episode this week and even if you’re not a fan (and I am not particularly a fan) it’s pretty obvious ufotable’s position is secure for a while yet.
posted by Ryvar at 11:14 AM on April 10, 2023


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