news culture Chainsaw Man: Shueisha celebrates the success of the MAPPA anime
Among the major releases of 2022 on the anime side, Chainsaw Man has clearly proven to be one of the best manga adaptations of this year. MAPPA’s work has sublimated Tatsuki Fujimoto’s lineage to bring to life an excellent, wacky, twisted show, with scary clashes and full of twists and turns. A work that has logically seduced fans and that Shueisha has decided to celebrate with a short video this week.
Chainsaw Man: The Anime of 2022?
If you follow manga and anime news, it’s hard not to miss the Chainsaw Man phenomenon. The adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s work by MAPPA, the hottest animation studio of the moment, was a hit on the networks and streaming platform Crunchyroll.
A whole box, or almost. If the anime was allowed to inflate the sales of the manga and monopolizing the top of the Crunchyroll charts (4.9/5 average for more than 190,000 reviews, a record for the platform), some fans would find fault with the MAPPA studio. A petition has been started to redo the animeunder the pretense that the seiyuu (Japanese voice actors) do not faithfully represent the characters and that MAPPA’s drawing would distort Fujimoto’s line too much. So far, this petition has collected just over 2,600 signatures. Not enough to spoil the party.
La Shueisha celebrates anime
As the anime ended with the release of the twelfth episode this week, Shueisha, Japan’s most famous publisher, who oversees the publication of Weekly Shōnen Jump and oversees Chainsaw Man, celebrated the anime’s success with a short video (available in the player at the top of the article). The video features artwork drawn by Tatsuki Fujimoto with quotes from each of the characters and ends with an animated image of Reze, a central character from the arc the anime ended on.
Nothing is certain about the adaptation of the “Bomb Girl Arc”. The anime just ended with a brief introduction of Reze to meet Denji. Those last few frames, both in the anime and in this video, suggest that MAPPA’s work may continue. A good half of the first part of the manga is ready to be adapted. It remains to be seen whether the success of this first season, as remarkable as it is, will lead to the launch of new episodes or not.
As a reminder, the anime ended around chapters 38-39 of the manga (volume 5). If you want to continue the adventure through the manga, you can find all the following chapters in the Shueisha Manga Plus application. Everything is available for free. In the meantime, we’re posting the opening of this first season here, just to end 2022 in the best possible way.
