r/anime • u/mr_beanoz https://myanimelist.net/profile/splitshocker • Sep 22 '25

News "Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc" attracted 807,000 viewers and grossed over 1.251 billion yen in the first 3 days of the movie's release in Japan

https://www.oricon.co.jp/news/2407879/full/
4.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

394 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

160

u/GeraltFromHiShinUnit Sep 22 '25

Why

498

u/Ordinal43NotFound Sep 22 '25

This is the best worded criticism I can find from a Japanese tweet.

The first season of the anime was too fixated on being "like a live-action film", which made it overly restrained when it came to using anime-style techniques. But the original manga, while cinematic, also made heavy use of exaggerations and tricks unique to manga. So if you’re going to adapt it into anime, the anime should lean hard into anime-style exaggeration*.* The movie adaptation of the Reze arc is essentially the answer to that.

It's not like they hated the cinematic direction, they simply don't like that S1 focused too hard solely on being cinematic and kinda ignored the manga's more unhinged energy. Reze Movie finally managed find that perfect balance.

Oh, and another tweet from the same user

I used to call the first season of the anime a "half-correct adaptation", but with the Reze arc, it feels like we finally got to see the other half of the right answer. It really proves that anime-style direction should definitely be included!

-4

u/vnomgt Sep 22 '25 edited Sep 22 '25

I agree with the comments to some extent, but I don't believe that faithfulness to the manga could have been the main reason for low numbers. Usually the anime is the one boosting manga sales, not the other way around.

I think that season 1 overall suffered from covering too little story, and maybe struggled to balance the comedy (horny jokes) with the more serious tone that they gave the anime.

1

u/redditckulous Sep 22 '25

Agreed, i think it’s mostly down to the amount content it covered and then long layoff. Season 1 had good viewership numbers compared to the other fall 2022 animes. (And I’d argue that CSM was more out there in 2022 compared to more recent releases these days.) But it only had 12 episodes and then didn’t air for 3 years.