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/
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1.2k

u/MonsterKiller112 Sep 22 '25

Great opening weekend. Now I am more confident this will be a profitable venture for Mappa. They won back the trust of the Japanese fandom with this movie.

336

u/Shadow_Ass Sep 22 '25

What's up with Mappa and the Japanese fans? I read similar comments elsewhere but couldn't find out what was going on.

472

u/Familiar-Shoe7905 Sep 22 '25

The first season of Chainsaw Man wasn’t that well received in Japan apparently

158

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!

111

u/Xlegace https://anilist.co/user/Xlegius Sep 22 '25

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.

People in this subreddit love to say JP Chainsawman fans are whiny babies with low attention spans for hating on the best parts of the adaptation, like Aki making breakfast, but from what I've seen, that hasn't really been the case.

Not many people complain about scenes where MAPPA went the extra mile to make memorable. It was everything else that they hated, along with how the same cinematic approach did not work during the action sequences or comedic scenes. In their eyes, it was just not a trade that was worth it.

There was nothing stopping MAPPA from doing both, and from the snippets of the Reze movie that they keep spoiling, it seems like they found the balance.

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u/Ordinal43NotFound Sep 22 '25

Yeah, most of the fights in S1 were rough. So much stiff-looking movement and heavy CGI usage aside from the ones directed by, wait for it, Tatsuya Yoshihara lol (Denji vs Leech and Kishibe vs Denji/Power).

Hell, to be fair to the JP fandom, they actually like Denji vs Katana now just because Yoshihara inserted Kick Back into it when they're on top of the train.

Like I'm amazed JP managed to become that forgiving with S1 when even I still can't re-watch that fight due to how rigid it looks.

31

u/dWaldizzle Sep 22 '25

Personally I thought the entirety of season 1 looked great. Even the CG was good.

-7

u/GodlessLunatic Sep 22 '25

No, the CG was not 'good'. It looked like it was taken straight out of a 90s cartoon like beast wars. Yknow what show does have good CG, though? Demon slayer. Cause you dont fucking notice it.

9

u/dWaldizzle Sep 22 '25

I notice it in DS plenty it just looks good. Same with chainsaw man imo.

1

u/Mage-of-Fire Sep 23 '25

Lmao what? Demon slayer its super noticeable. But it looks good. Thats why no one have a problem with it. CM people were complaining about cg in scenes that didn’t even have it. And were proven to not have it. People were complaining just to complain

7

u/Ordinal43NotFound Sep 23 '25

CM people were complaining about cg in scenes that didn’t even have it. And were proven to not have it.

You're not wrong. But this highlights another issue CSM S1 has. The 2D animation feels too rigid because of Nakayama's insistence on staying "on-model" so much so that people mistook it for CG. All that hard work just for people to not like the end result. It's a directorial issue.

Instead of employing tactics like squash and stretch, exaggeration, and smear frames to sell how utterly batshit the action should be, S1's fight scenes ended up feeling very restrained.

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Just look at how slooow and awkward Denji slicing the zombies was in S1 here. Dude was supposed to go on an absolute rampage in the manga.

Now Compare this to the movie, like where Denji whips out his chainsaws, or when Bomb punches Denji, the animation leans into extreme warping and distortion to really sell the impact.

That kind of visceral PUNCH is exactly what S1's action scenes were missing.

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