Chainsaw Man

Episode 5

I've been saying for years that the problem with so many anime that try so, so desperately to be “sexy” is that most of them don't seem to have the faintest idea of how sex actually works; or, at the very least, they are so stuck in the routine of repeating tired old tropes and emphasizing cheap fanservice that they utterly lack a truly human element, which is, you know, pretty damned important when it comes to making sex and sexuality interesting to watch on screen. Chainsaw Man, though? Hot damn, Chainsaw Man absolutely gets sex. It cannot be understated how important this is to the success of the show, either, since Denji's likeability as a protagonist lives and dies on the anime's ability to transform his single-minded horniness into a set of genuinely nuanced character traits and motivations, instead of simply being the fodder for lame jokes.

Indeed, this week's Chainsaw Man is proof that all you need to make sex work in animated form—other than having a basic understanding of how real human beings (or human-adjacent demon things) interact with each other on a physical and emotional level—is a bunch of really good jokes. Do you know what a good joke is? The way that this fifth episode animates the hell out of Denji and Power's bathroom grope-off, directing it like it was a scene ripped straight out of an intense psychological thriller, with the punchline being that Denji is so thoroughly underwhelmed by the experience of touching Power's boobies that it breaks his brain for a day. For this scene to be such a killer payoff to such a stupid setup, Chainsaw Man has to understand and execute three distinct ideas simultaneously:

1. The boob touching is inherently funnier when so much perverted manpower has gone into lovingly animating every condescending frame of Power's power moves.

2. Denji's brain freeze is inherently funnier when his expression is shot and framed perfectly across multiple cuts and when the extent of his mental breakdown is dragged to the absolute limit of believability.

3. The real punchline is not Denji being such a perverted idiot that he literally cannot process one iota more of external stimuli for at least twelve hours after squeezing Power's chesticles; it comes when, after all of that Denji's first coherent thought is, “That's it?”

That's the funniest and most wonderful thing about Chainsaw Man, and it's self-evident in episodes that aren't as action heavy. Chainsaw Man as a character might be one of the dumbest little perverts ever to score the title role of a blockbuster television series, but at its core, Chainsaw Man The Anime is very clever. In Denji, Tatsuki Fujimoto has taken a complete joke of a character, one that we've seen waste time and kill brain cells in countless shonen anime over the years, and planted him in a world that feels, for lack of a better word, real. Denji isn't just some wiseass window-peeper with a fetish for Boss Mommy Leash Time; he's a very sad and broken little weirdo who craves love and meaningful human connections like anyone.

It's this careful balance of tone, not to mention the positively wild amounts of directorial flexing on display, that make the episode's other display of flagrant degeneracy so goddamned effective. I am at a loss to remember the last time an anime was allowed to be so deviously lewd—and I mean honestly, truly deranged with sexual tension—as the scene between Denji and Makima. Sure, the woman is so obviously leading Denji by his meat leash that it's honestly kind of cruel to watch her work him so effortlessly, but to Makima's credit, she's giving Denji some good advice. Sex stuff is better when it's with a person you get; it's what makes such simple acts as Denji rubbing Makima's earlobe or Makima nibbling the memory of her bite onto Denji's fingertip a thousand times sexier than 99% of every “ecchi” anime that has ever been made. It's a lesson that allows Denji to grow ever so slightly into a more mature and likable protagonist. Yeah, sure, a horny and neglected kid who spent most of his life pining for any condiment to add to his nightly bread slices is going to get overloaded with all of this attention. He's obviously going to fall head-over-heels for the woman who is so clearly using his balls to bypass his brain. You can't fault the kid for trying to live his best life, though!

If you ever needed proof that Chainsaw Man is operating on another level, though, consider that every word I just wrote only covered two scenes of this episode—can you imagine wringing legitimately interesting themes and artistic observations out of the likes of MHA's Mineta, or—Sweet Merciful Anime Jesus forbid—fucking Zenitsu? I haven't even covered the haunting flashback that reveals Aki's tragic encounter with the Gun Devil's apocalyptic powers or the hilarious Denji/Power dynamic that develops once the former has finally recovered from fondling the latter's felon-melons. I could go on for even more paragraphs about the cool and scary way that fear and the proliferation of culture-wide panic is the source of power for creatures like the Gun Devil, but I suspect we'll be able to cover that even further down the road. We even get some of that precious Himeno and Kobeni screen time! Any episode that gives Himeno and Kobeni more screen time is automatically a Great Fucking Episode Of Chainsaw Man™.

I've seen some folks lamenting that Chainsaw Man wasn't the anime they expected based on all of the hype, but I hope by now they've come to realize that it might just be even better than the version of CSM that got built up in their minds by all of the trailers and fanart. This is a show that is just as good at being horny-yet-somehow-elevated trash art as it is at being a masterfully macabre splatterfest, and it's still a great time when its dick and its chainsaws have been tucked firmly into their proverbial pants/arm holes. It's a good-ass story, plain and simple, and it's one of the best looking and sounding good-ass stories to grace our screens in quite some time is icing on the cake.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Power's Playlist: How does every new ED keep getting better? “In the Back Room,” courtesy of syudou, is another banger of a track, but the wild visuals elevate this ending to the new #1 spot in my rankings. I'm a sucker for surreal visuals. Not only does this creepy credits sequence carry on the mood of the sketchy-as-hell endless hotel that Division 4 has found themselves in, but the tableaus are all beautifully drawn and animated. I will be watching this one on repeat for the next week.

• Kids Say the Denji-est Things! Our titular shit-boy has been hogging the spotlight here for too long, so I'm going to give the Best Line of the Week Award to “If you misbehave, I can always choke you to death,” if only because I can acutely hear the cries of fanboys and fangirls the world over, all of them yelling, “Please!”

• In other fun news, according to Tatsuki Fujimoto's own Twitter account, the prank that Denji and Power pulled on him was apparently…putting shit on his nose? That's, um…yeah, that's pretty screwed up, though I will forever be haunted by the question that this revelation poses: Was it Meowy's dookie that they wiped on Aki's face…or was it Power's?

Chainsaw Man is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.