#the chaotic energy of the right panel + denji face

[tumblezwei]

I know nothing about chainsawman but i still encourage you to elaborate

The summary version is that just because an anime has a big budget and the ability to do The Most with fight scenes and coloring doesn't mean it's actually a good adaptation of those scenes.

It's not something I can explain in really great detail, but the entire time I'm watching the anime I can tell it doesn't give off the same...vibe as the manga. A lot of moments in the manga are remembered the way they are because of how weird they are. The composition, art style, and pacing of the manga do a lot to give relatively mundane scenes this sense of strangeness that gives the series it's identity. But the anime has a really had tendency of taking these scenes and making them feel so. Flat. The scenes are there, a lot of them are practically copied and pasted over, but they just don't feel right.

Maybe it has to do with the chance of pace from manga panel to animated scene? Maybe the lack of music that makes everything feel stale? Like, ok, let me go through this slower.

So here's some panels from the manga where Denji has just started living with Aki, and Aki is slowly losing his shit at having to put up with Denji's shitty behavior.

These pages are back to back and then it cuts to the next scene of them at work. The way the paneling is arranged, the slow change in Aki's facial expression, the pacing of it, it all comes together to show how living with Denji is kind of a fucking nightmare. And by giving us these short panels one after another, it makes this behavior seem back to back to back. Aki can't catch a fucking break and by the end of the scene you can visibly see how furious he is.

And now look at the same scene in the anime.

Like, look, maybe it's just me, but this just doesn't feel the same. The pacing is too slow, there's no music or any ambience at all which makes it feel flat and lifeless (and no, that's not me saying I need music for the scene to tell me which emotion to feel or whatever, but you gotta do something to add to the chaotic energy of this manga and it never does), and Aki's facial expressions just don't sell the look of building fury the way the manga panels do.

And I can't post any more pics on this post, but another example I can think of is Power's introduction in the same chapter/episode. In the manga the panel gives us a full body shot with a close up of her face to the side. The emphasis is on showing all of her at once, the messy clothing, her loud and brash personality, the way she holds herself. But in the anime they like, only show close ups of her? We get a shot of her feet before speeding past the rest of her body up to her face, where it lingers until she's done with her introduction and zooms out to show us her final pose. It's weird and awkward. And even after the shot zooms out we never get a full view of her clothing because it's blocked by her sweater.

Like if you had never read the manga and your first introduction to Power was this scene, you just wouldn't be getting the full effect of Power being a weird gremlin. It doesn't even feel like she's the focus of the scene. Her own introduction scene and the camera barely gives itself a chance to linger on her.

Added with the often times muted color palette, the seeming disdain to engage with it's own whimsy, and it's inability to really capture the way Fujimoto does facial expressions, I just don't think the anime is a worthwhile experience in comparison to the manga.

If you like the anime and think I'm full of shit, then more power to you. I'm not saying it can't get better or that I'm the only person allowed to have an opinion, but I just think that MAPPA spent too much of their time trying to replicate the manga scene for scene that they didn't really try and give it a personality lol.

#ask #tsundere bellwether #like I can tell they *tried* to capture the vibe #but the way they went about it just sucked the fun out lmao #discourse tag