Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re checking out the first episode of a somewhat unusual anthology, as we screen the premiere of Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26. If you’re reading this, you’re likely aware of Fujimoto as the creator of Chainsaw Man, alongside a variety of acclaimed shorter manga like Look Back and Goodbye, Eri. The man has essentially solidified himself as the modern bridge between popular and prestige manga, earning himself a passionate shonen audience while also prompting creators as distinguished as Kiyotaka Oshiyama and Hirokazu Kore-eda to adapt his work.
I’m certainly on the Fujimoto train myself at this point; everything I’ve seen of his work has impressed me greatly, and I consider him one of the most insightful, authentic voices currently working in manga and anime. Fujimoto brings a sneering irreverence to his dramas that somehow naturally co-mingles with a profound sincerity of human expression; his distaste for expectations seems to serve as a defense of his characters’ distinct humanity, as he challenges his readers to understand both the messy complexity of human behavior and the insufficiency of genre staples’ ability to capture that complexity. He’s a bit of a genius, I think, and this potentially premature canonization of his pre-breakout works only underlines how eager we all are to watch a worthy artist take flight.
Anyway, this is indeed a collection of Fujimoto’s works from the age of 17 to 26, opening with “A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ In The Schoolyard,” directed by Seishirō Nagaya (a key animator turned director, with the notable credit of unit direction on The Colors Within). Let’s see what baby Fujimoto’s got!
Episode 1
We open on a voice speaking into a phone or recording device, saying “And I realized I had to keep Ami safe”
Then a strange, seemingly distorted skull, ripped from its lower jaw and left resting on the ground. Dramatic color design work here, with heavy yellows, kinda sickly greens, and deeper yet light-hued purples. The color design sorta reminds me of Chainsaw Man’s cover colors, which also trend towards pastels and somewhat off-putting hues. Between such color choices, his idle embracing of grotesque violence, and his irreverent, self-aware sense of humor, Fujimoto’s works generally tend to echo the sensibilities of punk rock and outsider comic art, instincts that coalesce in works like Tank Girl. He’s both an avid film viewer and a clear inheritor to this grungy ‘80s/‘90s aesthetic tradition, which by itself tends to make his works a lot more interesting than mangaka whose main influences are just recent works in their own genre
While much of modern shonen manga is basically just harvesting diminishing returns from Dragon Ball and the big ‘00s hits, Fujimoto never lets himself be limited by such conventions, and in fact deliberately deviates from expectation even in his mainstream hit Chainsaw Man. Ultimately, the lesson is the same as ever: if you don’t engage with art broadly yourself, you won’t create art worth engaging with
“I want you to remember one thing. Remember the story of how shortly before the fall of humankind… an alien and a human lived together, hand in hand.” In keeping with his aversion to cliche and punk rock sensibilities, much of Fujimoto’s work is explicitly about challenging social expectations, whether it’s through the defiant anti-capitalism of Chainsaw Man or the embracing of outsider perspectives and “deviant” art exemplified through Goodbye, Eri and Look Back. There is very little that is laudable about the shapes modern society contorts us into, and basically all of Fujimoto’s work challenges the idea that this horrible, capital-centric, anti-art present is the way things are naturally supposed to be
Scattered, erratic images contrasted against full black screens create a sense of urgency and disorientation, like we’re scanning through scraps of memory for some precious answer
Excellent, detail-rich background art as we are situated in some teenager’s bedroom as the alarm goes off. The color design once again favors these pastel greens and yellows, here set as the patchwork colors of their quilt
I can definitely see The Colors Within’s influence in this delicate color design
This stereotypical adolescent setup is immediately subverted by the reveal that the teenager in question is actually an alien, with pale green skin and a flat nose. As always, Fujimoto champions the humanity of the outsider
His name is Yohei
His classmate is Moemi, an extremely large alien girl with mandibles rather than a mouth
Delightfully fluid character acting as we see more students heading towards school, all of them “aliens” of different designs. So perhaps the actual aliens here will be human characters? Certainly an easy way to challenge the presumption of humans as the default
A quick shot to a mantis eating a moth offers an inherent question as to whether such broad coexistence is possible
And the “chickens” he must feed for animal duty are actually humans in ridiculous chicken hats. It definitely makes sense that the flourishes of absurdism present in all of Fujimoto’s work would be more prominent in the stuff he was writing when he was a literal teenager himself
As Yohei reflects that humans used to eat chickens, our “chickens” reveal their disguise
Man, I love these colors and compositions. There’s something so lonely and striking about this barren tree glimpsed between concrete walls, lit up by the pale jade sky behind it. The sort of bleak emptiness of a desert, compressed into a suburban snapshot
“Humans taste delicious to aliens. They were quickly gobbled up.”
“Aliens took a liking to human culture.” Consuming and adapting human culture and artistry while literally devouring humanity itself – a concept that has clear historical resonance, evoking the rapacious hunger of colonizers and cultural subjugators. We find no contradiction in detesting a people while greedily consuming and rearranging their culture
Our two human survivors are Yuto and Ami
Yuto assures Ami that “the aliens will leave when they have full tummies.” Right from the start, there is a sense of hopeless fatalism in Fujimoto’s work, the despairing anger that this world frankly deserves
A vision of a full human-meat lunch buffet serves as some nicely understated body horror, emphasizing the inherent grotesquery of feasting on the flesh of others
“Is it cruel of us to just slaughter humans left and right? I mean, they’re highly intelligent too. What do you think?” Yohei relates his misgivings about their lifestyle, as the production once again luxuriates in these sickly pastel greens and muted maroon tones
“Humans ate cows and pigs. It’s the same thing.” Love this use of live action footage for this food demonstration. It’s both a fun flourish in the abstract, and also an effective way of humanizing these animals, thus making the point hit harder
“Maybe we can put on our own play once the aliens are full and return to their own planet.” Fujimoto frequently employs our ability to create and appreciate art as a signifier of humanity’s spiritual richness. I’m unsurprisingly inclined to agree; if there’s anything like a human “soul,” I think it rests in our ability to create and be moved by art
Yohei reveals he knows their secret, but that he only wants to help
Nagaya is making excellent use of this wall surrounding them, setting up compositions that frame it as either a defensive barricade or cage
Yohei states that new transfer student Masatoshi Endo is from a planet where they eat chickens
Wonderful cut of Endo freaking out when he learns there are chickens here, like something out of a Yuasa production
His subsequent transformation and the accompanying music only amplify that parallel; this feels like a sequence from Kemonozume or Devilman Crybaby. Well, if Nagaya’s main influences include Yuasa and Yamada, I’m clearly going to be keeping a close eye on his career
Yohei’s plan to disguise them as cats is sadly ineffective; Endo is fine with eating cats too
Damn, another excellent morphing cut as Endo attempts to eat Ami. This one actually reminds me of that morphing demon cut from JJK S2; looking at the staff list, it’s clear we’ve got a rogues gallery of new-gen talent doing key animation here, with the exceedingly talented Moaang handling character design and animation direction
The human character designs actually sorta remind me of Yoshitoki Ōima’s work; they have a similar roundness and softness in the eyes and hair
Yohei flees, with Moemi taking off after him
The colors transition from those washed-out pastels to far richer reds and purples as the sun falls, seemingly echoing Yohei’s vitality as he pursues his selfless cause
Suddenly a giant fist defends from the heavens, and Yohei is splattered. Another staple of Fujimoto’s work – violence is never glamorous, it is grotesque and abrupt and meaningless. Adaptations of Chainsaw Man have sorta missed that point, steering more towards the usual shonen tendency to glamorize violence as a legitimate route to justice, but Fujimoto’s own work sees nothing laudable about possessing the power to end another’s life
“Human creatures, I am a policeman.” What’s more, it is generally authority figures who possess a monopoly on violence, and who define “the law” in terms of their own validation, reigning terrible misfortune on whoever challenges their supremacy. Violence, capital, and law are the principle tools of the oppressor, and are nearly always seen in each other’s company
“Humans don’t have the right to live.” Well, that’s very straightforward, then. Even from this young age, Fujimoto was already questioning who makes the law, and why they get to decide whose existence is invalid (a question that defines the fury of Chainsaw Man)
Yuto is too injured to move, but Ami refuses to leave without him. Our dignity and worthiness as a species is realized in these terrible, tragic moments, these acts of sacrifice and charity that are all we can offer in the face of society’s cruelty. Chainsaw Man’s most painful moments tend to involve its characters briefly breaking free from the assumptions of servitude, might-makes-right, and transactional support that define capitalism, instead offering their lives freely for the sake of someone who means more to them than an insurance adjuster could calculate
As Ami hopelessly spreads her arms to defend Yuto, we cut to six months earlier, during the brutal initial invasion
“We were only practicing for a play. Why did you kill us?” The first meeting of Ami and Yohei
“What would it feel like if the shoe were on the other foot?” Many lack even that degree of self-awareness, embracing dehumanization if it is convenient for validating their existing preferences. In fact, we are explicitly taught to believe so, through religion and nationalism and every other source of externally assigned “chosen one” rhetoric. If you believe your fundamental nature makes you special, it is a short journey to believing others’ lack of that nature makes them deficient
“To put myself in Ami’s shoes, I played the part of ‘Yuto’ the human.”
“Yuto” claims he’s going to eat her now, prompting her to run away, and hopefully saving her from the consequences of his fight with the police
Scenes of hectic battle are contrasted against Yuto’s memories of Ami, the precious incidental moments he’s fighting to preserve. Damn, Fujimoto really had the stuff right from the jump!
These memories also maintain the painterly stillness and solemnity of that previous shot of the tree. A strong eye for composition, whether from Fujimoto’s original or Nagaya’s adaptation
“Ami successfully met up with the humans. However, humanity never had a chance of fighting the aliens. A short while later, humanity went extinct.” All we can do is rage against the beast, but that doesn’t make it not worth doing
And Done
Oh man, that was excellent! I was expecting early Fujimoto to be mostly his snarling, scatalogical instincts with little of his subsequent moral philosophy, but this story embodied pretty much everything I love about his work, from his razor-sharp rejection of modern society’s failing to his hard-won humanism in spite of it all. And Nagaya’s adaptation was truly exceptional, embracing the alienating confines of the original narrative to create an aesthetic and cinematographic language that felt perfectly attuned to Fujimoto’s style. It seems Fujimoto has somehow always been one of our most essential modern storytellers; if this was his origin point, I can’t wait to see what his career still holds.
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