Director Ryu Nakayama's team made a deliberate bet: adapt Fujimoto's cinematic sensibility rather than his comic energy.
Concretely:
Why it's divisive: Fujimoto's manga swings violently between grounded dread and unhinged comedy, and the film-style approach nails the dread but flattens some comedy beats that fans loved. The famous 'too subdued' criticism is really a disagreement about which half of Fujimoto's voice matters more.
Worth knowing: the Reze arc movie shifted the approach — more expressive animation, more 'anime' energy — so the staff clearly heard the conversation. Comparing the two is a great case study in adaptation philosophy.
I went in expecting Demon Slayer with a chainsaw and got something closer to a moody live-action drama that happens to be animated, and once I understood why, I actually came around on it.
The director, Ryu Nakayama, was a storyboard and key animator on Black Clover, Fate/Grand Order and Jujutsu Kaisen before this — Chainsaw Man was his first time leading a full season, and by his own account he wanted to treat it less like an "anime" and more like a live-action film that happened to be drawn. That shows up everywhere: muted, naturalistic color grading instead of the bright saturated palette shonen usually reaches for, ambient sound design (traffic, birds, quiet rooms) filling space where a normal show would drop a musical sting, toned-down line reads instead of big theatrical anime delivery, and camera work that behaves like an actual film camera — slow pans, held shots, angles a 2D storyboard wouldn't normally bother with.
The read I find most convincing is that this isn't Nakayama imposing his own taste so much as translating Tatsuki Fujimoto's. Fujimoto is a genuine cinephile and it's all over his other work — his one-shot "Goodbye, Eri" is framed as if shot entirely on someone's phone camera. Chainsaw Man the manga already reads like it's storyboarding an indie film half the time. Nakayama leaning into that instead of flattening it into standard shonen visual language is, I think, the most faithful adaptation choice available, even if it cost the show some of the immediate punch fans came in expecting after Demon Slayer and JJK.
It's genuinely divisive for exactly that reason. If you came for spectacle first, the restraint reads as "worse." If you came for Fujimoto's specific sensibility, it reads as the only correct choice they could've made.
