This Week in Anime

A Look Back at Tatsuki Fujimoto Of The Prophecy

Steve
Allow me to be the first to welcome you, Lucas, to the hallowed annals of "This Week In Anime" history! We like to have fun here. Usually, we keep it pretty low-key. Bad anime jokes and all that. But since this is a special occasion, I figured we'd bring you aboard with a bang.

Don't worry, kid. As long as you stick with me and have opinions about anime, manga, and the miasma of discourse that perpetually wafts around them, you'll do well. And you can trust me. This'll be my seventh(?) year writing these things, and I have no freakin' idea what I'm doing either.

That's right, the Chainsaw Man man himself is back in the news with the recent announcement that his one-shot Look Back will be getting the anime film treatment later this year.
And while we've previously dug into Fujimoto vis-a-vis the Chainsaw Man anime, we figured this would be an excellent opportunity to look at his work outside of that bloody blockbuster—namely his shorts, one-shots, and other odds and ends.

When in doubt, I go chronological. Both Before Chainsaw Man volumes are invaluable resources for peering into Fujimoto's mind as a developing manga artist. Like you (and most other people, I reckon), I also found Fujimoto via CSM, and I was pretty quickly drawn into its quirks and devil-may-care attitude to pacing and plotting. However, these early works show how ingrained that idiosyncrasy is in his creative voice. I mean, just look at this.

The gap between telling a story across dozens of volumes and in a single sitting is even larger than the difference in lengths would indicate. And on a technical level, his pages also have a lot to offer. Even a mostly silent and simple page like this one accomplishes a lot regarding pacing, setting-building, and tone.

Even rough art can work when the structural fundamentals are strong.

As he gets more comfortable drawing manga, you can see him starting to play around with form a bit more. In Clucking Chickens, he keeps everyone confined in their panels. In Sasaki, you can see the gunman breaking out of one in the above example. It's a subtle effect but a good tool to have in one's toolbox.
So many of his pet themes show up in these that it's funny. Most of these shorts are very funny, albeit in Fujimoto's usual askew manner, reveling in his characters' immaturity and insecurities.

It's also probably the most wholesome thing in his oeuvre. Just Fujimoto "yes, and"-ing the schoolmate confession trope until it involves a hostile alien invader getting swept up in the romance of the moment. Nothing profound here, but as an exercise in absurdity, it's a good indicator of the lengths he's willing to go to be as delightfully dumb as possible.

Incidentally, his afterwords for all these works are also great succinct, dry humor exercises. I don't think the copies on the Shonen Jump app have all of them, but Love is Blind came about because a Jump SQ. editor told him he took "31 pages to do what could be accomplished in 16"...so he went ahead and proved him right.

For me, that's the strongest entry in the first volume. It may be the least ambitious out of all of them, but I think it ties together the most Fujimoto-isms in the most cohesive way. It's about "bad" people finding a twisted solace in each other despite whatever society at large thinks of them. It's also, importantly, hilarious.

If "I love you...I'll kill you..." doesn't sum up half of the relationships in CSM, then I don't know what does.

Volume two of Before Chainsaw Man also begins by vamping on that theme with Mermaid Rhapsody. It's a sweet amphibious love story complicated a tad by pseudo-cannibalism.

That's precisely what I love the most about Fujimoto. His preoccupation with misfits and societal outcasts is never about romanticizing them. Whether it's intrinsic or inflicted upon the person, to be abnormal is to be in pain. I think he gets that hurt people are naturally drawn to each other, but he also gets that they have a larger capacity to both hurt and be hurt. Much of Fujimoto's transgressiveness, I believe, can be ascribed to him wrestling honestly with that complexity—while never shying away from a weird punchline when the opportunity presents itself.

This one doesn't dig quite as deep into gender and identity as I'd like (it's no Inside Mari), but I suppose you can only do so much in 50 pages. And this page, in particular, is a stone-cold Fujimoto classic.

Many such cases.

Omg, it's Nayuta! Of the prophecy!

It's funny that Fujimoto more or less beta-tested the Chainsaw Man part 2 starlet here, with plenty of connective thematic tissue between both works as well. But it's not difficult to see why he loves her character enough to revive her in his most commercially successful enterprise.

And, of course, at its heart is the warped familial love you'll find in either of the stories, too. Though Nayuta prods especially hard at the idea of collective, systemic prejudice being the true trigger of the apocalypse.

Ah, but Fujimoto wouldn't be Fujimoto if he didn't take you there by the most outlandish, possibly nightmarish route possible. It's also the most direct antecedent to Look Back's quieter (and less nude) musings on what it means to be an artist. Look Back even echoes some of the panel compositions in Sisters.

Yeah, it fits the authentic messiness of the stories he likes to tell. I wouldn't want to imagine his manga with "cleaner" artwork when they already have so much character. In fact, given the quality of this 4-koma, I think he should start drawing like a fourth-grader more often.

I love how it reads like a quintessentially Fujimoto-esque comic strip, too. It warped punchlines and all. I would not be surprised if this were adapted from an actual comic he drew at that age.

Dear readers, if you thought Chainsaw Man was rough and unhinged, then check out Fire Punch. Then, you will appreciate how much Fujimoto has reined himself in for CSM.

Look Back is practically the polar opposite of Fire Punch, too. While it has the requisite "pinch of fantasy" that Fujimoto needs to add to all of his stories, it's the most grounded in reality of his major works.

Yeah, at its best, it's a raw, honest, and cathartic look at the fuel that drives any artist. Love of the craft. Jealousy towards those better at the craft. Frustration with the craft. Jubilation from the craft. It's a rollercoaster of emotions told quite beautifully. And "beautifully" is an adverb I'd seldom ascribe to anything that flows out of Fujimoto's pen, so you should know I'm serious when I use it here.

It's gratuitously autobiographical, enhancing its impact when you're like me and find Fujimoto a fascinating artist. The Kyoto Animation arson parallels especially hit hard at the time. However, Fujimoto revised some of the manga's dialogue after publication. It's hard to speculate on the impetus behind either of those decisions—writing it that way and then removing it—but I'm glad the version on the Shonen Jump app remains unchanged. Like, there are horrors in the real world that make a person seriously question what good can be done with dumb little drawings.

Goodbye, Eri especially feels like a response to Look Back. It's a clever way of peeling back the inevitable editorialization that goes into dramatizing a piece of your own life for art's sake while proving that you can never peel that editorialization back. A piece of art—a manga, a film, a documentary about vampires—necessarily exists separately from the reality that spawned it. That reality informs it, but it can never perfectly superimpose itself over reality. By the same turn, an artist can never completely isolate themselves from reality or their work.

Agreed! I can understand how some readers might find these recent, more metatextual works navel-gazey and indulgent. Still, I'll start complaining once Fujimoto stops finding interesting ways to explore those ideas. He's one of my favorite contemporary mangaka, and I can't wait to see how Kiyotaka Oshiyama translates Look Back into movie form. I'm sure Fujimoto can't wait either. If I know one thing about that man, he loves the cinema. And if I know a second thing about that man, he loves telling us how much he loves the cinema.