Chainsaw Man Trailer: Sharpen Your Teeth, Devil Hunters, For A Blood-Soaked Anime Adaptation

Crunchyroll has nabbed the streaming rights to "Chainsaw Man," the upcoming anime series adaptation of the popular manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto. The streamer plans to simulcast the series from Japan later this year, subtitled and dubbed, in over 200 countries and territories across the globe.

"Chainsaw Man," per Crunchyroll's press release, takes place "in a supernatural world of Devils manifested from the collective fears of humans." Which sounds like the world of politics, but I digress. The series "follows a teenage Devil Hunter named Denji who makes a contract with his pet Devil, Pochita, in order to be resurrected from the dead." He's like Ash Williams from the "Evil Dead" franchise, but with a chainsaw for a head (and one on each arm) instead of just a hand.

MAPPA, the Japanese animation studio behind "Jujutsu Kaisen 0" and "Attack on Titan: The Final Season," is producing "Chainsaw Man." The screenplay is by Hiroshi Seko, who served as writer for the latter title that season. Ryū Nakayama is directing, and character design is by Kazutaka Sugiyama, with Ghibli alum Kiyotaka Oshiyama ("The Wind Rises;" "The Secret World of Arrietty") handling the "devil design."

Check out the trailer for "Chainsaw Man," below.

The trailer for "Chainsaw Man" follows the pattern of other recent anime trailers like the one for Makoto Shinkai's "Suzume no Tojimari," in that it unfolds in a dialogue-free fashion. Crunchyroll plans to dub the series into languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German, but in the meantime, there's a series of abstract visuals to do the heavy lifting. A pool of blood, sharp teeth, a dark alley ... is this a vampire thing like "Vampire Hunter D?"

Not quite. Sure, "D" is for Dracula or dhampir or daywalker, but it also might stand for "devil" or "Denji." Why fuss with swords or vampires when you can wield a chainsaw and hunt devils? It's a question I've been asking myself lately.

If you have no familiarity with the manga and are just watching the trailer without reading anything else beforehand, it might be hard to suss out the plot of "Chainsaw Man." Good thing there's this handy-dandy official plot synopsis from Crunchyroll:

Denji is a teenage boy living with a Chainsaw Devil named Pochita. Due to the debt his father left behind, he has been living a rock-bottom life while repaying his debt by harvesting devil corpses with Pochita. One day, Denji is betrayed and killed. As his consciousness fades, he makes a contract with Pochita and gets revived as 'Chainsaw Man' — a man with a devil's heart.

"Chainsaw Man" will stream on Crunchyroll later this year.