2025 has been quite the year for Tatsuki Fujimoto. He is still going strong with his most popular serialized manga Chainsaw Man now with over two hundred chapters under its belt, as well as making the jump to the big screen with the Reze Arc movie that has become a critical and commercial hit. If you have been loving Chainsaw Man, whether on the page or the screen, and you are craving for more from the manga industry’s wildest auteur, Prime Video has released an anime anthology series based on Fujimoto’s pre-famed works with Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26.
Within the age range between 17 and 26, like many manga artists, Fujimoto produced a series of one-shots before jumping into the long-running format, starting with Fire Punch. Eight short stories in total – which have been released as two collected volumes – they have all been given the anime treatment by studios P.A. Works, Zexcs, Lapin Track, Studio Kafka, 100studio, and Studio Graph7.
Considering the crude art from the source material where the author hadn’t quite developed his style at this point, it is amazing how each animation studio brings their A-game in creating some of the most vibrant short films within the medium.
Aside from a storytelling and/or musical standpoint, part of the excitement of watching anime short films and music videos is seeing animators pushing boundaries with what you can do in hand-drawn animation and by tackling the diverse range of Fujimoto’s earlier stories. It is a perfect opportunity for the various animation staffs to be let off the leash.
You can instantly see that from the very first segment “A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard”, which tells the story of two high school students trying to survive their world that has been taken over by aliens. From Studio Zexcs’ unhinged animation featuring transforming aliens eating up humans to gory effect, to Fujimoto’s darkly comic imagination that never loses sight of presenting weighty themes, it gives you an idea of the unpredictable nature throughout the series.
You can literally go from subversive alien invasions to normal situations that we can all relate to and take it to strange tangents. As explored in “Love is Blind” , where the student council president Ibuki wants to confess his love to Yuri as they walk together to their respected homes, only for some obstacles to get in the way. While it is funny seeing outside forces trying to interfere, it is Ibuki’s intense facial expressions that bring out the laughs.
The joy of Fujimoto’s fiction is the meshing of genres as even titles like Chainsaw Man, that is published under Weekly Shōnen Jump, very rarely feels like your typical Shonen series as it juggles action, comedy, horror and dark fantasy to tell a coming-of-age narrative that is raw and cruel. Even when stories like “Shikaku” use familiar anime tropes like the cute girl assassin, it is used to tell a story of abuse and twisted love for a vampire who has lived for so long that he just wants to die.
No doubt these stories are precursors to what Fujimoto would do with his more popular work, such as “Nayuta of the Prophecy.” It is the closest to Chainsaw Man’s melancholic insanity, in which Kenji is determined to protect his younger sister, who is prophesied as being a mage that will bring about the end of the world.
Fujimoto is not without his detractors, who tend to focus on the gory violence that most likely features a chainsaw or the crude humor that features the desire to touch a woman’s breast. However, Fujimoto is never a one-trick pony. If you strip the outlandish nature from some of the stories, they are oddly wholesome about what they say about humanity.
Both “Mermaid Rhapsody” and “Sisters” are about expressing art to find the beauty in someone, despite the hardships along the way, and you can definitely see the parallels between those and Fujimoto’s one-shot manga Look Back. While some may quibble over the gender politics of “Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome”, which touches upon masculinity and the threat of sexual assault, there is a nuance and sweetness in its central theme of self-acceptance, as well as having the most colorful visuals from Studio Kafka.
The greatest achievement from Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 is that it understands the diversity of anime as a medium. Anime is not a genre, but just another platform for telling different kinds of stories, whilst also being unique in how it tells a narrative through animation. The series also serves as a celebration of Fujimoto himself who has always been an outsider, in terms of what influenced him to get into the industry, and yet what we have seen from his work as a manga artist and the subsequent adaptations, he is leaving an impact.
Stream Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 on Prime Video.
