In an interview with Crunchyroll, MAPPA CEO Manabu Otsuka had nothing but praise for the source material. Ostuka has previously spoken about how he feels “Chainsaw Man” speaks to the “subculture” of Japan, providing a different kind of entertainment than other anime. It’s because of the abnormality of “Chainsaw Man” that MAPPA wanted to switch things up with their process and bring a first-time director into the fold that could capture the manic energy the studio was looking for:
“So I, myself, am a big fan of Chainsaw Man. When I saw Fujimoto-sensei’s expressions of bursting, explosive, raw energy, we needed somebody to be able to bring that out and direct it in that way. We’ve worked with many directors on MAPPA, but I kind of started thinking that we needed to inject new blood.”
The need to inject new blood led to the hiring of Ryu Nakayama. That said, MAPPA had worked with him once before on “Jujutsu Kaisen,” in which he served as an episode director late in season 1. But on “Chainsaw Man,” Nakayama took on the role of director for the first and last episodes — generally considered the most critical episodes of a show’s debut season. It was a tall ask, but Otsuka believed he was right for it simply because the studio “needed somebody else, something new, in order to get this sort of bursting raw energy out of the story.”