2025 was an exceptional year for Tatsuki Fujimoto. His most popular serialized manga, Chainsaw Man, continues to be a success, with over two hundred chapters published, and it also made the leap to the big screen with the film Reze Arc, which became a critical and commercial hit. If you fell in love with Chainsaw Man, whether on paper or on screen, and you crave more from manga's most daring author, Prime Video has released an anthology anime series based on his most acclaimed works: Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26.
Like many manga artists, Fujimoto, aged between 17 and 26, published a series of short stories before venturing into the long-form format, starting with Fire Punch. Eight short stories in total, collected in two volumes, were adapted into an anime by studios P.A. Works, Zexcs, Lapin Track, Studio Kafka, 100studio, and Studio Graph7. Considering the rough style of the original material, where the author hadn't yet fully developed his style, it's astonishing how each animation studio shines, creating some of the most vibrant short films in the medium.
Stars: Shelby Young, Ryan Colt Levy, Tomokazu Sugita
Beyond the narrative and/or the music, part of the appeal of watching anime short films and music videos lies in observing the animators exploring the boundaries of traditional animation and tackling the diversity of Fujimoto's early stories. It's a perfect opportunity for the various animation teams to unleash their creativity.
This is immediately apparent in the first segment, "A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin' in the Schoolyard," which tells the story of two high school students trying to survive in a world invaded by aliens. From Studio Zexcs's frenetic animation, featuring transforming aliens devouring humans with gory effects, to Fujimoto's dark and comedic imagination, which never loses sight of presenting profound themes, all of this gives a sense of the series' unpredictable nature.
It can literally shift from subversive alien invasions to relatable, everyday situations, only to then veer off into unexpected twists. This is explored in "Love Is Blind," where student council president Ibuki wants to confess his love to Yuri as they walk home together, but obstacles stand in his way. While it's amusing to see external forces trying to interfere, it's Ibuki's intense facial expressions that elicit the laughs.
The brilliance of Fujimoto's fiction lies in its fusion of genres. Even titles like Chainsaw Man, published in Weekly Shōnen Jump, are rarely perceived as typical shonen series, as they combine action, comedy, horror, and dark fantasy to tell a raw and cruel coming-of-age story. Even when stories like "Shikaku" employ classic anime tropes, such as the adorable assassin, they use them to tell a story of abuse and a twisted love for a vampire who, after living so long, only wishes to die.
Undoubtedly, these stories are precursors to what Fujimoto would do with his most popular work, such as "Nayuta of the Prophecy." The latter is the closest to the melancholic madness of Chainsaw Man, where Kenji is determined to protect his younger sister, who is prophesied to become a sorceress who will bring about the end of the world.
Fujimoto is not without his detractors, who tend to focus on the explicit violence, likely involving a chainsaw, or the crude humor revolving around the desire to touch a woman's breasts. However, Fujimoto never confines himself to a single style. If you set aside the eccentricities of some of his stories, they are surprisingly poignant in their message about humanity.
Both "Mermaid Rhapsody" and "Sisters" deal with artistic expression as a way to find beauty in someone despite hardships, and you can certainly see the parallels between these works and Fujimoto's self-contained manga, "Look Back." While some might question the gender perspective of "Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome," which addresses masculinity and the threat of sexual assault, there is a subtlety and sweetness to its central theme of self-acceptance, in addition to featuring some of Studio Kafka's most colorful illustrations.
Tatsuki Fujimoto's greatest achievement, 17-26, lies in his understanding of the diversity of anime as a medium. Anime is not a genre, but rather another platform for telling diverse stories, with a unique narrative conveyed through animation. The series also celebrates the career of Fujimoto himself, who has always considered himself an outsider in terms of the influences that drove him to enter the industry, and yet his work as a manga artist and the subsequent adaptations demonstrate his great impact.
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