The creator of Chainsaw Man wrote a found footage film… in comic book form

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Tatsuki Fujimoto, creator of “Chainsaw Man,” loves movies and brings that love into his comics. Makima, the strange antagonist of “Chainsaw Man”, shares his creator’s cinephile. A chapter, adapted in the recent “Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc”, sees Makima taking our hero Denji on a movie marathon date. “Reze Arc” itself is Fujimoto exploring the conventions of love films and romantic comediesthen twisting them brutally. In the climax of the first part of “Chainsaw Man”, Makima explains that she only wants to cleanse the world of evils, including bad movies.

In Fujimoto’s first serialized manga, the web series “Fire Punch”, the revenge-seeking hero Agni has a parasite, Togata. Obsessed with cinema, Togata wants to film Agni’s revenge and does not hesitate to manipulate others to stage the best “scenes”. Fujimoto revisits documentaries in his 2022 one-shot “Goodbye, Eri,” released between parts 1 and 2 of “Chainsaw Man”. The 200-page comic is framed through the lens of a cell phone camera – a comic “shot” like a found footage film. Yet somehow, “Goodbye Eri” is one of Fujimoto’s only works (along with “Fire Punch”) that has yet to be made into an anime, even though its formal tricks are all taken from cinema.

“Goodbye, Eri” follows a young Japanese boy named Yuta, who, at the request of his terminally ill mother, films his final days. The first 20 pages of the comic play out like this, before it’s revealed that the panels we were seeing were from Yuta’s completed film, which is screened for his classmates and then filmed (because he chose to end it with him running away from an explosion). Everyone hates Yuta’s “insensitive” movie… except a girl named Eri, who decides to teach Yuta how to make a better movie by making him watch dozens of movies with her. The comic follows Yuta filming his days with Eri, which can also be numbered.

“Goodbye, Eri” hits similar emotional (and metatextual) notes as films like “Me, Earl and the Dying Girl,” which is also about a teenager filming someone’s final days, and Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans.” “Goodbye, Eri” is Fujimoto looking inward to explore what motivates him as an artist and why he is so fascinated by cinema. In this way he overlaps another one of his extended one-shots, “Look Back”, about two girls who bond over a shared passion for drawing manga art. “Look Back” had Fujimoto asking him why he drew, while “Goodbye, Eri” asked him why someone was filming the world and its inhabitants.

The comic concludes that someone to want be filmed because it offers immortality and shapes the way a person is remembered. Found footage is more synonymous with horror films and it’s not just because the bizarre camerawork lends itself to a nightmarish atmosphere. Found footage horror films offer a supposed look into the “real” final moments of the person filming the footage. What’s more disturbing to watch than that?

They may be filmed like documentaries, but found footage films are of course truly fictional, offering only the aesthetics of reality. In “Goodbye, Eri”, Yuta feels obliged to always bring “a pinch of fantasy” to his films. For the film he made after Eri, he portrayed her not only as a sick girl but also as a 1,200-year-old vampire. This, of course, reflects Fujimoto adding his own “pinch of fantasy”. He’s the one who tells us the story of Yuta and Eri, the same story Yuta tells in his next film, and Fujimoto adds the possibility of a vampire (reflecting that people never die if they’re filmed) to what is otherwise a slice-of-life premise.

Found footage gained popularity in the early 2000s, just as film and digital cameras were becoming the norm. Cell phones, with their built-in cameras and microphones, are now as ubiquitous a tool as pencil and paper. In theory, it’s as easy to make a movie as it is to draw a comic book. In “Goodbye, Eri”, Fujimoto does the latter to tell a story about the former. However, the cellphone framing of “Goodbye, Eri” is never a taxing gimmick.

Most of the pages in “Goodbye Eri” use four long, rectangular panels, suggesting the uniform, square view of a cell phone screen. The jumps in time and place between these panels range from tiny (take the multiple pages to Yuta and Eri sitting together on a couch watching movies) to enormous.

Media viewing

The opening pages depicting Yuta’s film about his mother use a panel for a shot of the film, suggesting a film montage. The unzipped pages of “Goodbye, Eri,” however, convey the sensation of looking into a cell phone camera and the image not changing.

Several panels of “Goodbye, Eri” are deliberately drawn with a blur, to indicate that the imaginary cell phone filming the image is moving. Since Yuta films everything, and that is the (literal) lens through which we see the story, the pages rarely begin with a clear indication of what is real and what is a staged scene. The comic is able to pull off scene-within-a-scene twists even more easily than any movie.

As for the subject of Yuta’s film, Eri fits in alongside other Fujimoto characters like Reze and Makima; a woman with hypnotic eyes who seems both innocent and not. A good movie needs something or someone compelling to follow and Eri passes that test.