Warning! Contains spoilers for PPPPPP Chapter 61!
While Shonen Jump's most cinematic series, the manga PPPPPP has made its own claim for this title in recent chapters. This manga by Mapollo 3 follows the scion of a great family of piano players as he attempts to reunite his siblings and become a better pianist. While this may not sound like a good basis for a cinematic manga the series has defied expectations and provided readers with some truly beautiful pages.
In chapter 61 the protagonist Lucky visits his mother's grave and contemplates the current state of his dream to reunite his siblings and have them play for her. As he contemplates the impossibility of his typically Shonen-esque dream, a butterfly flies between him and the headstone, and the manga spends a couple pages silently showing him watch the butterfly fly away. The way this is done is utterly captivating, zooming out from his initial reaction into a beautiful two-page spread of the cemetery that shows how alone he feels. Then, when the butterfly flies off into the distance, it zooms in on a tilted version of the back of his head to show how destabilized he has become. And then it cuts away to a spacious shot of the sky. It's an incredibly powerful and cinematic sequence that easily rivals anything Chainsaw Man has ever done.
Chainsaw Man has been held up as the gold standard of excellence in cinematic manga s due to its author Tatsuki Fujimoto's unique style. Fujimoto loves movies and so will often frame his s as if they are a still from a movie. This makes him very effective at portraying minute changes in his characters' expressions and postures that can convey subtle depth of emotion. It also makes his fight scenes some of the most exciting of any other Shonen Jump manga. However, his style is not perfect.
PPPPPP's Chapters Have a Touching Quality Chainsaw Man's Lack
Fujimoto's s can often lack the heart-wrenching beauty that Mapollo 3's possessed in chapter 61. Especially in Chainsaw Man part 2, which hasn't hit the emotional highs that the first part did yet. Meanwhile, in addition to chapter 61, PPPPPP has featured a myriad of other chapters with similarly powerful and incredibly crafted sequences, such as Lucky's confrontation with his inner self in chapter 48 or Fanta's captivating performance in chapter 57. In of recent cinematic moments, PPPPPP has Chainsaw Man beat.
This is not to say that Chainsaw Man's shot composition has been bad or that it won't reclaim its past title in the future. But currently, its accomplishments are being overshadowed by the gorgeous s in PPPPPP. Because of this, fans of Fujimoto's cinematic style in Chainsaw Man owe it to themselves to read Shonen Jump's PPPPPP, which has amazingly outshone its predecessor in its latest chapters.
PPPPPP Chapter 61 is available to read from Viz Media.
