Chainsaw Man Creator Tatsuki Fujimoto Sounds Off on South Park’s Most Notorious Character

File this under fun creator trivia that actually reframes a character: Tatsuki Fujimoto, the Chainsaw Man author, once said he loves Kenny from South Park. Yes, that Kenny. And the way he talks about Kenny explains a lot about how Denji is built.

"In the animation 'South Park' there's Kenny, whom I also liked, but as he got more popular, in response to the viewers, he had to change into the character they were seeking."

- Tatsuki Fujimoto, 2021 interview with Da Vinci

So what's the connection?

Fujimoto has never outright said Denji was modeled on Kenny, but the overlap is hard to miss. Kenny is one of Stan's core friends in South Park, famous for the orange hoodie, his constant (and constantly undone) deaths, and being a little gremlin about sex. Denji, meanwhile, is a chainsaw-armed poverty kid whose goals start out hilariously small and horny. Different worlds, same DNA.

• Rough starts: Kenny grows up in one of South Park's poorest families, with alcoholic parents, and Cartman regularly waves a few bucks to push him into dumb, dangerous stunts. Denji's backstory is even uglier: during a drunken outburst, his father came at him and Denji killed him. With nobody left to look out for him, he lands in crushing debt and gets worked like a dog by the yakuza for pocket change.
• Death as a feature: Early South Park made Kenny's gruesome death a running gag. He'd be back next week like nothing happened. Denji fights devils for a living and gets torn apart constantly, then stitches himself back together thanks to his powers. Different tone, same idea: the character keeps coming back.
• Perpetually horny: Kenny is famously obsessed with the female body and is always scheming to get a peek or a moment. Denji is just as shameless, chasing kisses and contact like they're the holy grail, and getting himself into trouble for it.
• Bent by expectations: Fujimoto's quote is the tell here. As Kenny's popularity swelled, the show reinvented him. By Season 5, the creators even toyed with killing him off for real, which is why he's basically gone for most of Season 6 until the finale. After that, he doesn't die nearly as often, his resurrection becomes an explicit superpower, and he even takes up the masked vigilante mantle of Mysterion. That meta tweak echoes how Denji evolves: after a brutal childhood, he's suddenly hailed as a public hero who protects humans from devils. He loves the attention, but he has no clue that being idolized comes with strings and some nasty side effects. Over time he inches from a reckless, simple kid to someone more complicated and adult, finally getting the recognition readers were pulling for at the start.

The bottom line

This is one of those creator comments that makes the character click. Fujimoto digs Kenny. Kenny changed because fans latched onto him. Denji wears a similar arc in a very different genre: born from misery, hard to kill, guided by painfully human appetites, and reshaped by what the world wants from him.

For the numbers crowd: South Park sits at an 8.7/10 on IMDb; Chainsaw Man is at 8.3/10. And if you want to revisit Denji's mess, the Chainsaw Man anime is streaming on Crunchyroll right now.