🔗 Share this article

A pair of teenagers experience a intimate, tender instant at the local high school’s open-air pool late at night. While they drift together, hanging beneath the night sky in the quietness of the night, the scene portrays the ephemeral, heady excitement of teenage romance, completely caught up in the moment, consequences overlooked.

About half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the core of the film. Denji and Reze’s love story became the focus, and every bit of background details and backstories I had gleaned from the series’ first season proved to be mostly unnecessary. Although it is a official installment within the series, Reze Arc provides a easier entry point for first-time viewers — regardless of they haven’t seen its prior content. The approach has its benefits, but it simultaneously limits a portion of the tension of the film’s story.

Developed by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a indebted Devil Hunter in a universe where demons embody specific evils (ranging from concepts like getting older and obscurity to terrifying entities like insects or World War II). When he’s deceived and murdered by the yakuza, he forms a contract with his faithful companion, his pet, and comes back from the dead as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the ability to completely destroy fiends and the horrors they signify from reality.

Thrust into a violent struggle between demons and hunters, Denji meets Reze — a alluring coffee server hiding a deadly mystery — igniting a heartbreaking confrontation between the two where love and survival intersect. The movie picks up right after the first season, exploring Denji’s relationship with his love interest as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his devotion to his manipulative superior, Makima, forcing him to decide among desire, faithfulness, and self-preservation.

A Self-Contained Romantic Tale Within a Broader Universe

Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies story, with our imperfect protagonist the hero falling for his counterpart right away upon introduction. He is a isolated young man seeking love, which makes his heart unreliable and up for grabs on a first-come, first-served. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s complex lore and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is highly self-contained. Director Tatsuya Yoshihara understands this and guarantees the love story is at the center, rather than weighing it down with filler recaps for the new viewers, particularly since such details really matters to the overall plot.

Despite Denji’s imperfections, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He’s after all a adolescent, stumbling his way through a world that’s distorted his sense of right and wrong. His desperate longing for love portrays him like a infatuated dog, even if he’s prone to growling, snapping, and causing chaos along the way. His love interest is a perfect pairing for Denji, an compelling femme fatale who targets her mark in our hero. Viewers hope to see the main character win the ire of his affection, even if Reze is obviously hiding a secret from him. So when her real identity is revealed, audiences cannot avoid wish they’ll somehow succeed, although internally, it is known a happy ending is not truly in the plan. As such, the stakes don’t feel as high as they ought to be since their romance is doomed. This is compounded by that the film acts as a immediate follow-up to the first season, leaving little room for a romance like this among the darker developments that fans are aware are approaching.

Stunning Animation and Artistic Craftsmanship

The film’s graphics seamlessly blend 2D animation with 3D environments, providing stunning visual appeal prior to the action begins. Including cars to small office appliances, 3D models enhance realism and detail to each shot, making the animated figures pop beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its digital elements and changing settings, Reze Arc employs them less frequently, particularly evident during its explosive finale, where such elements, though not unappealing, become easier to spot. These smooth, dynamic backgrounds make the film’s battles both visually bombastic and surprisingly simple to understand. Still, the technique excels most when it’s invisible, enhancing the dynamic range and movement of the hand-drawn art.

Concluding Thoughts and Wider Implications

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a good starting place, likely leaving first-time audiences pleased, but it additionally carries a downside. Telling a standalone story restricts the stakes of what should feel like a sprawling animated saga. It’s an example of why following up a popular anime season with a film is not the best approach if it weakens the series’ general storytelling potential.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up several seasons of anime television with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 avoided the issue entirely by acting as a backstory to its well-known series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, perhaps a bit recklessly. But that doesn’t stop the movie from proving to be a great experience, a excellent introduction, and a memorable love story.