🔗 Share this article

Two youngsters share a intimate, tender moment at the local high school’s open-air pool after hours. While they drift together, hanging under the night sky in the quietness of the evening, the scene captures the fleeting, exhilarating thrill of teenage love, utterly caught up in the moment, ramifications overlooked.

Approximately half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the heart of the movie. Denji and Reze’s romantic tale became the focus, and every bit of background details and character histories I had gleaned from the series’ initial episodes proved to be largely irrelevant. Although it is a official entry within the series, Reze Arc provides a easier entry point for first-time viewers — regardless of they missed its prior content. This method has its benefits, but it also hinders some of the urgency of the film’s narrative.

Created by the original creator, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a indebted fiend fighter in a world where Devils embody specific dangers (ranging from ideas like Aging and Darkness to specific horrors like insects or historical conflicts). When he’s deceived and killed by the criminal syndicate, he makes a pact with his loyal companion, his pet, and returns from the dead as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to permanently erase fiends and the horrors they signify from existence.

Thrust into a violent conflict between demons and hunters, Denji meets a new character — a charming barista concealing a deadly secret — igniting a heartbreaking confrontation between the two where affection and survival collide. This film 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 loyalty to his manipulative boss, Makima, forcing him to decide among passion, loyalty, and self-preservation.

A Self-Contained Romantic Tale Within a Broader Universe

Reze Arc is fundamentally a lovers-to-enemies plot, with our fallible main character Denji falling for Reze almost immediately upon introduction. He is a isolated boy looking for affection, which renders him unreliable and easily swayed on a first-come basis. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s complex mythology and its large ensemble, Reze Arc is highly self-contained. Filmmaker Tatsuya Yoshihara recognizes this and guarantees the love story is at the center, instead of weighing it down with unnecessary summaries for the uninitiated, especially when such details is crucial to the overall storyline.

Despite the protagonist’s flaws, it’s difficult not to feel for him. He’s after all a adolescent, stumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his sense of right and wrong. His desperate longing for affection portrays him like a infatuated dog, although he’s likely to growling, biting, and causing chaos along the way. His love interest is a ideal match for him, an compelling seductive antagonist who finds her prey in our protagonist. You want to see Denji earn the affection of his love interest, even if Reze is clearly concealing something from him. Thus when her real identity is revealed, you still cannot avoid hope they’ll in some way succeed, although deep down, it is known a happy ending is never really in the cards. Therefore, the stakes fail to seem as high as they should be since their relationship is fated. This is compounded by that the film serves as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, allowing little room for a love story like this among the darker developments that fans know are approaching.

Stunning Visuals and Artistic Craftsmanship

The film’s visuals effortlessly combine traditional animation with 3D environments, delivering stunning eye candy even before the excitement begins. From cars to small desk fans, 3D models add depth and detail to each scene, making the animated figures stand out strikingly. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which often highlights its 3D assets and changing settings, Reze Arc employs them more sparingly, particularly evident during its action-packed finale, where those models, though not unappealing, are more apparent to identify. Such fluid, ever-shifting backgrounds make the movie’s battles both spectacular to watch and surprisingly simple to follow. Still, the method excels most when it’s unnoticeable, enhancing the vibrancy and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Concluding Thoughts and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a good point of entry, likely resulting in new fans satisfied, but it also has a downside. Telling a standalone narrative restricts the tension of what ought to seem like a sprawling anime epic. It’s an example of why following up a successful anime season with a film isn’t the optimal strategy if it weakens the franchise’s overall storytelling potential.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by tying up several installments of animated series with an grand film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the problem entirely by serving as a backstory to its popular show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc advances boldly, maybe a slightly foolishly. However that doesn’t stop the movie from proving to be a great experience, a terrific point of entry, and a unforgettable romantic tale.