🔗 Share this article

Two teenagers experience a intimate, gentle instant at the neighborhood high school’s outdoor pool after hours. While they drift as one, hanging beneath the stars in the quietness of the night, the sequence captures the fleeting, heady thrill of teenage love, completely engrossed in the present, ramifications overlooked.

Approximately half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, it became clear these scenes are the heart of the movie. Denji and Reze’s romantic tale became the focus, and all the background details and character histories previously known from the anime’s first season proved to be mostly irrelevant. Although it is a canonical installment within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a easier entry point for newcomers — regardless of they missed its prior content. This method brings advantages, but it simultaneously limits some of the tension of the movie’s narrative.

Created by the original creator, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a indebted Devil Hunter in a universe where demons represent particular evils (ranging from ideas like Aging and Darkness to terrifying entities like cockroaches or historical conflicts). After being deceived and killed by the yakuza, he makes a pact with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and returns from the dead as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the ability to completely destroy Devils and the terrors they represent from existence.

Plunged into a brutal struggle between devils and hunters, Denji encounters Reze — a alluring barista concealing a lethal mystery — sparking a tragic clash between the pair where affection and existence collide. This film continues immediately following season 1, exploring the main character’s connection with Reze as he grapples with his feelings for her and his loyalty to his controlling boss, Makima, forcing him to choose between desire, loyalty, and survival.

An Independent Love Story Amidst a Broader World

Reze Arc is inherently a romance-to-rivalry plot, with our fallible protagonist the hero falling for Reze almost immediately upon introduction. He is a isolated boy looking for affection, which renders him vulnerable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate lore and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is very independent. Filmmaker Tatsuya Yoshihara understands this and ensures the love story is at the forefront, instead of bogging it down with unnecessary summaries for the uninitiated, especially when such details really matters to the complete storyline.

Despite Denji’s imperfections, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He’s still a teenager, stumbling his way through a world that’s warped his understanding of morality. His desperate craving for love portrays him like a lovesick puppy, although he’s likely to barking, biting, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a ideal match for him, an effective femme fatale who finds her prey in our protagonist. You want to see the main character win the ire of his love interest, even if Reze is clearly hiding something from him. So when her true nature is unveiled, audiences cannot avoid hope they’ll in some way make it work, even though deep down, it is known a happy ending is not truly in the cards. Therefore, the stakes fail to seem as high as they ought to be since their romance is doomed. It doesn’t help that the movie serves as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, allowing minimal space for a love story like this among the more grim developments that followers are aware are coming soon.

Stunning Animation and Artistic Execution

The film’s visuals seamlessly blend 2D animation with computer-generated settings, providing stunning eye candy even before the excitement begins. Including cars to tiny desk fans, 3D models add depth and detail to each shot, making the 2D characters pop strikingly. Unlike Demon Slayer, which often showcases its digital elements and changing settings, Reze Arc uses them less frequently, most noticeably during its action-packed finale, where those models, while not unattractive, are more apparent to spot. Such fluid, ever-shifting environments make the movie’s battles both visually bombastic and surprisingly simple to follow. Nonetheless, the technique excels most when it’s invisible, enhancing the vibrancy and movement of the hand-drawn art.

Final Impressions and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a solid point of entry, likely leaving first-time audiences pleased, but it also has a drawback. Telling a self-contained story restricts the tension of what ought to seem like a sprawling anime epic. It’s an illustration of why continuing a successful television series with a film is not the optimal approach if it weakens the franchise’s overall storytelling potential.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up several seasons of animated series with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 avoided the problem entirely by serving as a backstory to its well-known series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, maybe a bit foolishly. However that doesn’t stop the movie from proving to be a enjoyable time, a terrific point of entry, and a memorable love story.