🔗 Share this article

Two youngsters experience a intimate, gentle instant at the neighborhood high school’s open-air swimming pool after hours. While they drift together, suspended beneath the stars in the quietness of the evening, the scene captures the fleeting, exhilarating excitement of teenage love, completely caught up in the moment, consequences forgotten.

Approximately half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the core of the movie. The love story took center stage, and every bit of contextual information and backstories I had gleaned from the series’ initial episodes proved to be largely unnecessary. Despite being a canonical installment within the series, Reze Arc offers a more accessible entry point for newcomers — even if they haven’t seen its single episode. The approach brings advantages, but it also hinders some of the urgency of the movie’s narrative.

Developed by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man chronicles Denji, a debt-ridden fiend fighter in a universe where Devils represent specific dangers (including concepts like Aging and obscurity to specific horrors like insects or World War II). When he’s betrayed and killed by the yakuza, he makes a pact with his faithful devil-dog, Pochita, and returns from the dead as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the power to completely destroy fiends and the horrors they signify from existence.

Thrust into a brutal conflict between devils and hunters, the hero meets Reze — a charming barista concealing a deadly mystery — igniting a tragic clash between the two where affection and survival intersect. This film continues immediately following the first season, delving into the main character’s relationship with Reze as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his devotion to his controlling superior, Makima, compelling him to choose between passion, faithfulness, and self-preservation.

An Independent Love Story Within a Broader World

Reze Arc is fundamentally a romance-to-rivalry plot, with our fallible protagonist the hero becoming enamored with his counterpart almost immediately upon introduction. He’s a lonely young man seeking affection, which makes his heart unreliable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s complex lore and its large ensemble, Reze Arc is highly independent. Director the director recognizes this and guarantees the romantic arc is at the center, rather than bogging it down with filler recaps for the new viewers, especially when none of that is crucial to the complete plot.

Despite the protagonist’s flaws, it’s difficult not to sympathize with him. He’s after all a adolescent, fumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his understanding of right and wrong. His intense craving for love makes him come off like a infatuated puppy, although he’s prone to growling, biting, and causing chaos along the way. His love interest is a ideal match for Denji, an effective femme fatale who targets her prey in our protagonist. You want to see the main character win the ire of his affection, even if she is clearly concealing something from him. So when her real identity is revealed, you still cannot avoid wish they’ll somehow succeed, even though internally, it is known a happy ending is never really in the plan. Therefore, the tension fail to seem as high as they ought to be since their romance is doomed. It doesn’t help that the film acts as a direct sequel to Season 1, leaving little room for a love story like this amid the darker developments that fans know are coming soon.

Stunning Animation and Technical Execution

This movie’s visuals effortlessly combine traditional animation with 3D environments, delivering impressive visual appeal even before the action kicks in. Including vehicles to small office appliances, 3D models add depth and texture to every shot, making the 2D characters pop beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its digital elements and changing settings, Reze Arc uses them more sparingly, most noticeably during its action-packed climax, where such elements, though not unappealing, are more apparent to spot. Such fluid, ever-shifting backgrounds make the film’s battles both visually bombastic and remarkably easy to understand. Nonetheless, the technique excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the vibrancy and motion of the 2D animation.

Final Thoughts and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a solid starting place, probably leaving first-time audiences pleased, but it also has a drawback. Presenting a standalone story restricts the stakes of what ought to seem like a sprawling anime epic. It’s an example of why following up a popular anime season with a movie is not the best strategy if it undermines the series’ general narrative possibilities.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up several installments of anime television with an epic movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the problem completely by acting as a prequel to its popular series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, perhaps a slightly recklessly. However this does not prevent the movie from being a enjoyable time, a excellent point of entry, and a memorable love story.