🔗 Share this article

A pair of youngsters experience a intimate, tender instant at the local high school’s outdoor swimming pool late at night. As they float as one, suspended under the stars in the quietness of the night, the sequence captures the fleeting, heady thrill of adolescent romance, completely caught up in the present, consequences forgotten.

Approximately half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, it became clear such moments are the heart of the film. The romantic tale took center stage, and all the background details and backstories previously known from the series’ first season turned out to be mostly irrelevant. Despite being a canonical entry within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a more accessible entry point for first-time viewers — even if they missed its prior content. This method brings advantages, but it simultaneously limits some of the tension of the film’s narrative.

Developed by the original creator, Chainsaw Man follows Denji, a debt-ridden Devil Hunter in a world where Devils embody particular dangers (ranging from concepts like Aging and obscurity to specific horrors like cockroaches or historical conflicts). When he’s betrayed and murdered by the yakuza, Denji makes a pact with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and returns from the dead as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the power to completely destroy fiends and the terrors they represent from reality.

Thrust into a brutal conflict between demons and hunters, the hero encounters a new character — a alluring coffee server concealing a lethal mystery — sparking a heartbreaking confrontation between the pair where love and survival intersect. This film continues right after the first season, exploring the main character’s connection with Reze as he grapples with his feelings for her and his devotion to his controlling superior, his employer, forcing him to choose between passion, faithfulness, and self-preservation.

An Independent Romantic Tale Amidst a Larger Universe

Reze Arc is inherently a romance-to-rivalry plot, with our fallible protagonist Denji becoming enamored with his counterpart almost immediately upon meeting. He’s a lonely boy seeking affection, which renders him vulnerable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. As a result, despite all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate lore and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is highly self-contained. Filmmaker Tatsuya Yoshihara understands this and guarantees the love story is at the forefront, instead of weighing it down with unnecessary summaries for the uninitiated, especially when such details is crucial to the complete plot.

Regardless of the protagonist’s flaws, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He’s after all a teenager, stumbling his way through a world that’s warped his understanding of right and wrong. His intense longing for affection makes him come off like a lovesick puppy, although he’s likely to barking, snapping, and making a mess along the way. His love interest is a perfect match for Denji, an effective femme fatale who targets her prey in our hero. Viewers hope to see Denji win the ire of his love interest, despite Reze is clearly concealing a secret from him. Thus when her true nature is unveiled, audiences cannot avoid hope they’ll somehow make it work, although deep down, it is known a positive outcome is not truly in the plan. Therefore, the stakes fail to seem as intense as they should be since their romance is doomed. This is compounded by that the film serves as a immediate follow-up to the first season, allowing little room for a love story like this among the more grim events that followers know are approaching.

Breathtaking Animation and Artistic Craftsmanship

The film’s visuals effortlessly combine 2D animation with 3D environments, providing stunning eye candy prior to the excitement kicks in. From vehicles to tiny desk fans, 3D models add depth and detail to each scene, allowing the 2D characters pop strikingly. Unlike Demon Slayer, which often highlights its 3D assets and changing settings, Reze Arc uses them less frequently, particularly evident during its explosive finale, where those models, while not unattractive, are more apparent to identify. Such fluid, dynamic environments render the movie’s fights both visually bombastic and surprisingly easy to understand. Nonetheless, the technique excels most when it’s invisible, enhancing the vibrancy and motion of the 2D animation.

Concluding Impressions and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a solid starting place, probably resulting in first-time audiences pleased, but it also has a drawback. Telling a standalone narrative limits the stakes of what ought to seem like a sprawling animated saga. This is an illustration of why continuing a popular anime season with a film isn’t the best approach if it weakens the series’ general narrative possibilities.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up several installments of animated series with an epic movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue completely by acting as a backstory to its well-known series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc advances boldly, maybe a bit foolishly. But that doesn’t stop the movie from proving to be a great time, a terrific point of entry, and a memorable love story.