🔗 Share this article

Two youngsters experience a private, gentle moment at the neighborhood high school’s outdoor pool after hours. While they drift together, suspended under the night sky in the stillness of the evening, the sequence portrays the ephemeral, exhilarating thrill of adolescent love, utterly caught up in the present, consequences forgotten.

About half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the heart of the film. The romantic tale became the focus, and all the background details and backstories previously known from the series’ first season proved to be mostly irrelevant. Despite being a official installment within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a more accessible entry point for first-time viewers — regardless of they missed its prior content. The approach has its benefits, but it also hinders a portion of the urgency of the movie’s narrative.

Created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a indebted fiend fighter in a world where demons embody particular evils (including ideas like getting older and obscurity to terrifying entities like cockroaches or World War II). After being betrayed and killed by the yakuza, Denji forms a contract with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and comes back from the dead as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to completely destroy fiends and the terrors they represent from existence.

Plunged into a brutal struggle between devils and hunters, Denji meets Reze — a charming coffee server hiding a deadly mystery — igniting a heartbreaking confrontation between the pair where affection and existence collide. The movie continues immediately following the first season, exploring the main character’s relationship with Reze as he wrestles with his emotions for her and his devotion to his controlling boss, his employer, compelling him to decide among passion, faithfulness, and survival.

A Self-Contained Romantic Tale Within a Larger World

Reze Arc is inherently a romance-to-rivalry story, with our fallible main character Denji becoming enamored with his counterpart almost immediately upon introduction. He’s a isolated young man seeking affection, which makes his heart vulnerable and up for grabs on a first-come, first-served. As a result, despite all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate mythology and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is very independent. Filmmaker the director recognizes this and guarantees the love story is at the forefront, instead of weighing it down with unnecessary summaries for the uninitiated, especially when none of that really matters to the complete storyline.

Regardless of the protagonist’s flaws, it’s difficult not to feel for him. He is still a adolescent, stumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his sense of morality. His intense craving for love makes him come off like a lovesick dog, although he’s likely to growling, biting, and making a mess along the way. Reze is a ideal match for Denji, an compelling seductive antagonist who targets her prey in our hero. Viewers hope to see the main character win the ire of his love interest, even if Reze is clearly concealing a secret from him. Thus when her real identity is revealed, you still cannot avoid wish they’ll somehow make it work, even though deep down, you know a positive outcome is not truly in the plan. As such, the stakes fail to seem as intense as they ought to be since their relationship is fated. It doesn’t help that the film acts as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, allowing minimal space for a love story like this among the darker events that followers know are coming soon.

Stunning Animation and Artistic Craftsmanship

The film’s visuals effortlessly combine 2D animation with computer-generated settings, providing impressive visual appeal even before the action begins. From cars to tiny desk fans, digital assets add depth and detail to each shot, making the 2D characters stand out beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which often highlights its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc employs them more sparingly, most noticeably during its action-packed climax, where such elements, though not unappealing, become easier to identify. Such fluid, ever-shifting backgrounds make the film’s fights both spectacular to watch and remarkably easy to follow. Nonetheless, the method excels most when it’s unnoticeable, enhancing the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Final Impressions and Broader Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a good point of entry, likely resulting in new fans pleased, but it also has a downside. Telling a standalone story limits the tension of what should feel like a expansive animated saga. This is an illustration of why following up a successful television series with a film isn’t the best strategy if it weakens the franchise’s general narrative possibilities.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by concluding multiple installments of animated series with an grand film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue entirely by acting as a prequel to its well-known series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, maybe a bit recklessly. However that doesn’t stop the film from being a great experience, a excellent introduction, and a unforgettable romantic tale.