🔗 Share this article

Two teenagers experience a intimate, gentle instant at the local high school’s outdoor swimming pool after hours. As they float together, suspended beneath the night sky in the stillness of the night, the sequence portrays the fleeting, exhilarating excitement of teenage love, completely caught up in the moment, ramifications overlooked.

Approximately half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized such moments are the heart of the movie. Denji and Reze’s love story took center stage, and every bit of background details and character histories I had gleaned from the series’ first season proved to be mostly unnecessary. Despite being a official entry within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a more accessible entry point for newcomers — even if they missed its single episode. This method has its benefits, but it simultaneously limits a portion of the tension of the movie’s narrative.

Created by the original creator, Chainsaw Man follows Denji, a debt-ridden fiend fighter in a universe where Devils embody particular dangers (ranging from ideas like getting older and Darkness to terrifying entities like cockroaches or World War II). After being deceived and murdered by the criminal syndicate, he makes a pact with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and comes back from the dead as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the ability to completely destroy fiends and the horrors they signify from reality.

Thrust into a violent conflict between demons and hunters, Denji meets Reze — a alluring coffee server concealing a lethal mystery — igniting a heartbreaking confrontation between the pair where love and survival intersect. The movie continues right after season 1, delving into Denji’s connection with his love interest as he wrestles with his emotions for her and his devotion to his controlling boss, his employer, forcing him to choose between desire, loyalty, and survival.

A Self-Contained Romantic Tale Amidst a Larger Universe

Reze Arc is inherently a romance-to-rivalry story, with our imperfect protagonist Denji becoming enamored with Reze almost immediately upon meeting. He is a isolated boy seeking love, which makes his heart vulnerable and up for grabs 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. Director the director understands this and ensures the romantic arc is at the center, rather than weighing it down with filler recaps for the uninitiated, particularly since such details really matters to the overall plot.

Despite the protagonist’s flaws, it’s difficult not to sympathize with him. He is still a adolescent, fumbling his way through a world that’s distorted his sense of right and wrong. His desperate craving for love portrays him like a infatuated puppy, even if he’s prone to barking, biting, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a ideal match for Denji, an compelling seductive antagonist who targets her prey in our protagonist. You want to see Denji earn the affection of his love interest, despite she is clearly hiding something from him. Thus when her true nature is revealed, audiences cannot avoid wish they’ll somehow make it work, even though internally, you know a positive outcome is never really in the plan. As such, the tension fail to seem as intense as they should be since their romance is fated. This is compounded by that the film acts as a immediate follow-up to the first season, allowing little room for a romance like this amid the darker events that followers are aware are approaching.

Breathtaking Animation and Technical Craftsmanship

This movie’s graphics seamlessly blend traditional animation with computer-generated settings, providing stunning eye candy even before the action begins. From vehicles to small office appliances, 3D models add depth and detail to each shot, making the 2D characters pop beautifully. Unlike Demon Slayer, which frequently highlights its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc employs them less frequently, most noticeably during its explosive climax, where such elements, while not unattractive, become easier to identify. Such smooth, ever-shifting backgrounds make the movie’s fights both visually bombastic and remarkably simple to understand. Nonetheless, the technique shines brightest when it’s unnoticeable, enhancing the vibrancy and movement of the 2D animation.

Final Impressions and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a good point of entry, likely leaving first-time audiences pleased, but it additionally carries a drawback. Presenting a standalone story restricts the stakes of what ought to seem like a expansive animated saga. This is an illustration of why following up a successful anime season with a film isn’t the best strategy if it undermines the series’ general storytelling potential.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by tying up several seasons of anime television with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the problem entirely by serving as a backstory to its well-known series, 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 time, a excellent introduction, and a memorable love story.