🔗 Share this article

Two teenagers experience a private, gentle moment at the local high school’s outdoor pool late at night. While they drift as one, hanging under the night sky in the stillness of the evening, the sequence portrays the fleeting, exhilarating excitement of adolescent love, utterly engrossed in the present, consequences overlooked.

About 30 minutes into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, it became clear such moments are the heart of the movie. The love story took center stage, and every bit of background details and backstories previously known from the anime’s first season turned out to be largely unnecessary. Despite being a official entry within the series, Reze Arc offers a easier starting place for first-time viewers — even if they haven’t seen its single episode. The approach has its benefits, but it simultaneously limits a portion of the tension of the movie’s story.

Developed by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man follows Denji, a indebted fiend fighter in a world where Devils represent particular dangers (including ideas like Aging and Darkness to terrifying entities like cockroaches or historical conflicts). After being deceived and killed by the criminal syndicate, he makes a pact with his faithful companion, Pochita, and comes back from the dead as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to completely destroy Devils and the horrors they signify from reality.

Thrust into a brutal struggle between demons and hunters, Denji encounters a new character — a alluring coffee server concealing a deadly secret — igniting a heartbreaking confrontation between the pair where affection and existence intersect. The movie picks up right after the first season, exploring the main character’s connection with Reze as he wrestles with his emotions for her and his loyalty to his manipulative boss, Makima, compelling him to decide among desire, loyalty, and self-preservation.

A Self-Contained Love Story Amidst a Larger World

Reze Arc is fundamentally a romance-to-rivalry plot, with our imperfect main character Denji becoming enamored with his counterpart almost immediately upon meeting. He’s a isolated boy seeking affection, which makes his heart unreliable and up for grabs on a first-come basis. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate mythology and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is highly self-contained. Filmmaker the director understands this and guarantees the romantic arc is at the center, rather than bogging it down with filler recaps for the uninitiated, particularly since none of that really matters to the overall storyline.

Despite Denji’s imperfections, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He’s after all a adolescent, fumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his sense of morality. His desperate longing for love portrays him like a lovesick puppy, although he’s prone to barking, biting, and making a mess along the way. Reze is a ideal pairing for him, an compelling seductive antagonist who targets her mark in our hero. You want to see the main character earn the affection of his love interest, despite she is clearly hiding something from him. So when her real identity is revealed, you still cannot avoid hope they’ll in some way make it work, even though deep down, you know a happy ending is never really in the cards. As such, the tension don’t feel as intense as they ought to be since their relationship is doomed. This is compounded by that the film acts as a direct sequel to the first season, allowing minimal space for a love story like this amid the more grim developments that fans know are approaching.

Stunning Visuals and Artistic Execution

The film’s graphics effortlessly combine traditional animation with computer-generated settings, delivering impressive eye candy even before the action kicks in. Including cars to tiny desk fans, 3D models add depth and detail to every shot, allowing the 2D characters stand out beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its digital elements and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc employs them less frequently, most noticeably during its action-packed climax, where such elements, though not unappealing, become easier to spot. Such smooth, dynamic environments render the movie’s fights both visually bombastic and surprisingly easy to follow. Nonetheless, the technique excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the vibrancy and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Final Thoughts and Broader Implications

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a solid point of entry, probably resulting in new fans satisfied, but it additionally carries a drawback. Telling a self-contained story limits the stakes of what ought to seem like a expansive anime epic. It’s an illustration of why following up a popular anime season with a film is not the best approach if it undermines the series’ overall narrative possibilities.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by tying up multiple installments of anime television with an epic movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the problem entirely by serving as a backstory to its popular series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, maybe a slightly foolishly. But that doesn’t stop the film from proving to be a enjoyable time, a terrific point of entry, and a memorable love story.