🔗 Share this article

Two youngsters experience a private, tender instant at the neighborhood high school’s open-air swimming pool after hours. As they float together, hanging under the stars in the stillness of the night, the sequence captures the fleeting, heady thrill of teenage romance, completely caught up in the present, consequences forgotten.

About 30 minutes into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the heart of the film. The love story took center stage, and all the background details and character histories I had gleaned from the series’ first season proved to be largely irrelevant. Despite being a canonical entry within the series, Reze Arc provides a more accessible starting place for first-time viewers — even if they haven’t seen its prior content. The approach has its benefits, but it also hinders a portion of the urgency of the movie’s narrative.

Developed by the original creator, Chainsaw Man follows the protagonist, a debt-ridden fiend fighter in a world where Devils represent particular dangers (ranging from concepts like getting older and Darkness to terrifying entities like cockroaches or historical conflicts). After being deceived and murdered by the criminal syndicate, Denji forms a contract with his faithful devil-dog, Pochita, and comes back from the deceased as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to completely destroy fiends and the horrors they signify from existence.

Plunged into a brutal conflict between demons and hunters, Denji encounters Reze — a charming barista concealing a lethal mystery — igniting a heartbreaking clash between the pair where love and survival collide. This film picks up immediately following the first season, exploring the main character’s connection with Reze as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his devotion to his manipulative superior, his employer, forcing him to decide among passion, loyalty, and self-preservation.

An Independent Romantic Tale Within a Larger Universe

Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies plot, with our imperfect protagonist the hero becoming enamored with Reze right away upon introduction. He is a lonely boy looking for 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 intricate mythology and its extensive ensemble, Reze Arc is very self-contained. Filmmaker the director recognizes this and guarantees the romantic arc is at the center, instead of bogging it down with unnecessary summaries for the new viewers, especially when such details really matters to the overall plot.

Despite the protagonist’s flaws, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He’s still a adolescent, fumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his sense of right and wrong. His desperate craving for love makes him come off like a infatuated dog, although he’s likely to growling, snapping, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a perfect match for him, an effective seductive antagonist who targets her mark in our protagonist. You want to see Denji earn the affection of his affection, despite she is obviously hiding a secret from him. Thus when her real identity is unveiled, you still can’t help but hope they’ll in some way make it work, even though internally, you know a happy ending is never really in the plan. As such, the stakes fail to seem as intense as they ought to be since their romance is fated. This is compounded by that the movie serves as a direct sequel to the first season, allowing minimal space for a romance like this among the more grim events that fans know are approaching.

Stunning Animation and Technical Craftsmanship

This movie’s visuals seamlessly blend 2D animation with 3D environments, providing stunning eye candy prior to the action kicks in. Including vehicles to small office appliances, digital assets add depth and texture to each scene, making the animated figures stand out beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which often showcases its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc uses them less frequently, most noticeably during its explosive climax, where such elements, while not unattractive, are more apparent to identify. These smooth, dynamic environments render the movie’s fights both spectacular to watch and surprisingly simple to follow. Nonetheless, the method excels most when it’s invisible, enhancing the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Concluding Thoughts and Broader Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a solid starting place, probably resulting in first-time audiences pleased, but it additionally carries a drawback. Presenting a self-contained narrative restricts the tension of what should feel like a sprawling animated saga. It’s an illustration of why following up a successful television series with a movie isn’t the optimal strategy if it undermines the franchise’s overall narrative possibilities.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by concluding multiple seasons of anime television with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the problem completely by serving as a backstory to its well-known show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, perhaps a bit foolishly. However this does not prevent the movie from proving to be a enjoyable experience, a excellent introduction, and a unforgettable romantic tale.