🔗 Share this article

A pair of teenagers experience a private, gentle moment at the neighborhood secondary school’s open-air swimming pool late at night. While they drift together, hanging beneath the night sky in the stillness of the night, the scene captures the fleeting, exhilarating thrill of teenage love, completely caught up in the present, consequences overlooked.

About 30 minutes into The Chainsaw Man Film: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the heart of the film. Denji and Reze’s love story took center stage, and all the background details and character histories previously known from the series’ first season proved to be mostly unnecessary. Despite being a canonical installment within the franchise, Reze Arc provides a easier entry point for first-time viewers — regardless of they haven’t seen its single episode. The approach has its benefits, but it also hinders a portion of the urgency of the movie’s narrative.

Developed by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a indebted fiend fighter in a world where demons represent specific dangers (ranging from concepts like getting older and Darkness to specific horrors like cockroaches or historical conflicts). When he’s deceived and killed by the yakuza, he forms a contract with his faithful companion, Pochita, and comes back from the deceased as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the power to completely destroy Devils and the terrors they signify from existence.

Plunged into a brutal struggle between devils and hunters, the hero meets Reze — a charming barista hiding a lethal mystery — sparking a heartbreaking confrontation between the two where affection and survival collide. This film picks up right after season 1, delving into the main character’s connection with Reze as he wrestles with his emotions for her and his devotion to his manipulative boss, his employer, forcing him to decide among desire, loyalty, and survival.

An Independent Romantic Tale Within a Larger World

Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies story, with our fallible protagonist Denji becoming enamored with Reze right away upon meeting. He’s a lonely young man looking for affection, which makes his heart vulnerable and up for grabs on a first-come, first-served. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate lore and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is very self-contained. Filmmaker the director understands this and guarantees the love story is at the center, instead of bogging it down with filler recaps for the uninitiated, particularly since such details is crucial to the complete storyline.

Despite the protagonist’s imperfections, it’s difficult not to feel for him. He’s still a adolescent, fumbling his way through a reality that’s warped his understanding of morality. His desperate longing for love makes him come off like a infatuated puppy, although he’s likely to growling, snapping, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a perfect pairing for him, an compelling femme fatale who targets her mark in our protagonist. Viewers hope to see Denji earn the affection of his love interest, even if she is clearly concealing a secret from him. Thus when her true nature is revealed, audiences cannot avoid wish they’ll in some way succeed, even though internally, you know a positive outcome is never really in the cards. As such, the stakes don’t feel as high as they ought to be since their romance is fated. It doesn’t help that the film serves as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, leaving little room for a love story like this among the more grim events that fans know are coming soon.

Breathtaking Visuals and Artistic Execution

This movie’s graphics seamlessly blend 2D animation with computer-generated settings, delivering stunning visual appeal even before the action kicks in. From vehicles to tiny desk fans, 3D models add depth and detail to every shot, making the 2D characters pop strikingly. Unlike Demon Slayer, which frequently highlights its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc uses them more sparingly, particularly evident during its action-packed finale, where those models, though not unappealing, are more apparent to spot. Such smooth, ever-shifting backgrounds render the film’s battles both spectacular to watch and remarkably simple to understand. Nonetheless, the method excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Final Impressions and Broader Implications

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a solid starting place, probably leaving first-time audiences satisfied, but it additionally carries a drawback. Presenting a self-contained story limits the stakes of what ought to seem like a expansive animated saga. This is an illustration of why continuing a successful television series with a movie is not the optimal strategy if it undermines the franchise’s overall narrative possibilities.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by concluding several seasons of anime television with an grand film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue completely by acting as a prequel to its well-known show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc advances boldly, maybe a slightly foolishly. But this does not prevent the movie from proving to be a great experience, a terrific point of entry, and a memorable romantic tale.