🔗 Share this article

A pair of teenagers experience a intimate, tender instant at the local secondary school’s open-air swimming pool late at night. While they drift as one, hanging beneath the night sky in the stillness of the night, the sequence portrays the ephemeral, exhilarating excitement of adolescent romance, completely caught up in the present, ramifications overlooked.

About half an hour into The Chainsaw Man Film: Reze Arc, I realized such moments are the core of the movie. The romantic tale became the focus, and all the background details and backstories I had gleaned from the anime’s initial episodes proved to be mostly irrelevant. Despite being a official installment within the series, Reze Arc provides a easier entry point for first-time viewers — even if they missed its prior content. The approach has its benefits, but it simultaneously limits some of the tension of the movie’s story.

Created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man chronicles the protagonist, a indebted fiend fighter in a universe where Devils represent specific evils (including concepts like Aging and obscurity to specific horrors like insects or historical conflicts). After being betrayed and killed by the yakuza, Denji forms a contract with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and returns from the deceased as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to permanently erase fiends and the horrors they represent from reality.

Plunged into a brutal struggle between devils and hunters, the hero encounters a new character — a alluring barista hiding a lethal secret — igniting a tragic clash between the two where affection and survival intersect. This film continues immediately following season 1, exploring Denji’s relationship with his love interest as he grapples with his feelings for her and his devotion to his manipulative superior, his employer, compelling him to choose between passion, faithfulness, and self-preservation.

A Self-Contained Love Story Amidst a Broader World

Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies story, with our fallible protagonist Denji becoming enamored with his counterpart right away upon introduction. He is a lonely young man looking for affection, which makes his heart vulnerable and easily swayed on a first-come basis. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate mythology and its large ensemble, Reze Arc is very independent. Director Tatsuya Yoshihara recognizes this and guarantees the love story is at the forefront, rather than bogging it down with filler recaps for the uninitiated, especially when none of that is crucial to the complete storyline.

Regardless of Denji’s imperfections, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He’s after all a teenager, fumbling his way through a reality that’s warped his understanding of right and wrong. His desperate craving for love portrays him like a infatuated puppy, although he’s likely to barking, biting, and causing chaos along the way. His love interest is a ideal pairing for him, an effective seductive antagonist who finds her mark in our hero. You want to see the main character earn the affection of his affection, despite Reze is obviously hiding something from him. So when her real identity is revealed, audiences cannot avoid wish they’ll in some way make it work, although internally, it is known a positive outcome is not truly in the cards. As such, the stakes fail to seem as high as they should be since their romance is doomed. It doesn’t help that the movie acts as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, allowing minimal space for a love story like this among the more grim developments that fans know are approaching.

Breathtaking Visuals and Artistic Execution

This movie’s visuals effortlessly combine 2D animation with 3D environments, providing impressive eye candy even before the excitement kicks in. From cars to small desk fans, digital assets enhance realism and detail to every scene, allowing the animated figures pop beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which often highlights its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc uses them more sparingly, most noticeably during its action-packed climax, where those models, while not unattractive, are more apparent to spot. Such smooth, dynamic environments render the film’s battles both spectacular to watch and surprisingly simple to understand. Nonetheless, the method excels most when it’s invisible, enhancing the vibrancy and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Concluding Impressions and Broader Implications

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a good point of entry, probably resulting in first-time audiences pleased, but it also has a downside. Presenting a self-contained story limits the stakes of what ought to seem like a expansive anime epic. It’s an illustration of why continuing a popular television series with a film isn’t the best approach if it undermines the series’ general narrative possibilities.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up several installments of anime television with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 avoided the issue entirely by serving as a backstory to its well-known series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, perhaps a slightly foolishly. But that doesn’t stop the film from being a great time, a excellent introduction, and a memorable romantic tale.