A pair of youngsters experience a private, gentle moment at the local high school’s outdoor swimming pool late at night. While they drift together, hanging under the stars in the stillness of the evening, the sequence portrays the fleeting, heady thrill of teenage love, utterly engrossed in the moment, ramifications overlooked.
About 30 minutes into The Chainsaw Man Film: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the core of the movie. Denji and Reze’s love story became the focus, and all the background details and backstories previously known from the anime’s first season proved to be mostly unnecessary. Despite being a canonical installment within the franchise, Reze Arc provides a easier starting place for newcomers — regardless of they missed its single episode. The approach brings advantages, but it also hinders a portion of the urgency of the movie’s narrative.
Created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man chronicles Denji, a indebted Devil Hunter in a world where Devils embody particular evils (ranging from ideas like getting older and Darkness to specific horrors like cockroaches or World War II). When he’s deceived and murdered by the criminal syndicate, Denji forms a contract with his loyal devil-dog, his pet, and comes back from the deceased as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the ability to permanently erase Devils and the terrors they represent from reality.
Plunged into a violent conflict between demons and hunters, the hero encounters a new character — a alluring barista hiding a lethal secret — igniting a heartbreaking clash between the two where affection and survival intersect. The movie picks up right after season 1, exploring the main character’s relationship with Reze as he wrestles with his emotions for her and his devotion to his manipulative boss, Makima, compelling him to decide among desire, faithfulness, and self-preservation.
Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies plot, with our imperfect main character Denji falling for his counterpart almost immediately upon meeting. He’s a lonely boy seeking affection, which makes his heart unreliable and easily swayed on a first-come basis. Consequently, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate mythology and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is very self-contained. Filmmaker Tatsuya Yoshihara understands this and guarantees the romantic arc is at the forefront, instead of weighing it down with unnecessary summaries for the new viewers, especially when none of that really matters to the overall storyline.
Despite the protagonist’s imperfections, it’s difficult not to sympathize with him. He is after all a adolescent, fumbling his way through a reality that’s warped his understanding of right and wrong. His intense craving for affection makes him come off like a lovesick puppy, even if he’s likely to barking, snapping, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a perfect pairing for Denji, an compelling femme fatale who targets her mark in our hero. Viewers hope to see Denji win the ire of his love interest, despite she is obviously concealing something from him. So when her true nature is revealed, audiences cannot avoid wish they’ll in some way make it work, even though internally, it is known a positive outcome is not truly in the cards. As such, the tension don’t feel as high as they should be since their romance is fated. It doesn’t help that the film serves as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, allowing minimal space for a romance like this amid the darker developments that followers are aware are approaching.
This movie’s graphics effortlessly combine traditional animation with computer-generated settings, delivering impressive eye candy prior to the action begins. Including cars to tiny office appliances, 3D models enhance realism and detail to every scene, allowing the 2D characters pop strikingly. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its 3D assets and shifting settings, Reze Arc uses them more sparingly, most noticeably during its explosive climax, where those models, while not unattractive, are more apparent to spot. These smooth, dynamic environments make the movie’s fights both spectacular to watch and remarkably simple to follow. Nonetheless, the method excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.
Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a good starting place, probably leaving new fans pleased, but it also has a drawback. Telling a standalone narrative limits the stakes of what ought to seem like a expansive anime epic. This is an illustration of why continuing a successful television series with a movie isn’t the best approach if it undermines the franchise’s overall storytelling potential.
While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by concluding multiple installments of anime television with an grand movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue completely by acting as a backstory to its popular show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, maybe a slightly foolishly. But that doesn’t stop the movie from being a great experience, a terrific point of entry, and a memorable love story.
Aria Vance is a seasoned gaming expert and content creator specializing in casino reviews and strategies for high-rollers.
