Two teenagers experience a private, tender instant at the neighborhood secondary school’s outdoor pool after hours. While they drift as one, hanging under the night sky in the stillness of the night, the scene captures the ephemeral, exhilarating excitement of adolescent love, completely engrossed in the moment, ramifications overlooked.
Approximately 30 minutes into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, it became clear such moments are the heart of the movie. Denji and Reze’s romantic tale took center stage, and all the contextual information and backstories I had gleaned from the anime’s first season proved to be mostly irrelevant. Although it is a canonical entry within the series, Reze Arc offers a easier starting place for newcomers — regardless of they haven’t seen its single episode. This method has its benefits, but it also hinders a portion of the urgency of the film’s story.
Created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man follows Denji, a debt-ridden Devil Hunter in a world where Devils embody particular dangers (ranging from ideas like Aging and obscurity to terrifying entities like cockroaches or historical conflicts). After being betrayed and murdered by the criminal syndicate, he makes a pact with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and comes back from the deceased as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the ability to permanently erase fiends and the horrors they represent from existence.
Thrust into a violent struggle between demons and hunters, the hero meets a new character — a charming coffee server hiding a lethal mystery — sparking a heartbreaking confrontation between the pair where love and survival intersect. The movie picks up immediately following the first season, delving into the main character’s connection with his love interest as he grapples with his emotions for her and his loyalty to his manipulative boss, his employer, forcing him to choose between desire, faithfulness, and self-preservation.
Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies plot, with our imperfect main character the hero becoming enamored with Reze right away upon meeting. He’s a lonely young man seeking affection, which renders him 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 large ensemble, Reze Arc is highly independent. Director the director understands this and ensures the love story is at the forefront, instead of weighing it down with filler recaps for the new viewers, especially when none of that really matters to the complete storyline.
Regardless of Denji’s flaws, it’s difficult not to sympathize with him. He’s still a adolescent, stumbling his way through a reality that’s warped his sense of right and wrong. His desperate craving for affection makes him come off like a lovesick dog, even if he’s likely to barking, snapping, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a ideal pairing for him, an effective femme fatale who finds her prey in our protagonist. Viewers hope to see the main character win the ire of his affection, despite she is obviously concealing a secret from him. Thus when her true nature is unveiled, audiences cannot avoid hope they’ll somehow make it work, even though deep down, you know a happy ending is not truly in the plan. As such, the tension don’t feel as high as they should be since their relationship is fated. It doesn’t help that the film serves as a immediate follow-up to Season 1, leaving minimal space for a love story like this amid the more grim events that fans know are approaching.
This movie’s graphics seamlessly blend 2D animation with 3D environments, delivering impressive eye candy prior to the action begins. Including cars to tiny desk fans, 3D models add depth and detail to every shot, making the 2D characters pop strikingly. Unlike Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its digital elements and changing settings, Reze Arc employs them more sparingly, most noticeably during its explosive finale, where those models, though not unappealing, become easier to identify. Such smooth, ever-shifting environments make the movie’s battles both spectacular to watch and remarkably easy to follow. Nonetheless, the method shines brightest when it’s invisible, improving the vibrancy and movement of the hand-drawn art.
Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a solid starting place, likely resulting in first-time audiences satisfied, but it additionally carries a drawback. Presenting a self-contained story restricts the tension of what ought to seem like a expansive anime epic. This is an example of why continuing a popular television series with a movie isn’t the best approach if it weakens the series’ general storytelling potential.
Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by concluding multiple seasons of anime television with an epic movie, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue completely by acting as a backstory to its well-known series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc advances boldly, maybe a bit recklessly. But this does not prevent the film from proving to be a enjoyable time, a excellent point of entry, and a memorable love story.
Tech enthusiast and writer with a passion for exploring emerging technologies and their impact on society.
