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A pair of teenagers experience a intimate, tender moment at the local secondary school’s open-air swimming pool after hours. As they float together, hanging beneath the stars in the stillness of the night, the scene portrays the fleeting, exhilarating excitement of teenage love, completely caught up in the moment, consequences forgotten.

About half an hour into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, it became clear these scenes are the core of the movie. Denji and Reze’s love story took center stage, and all the contextual information and backstories I had gleaned from the series’ first season proved to be largely irrelevant. Although it is a canonical entry within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a easier starting place for newcomers — regardless of they missed its single episode. This method has its benefits, but it also hinders some of the urgency of the film’s story.

Developed by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man follows the protagonist, a indebted Devil Hunter in a world where demons embody specific dangers (ranging from concepts like Aging and Darkness to specific horrors like insects or World War II). After being deceived and killed by the criminal syndicate, he forms a contract with his loyal companion, Pochita, and comes back from the dead as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the ability to permanently erase Devils and the terrors they represent from existence.

Thrust into a brutal conflict between demons and hunters, Denji encounters a new character — a charming barista concealing a deadly mystery — igniting a tragic confrontation between the pair where love and survival intersect. This film continues immediately following season 1, delving into Denji’s connection with his love interest as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his devotion to his manipulative superior, his employer, compelling him to choose between passion, faithfulness, and self-preservation.

An Independent Love Story Amidst a Broader Universe

Reze Arc is fundamentally a lovers-to-enemies story, with our fallible protagonist Denji falling for Reze almost immediately upon meeting. He is a lonely boy seeking love, which renders him vulnerable and up for grabs on a first-come, first-served. As a result, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s complex lore and its extensive cast of characters, Reze Arc is highly self-contained. Filmmaker the director recognizes this and guarantees the love story is at the forefront, instead of weighing it down with unnecessary summaries for the new viewers, particularly since such details really matters to the overall storyline.

Regardless of the protagonist’s flaws, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He is still a teenager, stumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his sense of morality. His intense craving for love portrays him like a lovesick dog, although he’s prone to barking, biting, and making a mess along the way. His love interest is a ideal match for him, an effective seductive antagonist who targets her prey in our hero. You want to see Denji win the ire of his love interest, even if Reze is obviously hiding a secret from him. So when her real identity is revealed, audiences cannot avoid wish they’ll in some way make it work, even though internally, you know a happy ending is never really in the cards. As such, the tension fail to seem as high as they should be since their romance is fated. It doesn’t help that the movie acts as a direct sequel to Season 1, allowing little room for a love story like this among the more grim events that fans know are coming soon.

Stunning Animation and Technical Execution

This movie’s visuals seamlessly blend 2D animation with computer-generated settings, delivering impressive visual appeal even before the action begins. Including vehicles to small desk fans, 3D models add depth and texture to every scene, allowing the 2D characters stand out strikingly. Unlike Demon Slayer, which frequently showcases its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc uses them less frequently, most noticeably during its action-packed finale, where such elements, while not unattractive, become easier to spot. Such smooth, ever-shifting environments render the film’s battles both spectacular to watch and remarkably easy to understand. Still, the technique excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Concluding Thoughts and Wider Implications

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc functions as a solid starting place, probably resulting in new fans satisfied, but it also has a drawback. Telling a self-contained narrative limits the stakes of what ought to seem like a sprawling animated saga. This is an illustration of why following up a successful anime season with a film is not the optimal strategy if it undermines the series’ general narrative possibilities.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up multiple installments of animated series with an grand film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 avoided the issue entirely by acting as a prequel to its popular show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, maybe a bit foolishly. But this does not prevent the film from proving to be a great time, a excellent point of entry, and a memorable romantic tale.