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Two youngsters experience a private, tender moment at the neighborhood secondary school’s outdoor pool after hours. While they drift as one, hanging under the stars in the stillness of the evening, the scene captures the fleeting, heady thrill of teenage love, utterly caught up in the moment, consequences forgotten.

About half an hour into The Chainsaw Man Film: Reze Arc, it became clear these scenes are the core of the movie. Denji and Reze’s love story took center stage, and every bit of contextual information and character histories I had gleaned from the anime’s first season turned out to be largely irrelevant. Although it is a official entry within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a easier starting place for first-time viewers — even if they missed its prior content. The approach has its benefits, but it also hinders some of the urgency of the movie’s narrative.

Created by the original creator, Chainsaw Man follows the protagonist, a indebted Devil Hunter in a universe where demons embody particular evils (including ideas like Aging and obscurity to specific horrors like cockroaches or World War II). After being betrayed and murdered by the yakuza, he forms a contract with his faithful companion, his pet, and returns from the dead as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to permanently erase fiends and the terrors they signify from existence.

Thrust into a violent struggle between demons and hunters, the hero encounters a new character — a charming barista concealing a deadly secret — igniting a tragic confrontation between the pair where affection and survival intersect. This film picks up immediately following the first season, exploring Denji’s relationship with his love interest as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his loyalty to his manipulative superior, his employer, forcing him to choose between passion, faithfulness, and survival.

An Independent Love Story Amidst a Larger World

Reze Arc is inherently a romance-to-rivalry plot, with our fallible protagonist the hero falling for Reze right away upon introduction. He is a lonely young man seeking affection, which makes his heart unreliable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. Consequently, despite all of Chainsaw Man’s complex mythology and its extensive ensemble, Reze Arc is highly self-contained. Director the director understands this and guarantees the love story is at the center, rather than bogging it down with unnecessary summaries for the uninitiated, particularly since such details is crucial to the complete storyline.

Regardless of the protagonist’s imperfections, it’s hard not to feel for him. He is after all a adolescent, stumbling his way through a world that’s distorted his sense of right and wrong. His intense craving for love makes him come off like a lovesick dog, although he’s prone to growling, snapping, and causing chaos along the way. His love interest is a ideal pairing for Denji, an compelling femme fatale who targets her prey in our protagonist. You want to see the main character earn the affection of his love interest, even if she is obviously hiding a secret from him. Thus when her real identity is unveiled, audiences cannot avoid hope 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 fail to seem as intense as they ought to be since their relationship is fated. It doesn’t help that the movie acts as a direct sequel to the first season, leaving minimal space for a love story like this among the darker developments that followers know are coming soon.

Breathtaking Animation and Artistic Craftsmanship

This movie’s visuals effortlessly combine 2D animation with computer-generated settings, providing stunning eye candy prior to the action begins. Including cars to tiny office appliances, digital assets enhance realism and detail to every scene, making the animated figures pop beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently highlights its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc uses them more sparingly, most noticeably during its action-packed climax, where those models, though not unappealing, become easier to identify. These fluid, ever-shifting environments render the movie’s battles both visually bombastic and remarkably easy to understand. Still, the method excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Final Thoughts and Broader Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a good point of entry, likely leaving new fans pleased, but it also has a downside. Telling a self-contained narrative restricts the stakes of what should feel like a sprawling animated saga. This is an example of why continuing a popular anime season with a movie isn’t the optimal approach if it weakens the series’ overall storytelling potential.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by tying up multiple installments of anime television with an grand film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue entirely by acting as a prequel to its popular show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc advances boldly, maybe a slightly foolishly. But that doesn’t stop the movie from proving to be a great experience, a terrific introduction, and a unforgettable romantic tale.