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A pair of youngsters experience a private, gentle moment at the local secondary school’s open-air swimming pool after hours. As they float as one, hanging under the stars in the stillness of the night, the sequence portrays the fleeting, exhilarating excitement of adolescent love, utterly caught up in the present, ramifications overlooked.

About 30 minutes into Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the heart of the movie. Denji and Reze’s romantic tale became the focus, and every bit of background details and character histories I had gleaned from the anime’s initial episodes turned out to be largely unnecessary. Despite being a canonical installment within the series, Reze Arc offers a more accessible entry point for newcomers — even if they missed its prior content. The approach brings advantages, but it also hinders a portion of the urgency of the film’s story.

Created by the original creator, Chainsaw Man follows Denji, a debt-ridden Devil Hunter in a world where Devils represent particular evils (ranging from ideas like Aging and Darkness to specific horrors like insects or historical conflicts). When he’s betrayed and killed by the criminal syndicate, he forms a contract with his faithful devil-dog, his pet, and comes back from the dead as a part-human chainsaw wielder with the power to completely destroy fiends and the terrors they signify from existence.

Plunged into a violent struggle between devils and hunters, the hero encounters a new character — a charming coffee server hiding a deadly secret — sparking a heartbreaking confrontation between the pair where love and survival intersect. This film picks up right after the first season, delving into Denji’s relationship with his love interest as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his loyalty to his controlling superior, his employer, compelling him to choose between passion, loyalty, and survival.

An Independent Romantic Tale Within a Larger Universe

Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies plot, with our imperfect protagonist Denji becoming enamored with Reze almost immediately upon introduction. He is a lonely boy looking for love, which renders him vulnerable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. Consequently, despite all of Chainsaw Man’s complex lore and its extensive ensemble, Reze Arc is highly independent. Filmmaker the director understands this and guarantees the love story is at the center, instead of bogging it down with filler recaps for the new viewers, particularly since such details is crucial to the overall plot.

Despite Denji’s flaws, it’s difficult not to feel for him. He’s still a teenager, fumbling his way through a world that’s distorted his sense of morality. His intense longing for love portrays him like a lovesick dog, even if he’s likely to growling, biting, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a ideal pairing for him, an effective femme fatale who finds her mark in our hero. You want to see Denji win the ire of his affection, even if she is clearly concealing a secret from him. So when her true nature is revealed, you still cannot avoid hope they’ll somehow succeed, even though deep down, you know a positive outcome is not truly in the plan. As such, the tension fail to seem as high as they ought to be since their relationship is doomed. It doesn’t help that the film serves as a immediate follow-up to the first season, leaving minimal space for a love story like this among the darker events that fans know are coming soon.

Breathtaking Visuals and Technical Execution

The film’s visuals seamlessly blend traditional animation with computer-generated settings, delivering impressive visual appeal prior to the excitement kicks in. Including cars to small desk fans, digital assets enhance realism and detail to every scene, making the 2D characters pop beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently highlights its 3D assets and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc employs them more sparingly, particularly evident during its explosive finale, where those models, while not unattractive, are more apparent to identify. These smooth, dynamic backgrounds render the movie’s fights both visually bombastic and remarkably easy to understand. Nonetheless, the technique excels most when it’s invisible, improving the dynamic range and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Final Impressions and Broader Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a solid starting place, probably resulting in new fans satisfied, but it additionally carries a drawback. Presenting a standalone narrative restricts the tension of what should feel like a expansive anime epic. It’s an example of why continuing a popular television series with a movie isn’t the optimal approach if it undermines the series’ general storytelling potential.

While Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle found success by tying up several seasons of anime television with an epic film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 avoided the issue completely by serving as a prequel to its well-known show, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, maybe a bit recklessly. But that doesn’t stop the movie from being a great time, a terrific point of entry, and a unforgettable romantic tale.