Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
2025 · Tatsuya Yoshihara
For when you want to fall for someone and get your heart put through a wall — a doomed-romance high and an action blowout in one sitting. Not a comfort watch; it's the good kind of hurt.
What it's about
Denji, the devil-hunting boy with a chainsaw for a heart, meets Reze — a girl in a café who offers him something no battle ever has: the idea of an ordinary life. Their tentative romance unfolds inside a brutal shadow war between devils, hunters, and enemies nobody saw coming, and Denji is pulled toward the deadliest fight he's ever faced. It's a love story dropped into a meat grinder, and it knows exactly what it's doing with both halves.
The experience
It swings hard between hushed, rain-soaked tenderness and berserk large-scale destruction — you get butterflies and whiplash in the same reel. Melancholy hangs over even the funniest, sweetest scenes, and the action hits with real physical weight.
The craft
MAPPA imports live-action camera language into animation — handheld drift, shallow focus, naturalistic two-shots — so the quiet scenes feel eavesdropped-on and the carnage lands like it has mass. Director Tatsuya Yoshihara stages some of the studio's most kinetic destruction while keeping faith with Tatsuki Fujimoto's movie-mad, tonally daring source material. See it big and loud; the sound design and scale are the point.
Why it matters
The Reze arc is the most beloved stretch of one of the defining manga of its generation, and the theatrical treatment marks how far anime's event-film era has come — a single story arc given blockbuster scale.
MAPPA's theatrical continuation of Chainsaw Man adapts the most beloved stretch of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga: the arrival of Reze, a girl in a café who offers Denji — the devil-hunting boy with a chainsaw for a heart — something he's never had, a reason to imagine an ordinary life. Fujimoto is manga's great cinephile, and the Reze arc is his doomed-romance movie, equal parts rain-soaked tenderness and apocalyptic action; the film honors both registers, swinging from hushed, naturalistic two-shots to some of the most kinetic large-scale destruction the studio has staged. Director Tatsuya Yoshihara keeps the series' signature grounded camera language — handheld drift, shallow focus, the texture of live-action filmmaking imported into animation — so that when the carnage arrives it lands with physical weight. Kenshi Yonezu's theme song 'IRIS OUT' became a phenomenon in its own right, and the film broke opening records in Japan before an unusually wide global release. At its core is a question Fujimoto keeps asking across his work: whether a weapon can also be a person who simply wants to go to school.
Lines of influence
- Akira (1988) — Established the animated large-scale-destruction vocabulary—collapsing overpasses, expanding blast shockwaves and raining debris rendered fully by hand—that MAPPA's city-leveling Reze set-pieces directly extend.
- Ghost in the Shell (1995) — Pioneered importing live-action lens grammar into anime—rack focus, shallow depth of field, telephoto compression—the exact photographic language Reze Arc deploys for its handheld shallow-focus intimacy.
- Léon: The Professional (1994) — Supplies the template of tender, doomed romance between a lethal weapon-of-a-girl and a naive innocent, staged in quiet two-shots wedged between bursts of violence.
- Nikita (1990) — The woman remade by handlers into a deployable assassin—her affection weaponized against her—is the direct precursor to Reze as a Soviet-run bomb-girl ordered to seduce.
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) — Fuses the human-whose-body-is-armament with liquid, explosive spectacle, modeling the 'weapon-as-person' pathos Reze literally embodies as a walking bomb.
- Pulp Fiction (1994) — A touchstone of Fujimoto's cinephilia: the tonal-swing cutting that whiplashes from comedy and romance into sudden shocking violence within a single scene.
- Evil Dead II (1987) — Its frantic subjective 'shaky-cam' chase camera and comedy-to-gore tonal whiplash are echoed in Reze Arc's kinetic handheld staging and abrupt mood breaks.
- The End of Evangelion (1997) — Marries apocalyptic-scale annihilation to raw romantic and psychological devastation, plus expressionist iris/flash editing—an antecedent for the film's iris-out motif and emotional-cataclysm scale.
- Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door (2001) — Treats an anime like a shot-on-location film through cinephile live-action framing and music-timed cutting, the sensibility Reze Arc inherits in its 'live-action language' staging.
- Redline (2009) — Hand-drawn hyper-kinetic action built on exaggerated impact frames and smear—the animation-craft peer to Yoshihara's physically weighty fight choreography.
- Devilman Crybaby (2018) — Apocalyptic doomed romance in which the beloved is a monster/weapon, told through elastic tonal swings from tenderness to carnage—Fujimoto's tonal register in a peer work.
- Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021) — MAPPA's immediate house-style sibling: a theatrical shonen arc built on simulated handheld, shallow-focus 'camerawork' laid over cursed-energy spectacle.
- Attack on Titan: The Final Season (2020) — MAPPA continuity in large-scale destruction and simulated handheld camera tracking through chaos, the studio's craft lineage feeding Reze Arc's mayhem.
- Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020) — The single-arc theatrical shonen film model—an emotional doomed-sacrifice climax welded to bravura spectacle animation—that Reze Arc's release format mirrors.
- Look Back (2024) — A fellow Tatsuki Fujimoto adaptation whose naturalistic, observational handheld framing and mundane two-shots share the author's live-action grammar of quiet intimacy.
- Black Clover (2017) — Yoshihara's own directorial calling card—fluid, weighty fight choreography with dynamic virtual-camera moves and sakuga bursts—is the action signature he carries into Reze Arc.