The Chainsaw Man TV anime was an interesting experience, but as much as I admired Ryu Nakayama’s gritty vision, the eternal dreariness and restrictive feeling of its approach ultimately failed to resonate with me, especially as they affected the vitality of the story’s outlandish elements. The Tatsuya Yoshihara-directed (Chainsaw Man action director, Black Clover series director [later chief director], Wistoria: Wand and Sword Season 1) Chainsaw Man: The Movie — Reze Arc isn’t the anarchic antithesis to its predecessor, and it often feels very well-made but conventional, but I can definitely say that I enjoyed its comparatively greater sense of liberation.
By default, Reze Arc is brighter, more saturated, and a little shinier than the series. The details of its character designs have been toned down a little too. The movie is chock full of well-animated character acting, a technical aspect that makes the titular Reze spellbinding to watch as she gets close to protagonist Denji (Reina Ueda does a good job too, making the character feel simultaneously sincere and artificial, playfully casual yet calculating), but it doesn’t feel weighted by an obsession with realism.
If Reze Arc maintained this course from start to end, I’d still be happier with it than with the original series, but it’d also feel quite conservative in its own way. Fortunately, there are a number of scenes that break away to embrace their own individual stylings. One shrouds the aftermath of a battle with a stark, blood-red sky, while another infects the lair of a villain with a sickly, murderous green that brings the film into horror/slasher/thriller territory. A night-time pool outing (which seemed to have suffered some cuts by the Malaysian cinema chain I watched the film at, to my chagrin) embraces a dreamy, otherworldly blue. Later, an action shot drains colors from all but the launched attack and anything illuminated by it, while also having an inverted look for the monochrome sections. More than two weeks have passed since I watched the film, but I still find myself thinking back to these scenes and a couple other similarly inspired sections.
Although I opened this article by comparing Reze Arc with the Chainsaw Man TV anime, I also thought a lot about another anime during my viewing: DAN DA DAN. Despite the initial impressions given by the trailers and promotional visuals, that anime turned out to be rather limited with its expression, with its decision to assign one color to each yokai/alien/otherworldly element resulting in a quickly repetitive and stale color palette for its action scenes. Reze Arc is no avant-garde project, but it does enough to remind me that, on some occasions, it’s good for a show to embrace the flexibility provided by being an anime.
