As ‘Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc’ proves it’s not just ‘Demon Slayer’ that can storm the U.S. box office, anime columnist Andrew Osmond looks over the franchise on both big and small screens.
Six weeks after Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and here we are again. Another anime film tops the American box-office; another action franchise spinoff rated “R” in America (though it’s an advisory PG12 in Japan). Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc is based on a portion of the source Chainsaw Man manga which, like Demon Slayer, debuted in Japan’s comic anthology, Shonen Jump.
Undoubtedly there’s a huge number of crossover viewers going to both films. But for all their likely lumping together by mainstream pundits who see them as a niche in a niche in a niche, Chainsaw Man and Demon Slayer have deep differences. Demon Slayer was one of those anime that felt grounded in children’s media, however violent or bloody it got. I refer you to my previous column on the subject. In contrast, Chainsaw Man’s protagonist is a childlike teen whose confused sexuality is a big part of the anime, especially in the new film.
In principle, you should see the TV anime first. (As with Infinity Castle, the Reze film picks up straight from the last TV episode.) That’s less of an ask than it was for Infinity Castle, which followed 63 TV episodes of Demon Slayer. Reze Arc continues from Episode 12 of the TV Chainsaw Man, which you can see on Crunchyroll. But though a continuation, it’s soon apparent that Reze is stylistically very different from the TV version, and not in ways one might expect. It’s rougher-hewn, closer to a comic, and graphic in ways that have nothing to do with its “R” rating. In all these ways, it seems to reflect fan chatter that’s been in the air since the TV show debuted in 2022.
That’s despite the fact that all the Chainsaw Man anime is animated by the same studio, MAPPA. No stranger to action franchises, MAPPA also handles Jujutsu Kaisen and animated much of Attack on Titan. While all these titles are from comics by different creators, their anime are scripted by one tireless writer, Hiroshi Seko, who also scripts Science Saru’s Dan Da Dan.
Background issues
The Chainsaw Man TV series (trailer above) was helmed by Ryu Nakayama, a longtime animator with few director credits. I found the series impressive, despite some very goofy early monsters – more on them later. It’s easy to find claims online that anime fans in Japan didn’t like the series. Such pontifications are usually hard to verify; get three fans in agreement, and they’ll think they’re a majority. However, they have backing in this case. Chainsaw Man’s Japanese Blu-ray and DVD sales were disastrously low, even while the manga’s popularity was stellar.
Meanwhile, Nakayama himself seemingly railed against working conditions at MAPPA. In November 2023, he posted an X/Twitter message; he didn’t name MAPPA in it, but spoke of “building a better work environment free from power harassment and moral harassment, with no unnecessary stress.” In August 2024, he became CCO at another company. All this occurred amid wider criticism of MAPPA’s working practices (more links here), which would take another article to discuss. One somber question is how much MAPPA’s problems are endemic through the industry.
In any case, Nakayama was replaced on the Reze Arc film by Tatsuya Yoshihara. He’s mainly known for directing the long adventure series Black Clover (another Shonen Jump property, animated by Pierrot, not MAPPA). Yoshihara was also “Action Director” on the TV Chainsaw Man; he also directed two episodes and contributed animation and storyboards.
I like Nakayama’s TV Chainsaw Man more than Yoshihara’s film. But whichever you prefer, it’s a case study of a franchise performing a mid-course correction, and for more defensible reasons than some live-action franchises. There may be behind-the-scenes ugliness; the whole story may only be known to the franchise’s two directors and some MAPPA staff. But I have to go by what’s on screen.
Denji 101
The titular Chainsaw Man is just a teenage boy, Denji. In another contrast to Demon Slayer, he’s no upstanding hero. Denji’s a crude hedonist; through the TV show, his wants are exclusively physical and more infantile than adolescent. Denji lusts after females, for instance, but he can’t picture himself doing anything with them except touching their breasts - and when that wish is granted, his disappointed confusion is hilarious. The Reze film shows his immaturity more subtly – he can’t bear the taste of coffee.
Even Denji realizes there’s something wrong with him when people start dying around him and he doesn’t feel anything. In story terms, that’s linked to his circumstances. Chainsaw Man is set in an alternate present, a modern Japan where the existence of monsters is global knowledge. Early in the TV anime, we learn that a super-devil wiped out more than a million people, though that monster hasn’t been glimpsed so far, just the carnage. A scene of a family house being blown away feels like a 1950s A-Bomb documentary.
The TV show starts with Denji growing up in this world, a child enslaved by the yakuza. He works off his late dad’s debts by killing low-level demons with the help of another demon, an adorable doggie with its own chainsaw face accessory (you’ve probably seen the plushies). By Episode 2, Denji’s gone beyond humanity and merged with the doggie. Now he can transform into a fiend with a metal head, needle teeth and chainsaws extruding from his limbs. After dismembering his masters (don’t worry, they were zombified), he’s recruited by monster-hunting specialists and starts a new life – though, it seems, with emotional defects caused by his transhumanity.
Many of these elements are familiar in Japanese sci-fi and fantasy. But Denji himself resonates beyond those genres, into a different work by Chainsaw Man’s manga writer, Tatsuki Fujimoto. While writing chapters of Chainsaw Man, Fujimoto also wrote a brief strip called Look Back. In 2024, it was adapted into a superb one-hour anime film by Studio Durian; I covered it in my first column for Animation World Network and you can see it on Prime Video.
On the face of it, Look Back is nothing like Chainsaw Man. It’s the story of two gifted girls who end up drawing comics together. But what’s plain from the start is that the viewpoint girl, Fujino, is a nasty person. Her talent is driven by selfishness and rivalry, which underpins the story. On the evidence of both Look Back and Chainsaw Man, Fujimoto is interested in brash, difficult, unattractive protagonists.
Chainsaw Man’s Denji is a groper in the crude sense. His true journey, though, may be his groping towards understanding what he lacks as a person, like Fujino in Look Back. They’re not the first dysfunctional characters in anime – Evangelion was full of them. Fujimoto’s vision, though, is more comedic and pervasively sad, in that his characters don’t realize the joke’s on them.
That sadness is underpinned by the anime’s musician. It’s Kensuke Ushio, and his Chainsaw Man music is often in the detached, melancholic, searching mode that he adopts in A Silent Voice and Liz and the Blue Bird, both Naoko Yamada films about troubled schoolkids. In the TV Chainsaw Man, such music accompanies a Godfather-style mass killing, or a wild girl feasting on a headless bear. Ushio mixes up these passages with rasping, crunching techno-tracks which accompany much of the action, but the sense of underlying sadness is unusual for an action show. In Reze, the music is used in what feels like a self-reflexive joke. It accompanies a film that the characters see in a cinema, supposedly too difficult for regular audiences.
The TV version of Chainsaw Man is let down by some extremely silly monsters in the early episodes. There’s a monster bat, followed by a Thing made of worms that looks like a goofier version of the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. In those episodes, the show’s visual style, full of lush backgrounds and quasi-live action spectacle, seems risibly misplaced. The silly creatures would have been happier in Science Saru’s Dan Da Dan, which had a cooler worm monster in its second season.
Indeed, the tenor of the complaints I’ve seen against the TV show is that it should have been more like Dan Da Dan – cartoony, furious, crazy fun. This is an argument that’s long bounced around pop culture – for instance in the contrasting takes on Superman (Zack Snyder versus James Gunn), themselves part of a decades-old argument about if superheroes can be serious. But I’m also reminded of a Japanese franchise, Ghost in the Shell. In its strip form, it was a frequently silly, goofy caper, though underpinned by the dense worldbuilding of its writer/artist, Masumune Shirow. The first anime film, made in 1995 by Mamoru Oshii, turned Ghost into an icy, severe piece of sci-fi, and that version is now recognized as a classic.
The TV Chainsaw Man is no Ghost in the Shell. But it works increasingly well as it goes along, past the terrible monsters. The big “experimental” episode is the eighth, which involves Denji, an older woman, and an abortive one-night stand. The episode’s first half is full of awkward framings and small, uncomfortable movements, playing in real time. It’s not anime!, some fans may object. If so, I’d point them to the episode’s artistic sibling, broadcast three years later. That’s Episode 7 of Dan Da Dan’s first season, where a crazed battle gives way to a harrowingly real-feeling tragic story involving a mother and child, no less “pretentious” or “arty” than its predecessor.
The title of chainsaw man shouldn’t be worn lightly, not when its past holders include Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wielding his bone-cutter like a majorette’s baton. If there’s a fundamental problem with the TV show – and, I’d argue, with the Reze film too – it’s that the chainsaw action itself feels like a weak link, even when Denji leaps into a monster maw and lets loose on labyrinths of sallow, squirming flesh. Discussing Dan Da Dan last summer, I mentioned how vital, how joyfully driven its action felt beside the average superhero flick. In Chainsaw Man, too much of Denji’s actual fighting feels generic under the gloss.
I like the gloss, and I enjoyed Denji enjoying his fights, but I couldn’t enjoy the fighting for itself. Nearly all the really interesting stuff in the TV Chainsaw Man happens when guts aren’t flying. There’s Denji’s first grown-up kiss, for instance, a meme-ably mortifying disaster. Members of the jury, it was a drinks party and these things happen.
On the big screen
So, on to Reze Arc. Since covering Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, I’ve come back from Japan to England, but there was no shortage of screens where I could see the new film. I watched Reze in an IMAX cinema, which only magnified the huge stylistic differences from the TV series. I won’t cover the film’s story in detail. Enough to say Denji meets a new girl, the title Reze. Their meet-cute happens in a phone booth, a reminder of how different this “modern” world is from ours. After a magic evening of school trespass and night swimming, Denji finally falls in love – which is when a pyrotechnic foe appears and the rest of the film becomes an escalating battle.
Perhaps that’s the main reason why it disappointed me. I like modulation in my fights, and Infinity Castle delivered that better; it was a longer film, but its separate episodes felt more satisfying in their arcs and crescendos. Infinity Castle was also better at selling the tragedy of its main foe, Akaza. Even though it involved a long flashback more than two hours into the film, that worked well in adding drama to the epic. In contrast, the backstory of Reze’s Bomb Devil is revealed in curt closing dialogue that any Marvel fan will find old hat.
True, the scenes in the film’s first half between Denji and Reze have great charm and chemistry. The simplified designs and childish antics reminded me of the last scenes of Mamoru Hosoda’s wonderful Wolf Children, with two kids in another darkened school. Reze is more knowing, though. The best gag is during the night-swimming scene where a blithely nude Reze says she’ll teach Denji something new – how to swim! But here my unfavorable comparison would be with Dan Da Dan. Unlike that series, very little of Reze’s character-based charm carries through once the action revs up.
I’ll grant that Reze wrangles its characters efficiently for a franchise film. Two fighters that were little-seen in the TV show, the winged Angel and the shark-man Beam, are both bulked up in the action. The shark will get all the memes, but the ambiguous, mass-murdering Angel is more interesting, teamed up with the show’s psychologically-maimed but reliably decent Aki. (It extends a running joke in the series; Aki always has unstable and unhinged characters thrust into his care.) Of the major TV characters, the horned girl Power and timorous Kobeni are reduced to cameos, while the devil fighters’ sphinx-like leader Makima has a restricted but weighty role.
All these calls are sensible, as is the film’s changed style, whether it came from fan gripes with the TV version or another reason. (For the record, Reze has the same art director as the TV series, Yusuke Takeda, while Mika Nakajima moves up from art setting on the series to art design here.) I’ve defended “live-action style” anime elsewhere. But for all the rewards of the style of the TV Chainsaw Man – like showing a drunken late-night liaison with naturalistic humanity – that style would hardly fit a movie where Denji rides a shark up a skyscraper.
The film’s presentation is changed down to rougher character outlines and scribble-style freckles. Characters are plainly faceless in several shots. Once the mayhem ramps up, we’re into the “world” of comic strips, much more than the TV show allowed. A gaudily-colored action freeze frame feels like a conscious riposte to one complaint against the TV show, that its lighting and background are clinically pale despite the splattered blood.
There are other revisionist touches. Reze presents an opening dream sequence in line-drawn outlines. Then when Denji wakes up, the next minutes pile in far more manga-style jokery than the TV version would have allowed. A moment where the girl Power punches Denji cartoonishly into the ceiling could be a response to another complaint I’ve seen about the TV show, that she hits harder in the manga. The film has less lurid color-coding than you see in some anime, but there’s a gorgeous early scene where Aki and Angel dispatch a monster in front of a blood-bright sunset.
I only wish I was drawn more into Reze’s action. The mayhem is frenetic, but it feels second hand, sometimes even labored. By the end, characters are being blown up so often that any sense that they might be destroyed, or “lose” in any sense, is gone. Watching the film, I was often thinking how more fun was had in so many of Dan Da Dan’s action scenes, or in a film like Promare. Reze’s whirlwind smash’n’crash finale has nothing on the climax to Into the Spider-Verse, to which it seems to aspire.
I was crying out for more of the character chemistry that infused Reze’s early scenes, and more moments of sustained kinetic pleasure among the bangs and flashes. There are some, but even Denji seems to have less fun than he did on TV. There are genuinely strong moments, such as the use of festival fireworks (and a watching child) to herald the carnage coming. The last minutes undercut sentimental clichés in ways that are cruel but not pitiless. But I hoped for much more than Reze delivered.
