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Nani!? English review!?
When Chainsaw Man aired in 2022, it was touted as the next “supremacy anime” before its debut — only to fall unexpectedly from its throne. Ironically, Bocchi the Rock!, a smaller production with less fame and budget, became that year's true critical and commercial success.
Although MAPPA's Chainsaw Man received strong acclaim overseas, its domestic reception in Japan was tepid, with disappointing Blu-ray sales (Volume 1 sold only 1,735 copies in its first week — still considered a key indicator of an anime's success).
The main reason lay in director Ryu Nakayama's distinct creative choices, which diverged sharply from the tone of Tatsuki Fujimoto's original manga, and in the sound direction's inability to capture the work's emotional cadence. Fans of the source material found it difficult to resonate with the adaptation. The promotional slogan “Go all out and enjoy it!（火力全開，好好享受）” quickly became an online meme.
That's why the theatrical film, Chainsaw Man: The Reze Arc, now carries heavy expectations — for the franchise's legacy and for its redemption.
Within the roaring chaos of flesh and iron that defines Chainsaw Man, the Reze Arc emerges like a misplaced love song — brief, burning, and unforgettable. Its flame flickers only for a moment, yet scorches itself into the hearts of countless viewers. If Tatsuki Fujimoto's stories are usually composed of coldness, violence, and absurdity, then Reze Arc is the fragment that feels closest to the human pulse. But its tenderness is not mere sentimentality; it is a tenderness built from contrast and allegory — love and desire, control and freedom, the dreams and disillusionments of youth, all torn apart and handed to the reader like fragments of a shattered heart.
Rewriting the Fable: The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
“Denji, which would you rather be — the city mouse or the country mouse?”
Fujimoto threads an ancient allegory through this story: the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. The fable, originating from Aesop, has been retold through cultures as a meditation on the trade-off between luxury and safety, danger and comfort. But in The Reze Arc, the traditional roles are completely reversed.
Denji, poor, filthy, and crushed under his father's debt, could only gnaw at moldy bread, living hand to mouth with his pet devil, Pochita. By all accounts, he should have been the “country mouse.” Yet under Makima's guidance — and her chilling promises — Denji steps into the city and begins to crave its simplest pleasures: jam on bread, dates with girls, the warmth of human intimacy.
Through that yearning, Denji becomes the city mouse: not because he belongs, but because he is consumed by the illusion of belonging. Every struggle, every desperate gesture, is an attempt to carve out a small space of comfort and affection within a cold, metallic world.
By contrast, Reze, a girl trained by the state to be a living weapon, should embody the city mouse. Educated, or at least conditioned by the system, every blush and smile of hers is calibrated. Yet her connection to the city is not joy but bondage. She has no home there — only a function, only orders.
What she longs for is the countryside's dream: an ordinary romance, a day at school, the sound of coffee cups, fireworks by the sea. She doesn't envy the city; she wishes to escape from it — to return to something unguarded, something human.
Misaligned Romance and the Shattering of Illusion
That is why The Reze Arc is a romance born of dissonance. Denji chases the city's mirage; Reze longs for a pastoral calm. From the moment they meet, their dreams are destined never to align.
When two mice choose to run away together, the meaning of the fable transforms — it is no longer about one choosing comfort and the other danger, but about two souls yearning to flee their assigned fates, only to cross paths and miss each other in motion.
Fujimoto's unique cruelty — and his strange tenderness — lie in his refusal to grant redemption. His characters don't find salvation; they find resonance in failure. Love, in his world, is not harmony — it is illusion.
The lovers whisper and dream of escape, while beneath their fragile hope lingers Makima's cold gaze, the quiet inevitability of death.
Ending Theme:Kenshi Yonezu, Hikaru Utada「JANE DOE」
Makima: The Cold Eye of Power and Reality
Within this story that brims with misplaced tenderness, Makima exists outside the fable altogether — she is reality itself.
She is neither city mouse nor country mouse, but the force that crushes both beneath her heel — the spectator who watches her dogs hunt the rats in the field. She represents power, order, and the inescapable weight of fate.
Denji enters the city because Makima grants him purpose. Reze is destroyed because Makima dictates her end. If Denji and Reze's love is a brief flame, then Makima is the cold current that snuffs it out.
The irony is sharp: Aesop's fable was once about the freedom to choose a way of life. In Fujimoto's hands, it becomes a story about the impossibility of choice itself — about how destiny devours even the desire to resist.
The clichés of “youthful love” — two people supporting each other through hardship, running toward a shared future — are here inverted. Their escape leads only to death and ruin. Even the poetic images of romance — flowers, coffee, schoolyards, fireworks, waves — exist only as bubbles, bursting the moment they touch the surface of reality.
Reze: The Name of Gunpowder, the Death of a Flower
And so we see the echoes of tragedy resound: Aesop's parable, adolescent love, the poetry of youth — all crushed beneath the wheel of reality.
Reze, true to her name as the Bomb Devil, burns and fades in the same instant. The bomb's meaning was never to create a perfect ending — it was to explode, and in that explosion, leave behind a scar.
That scar is not only Denji's heartbreak but also a prophecy — a signal that his pursuit of the city’s happiness will always come at a price. The people he loves can vanish at any time, consumed by the cold logic of power. This awareness marks Denji's evolution — from a boy driven by appetite to someone burdened with consciousness.
At the end of The Reze Arc, when Reze softly says, “Actually, I never went to school,” she removes her mask as Denji's would-be savior and stands beside him as his equal. In that moment, she stops being a weapon and becomes, briefly, a person.
But that same tenderness seals her fate. She could have boarded the train, escaped everything. Instead, she turns back. She looks at the red chrysanthemum — a flower of death — and chooses fleeting truth over enduring lies. Because of that, Makima erases her, and reality consumes her whole.
Chainsaw Man: The Reze Arc film still / Source:Ending Theme:Kenshi Yonezu, Hikaru Utada「JANE DOE」
Regret as the Essence of Youth
To viewers, Reze becomes an eternal wound. The sorrow lingers because it is understated — there are no melodramatic screams, no extravagant farewells, only a quiet, everyday kind of death.
A girl tries to return to the one she loves, and the world simply takes her away. That understated ending feels more brutal for its simplicity. It reminds us that the deepest losses are not sudden deaths, but the moments when someone lays down their defenses, reaches out with pure sincerity — and is never heard.
Fujimoto's storytelling cuts with surgical cruelty. He first soothes us with youthful romance, then pierces us with reality's indifference. The Reze Arc is the culmination of that art: love and death coexisting, beauty entwined with destruction, symbol reflecting reality.
Reze is not merely the Bomb Devil; she is a paradox — a flower that holds both purity and madness, innocence and violence. She is an assassin and a girl who dreams of normal days; she is an explosion and a summer insect song.
And because of that, within a mere handful of manga chapters — or ninety-nine minutes on screen — she becomes unforgettable.
Epilogue: Romance as an Eternal Curse
When fireworks fade across the night sky, when flowers wilt in one's hand, when the sea swallows two shadows whole — we finally understand that Reze is not just Denji’s first love. She is Chainsaw Man's purest elegy: romantic, cruel, and painfully real.
She dies, yet lives on in every reader and viewer.
She reminds us: youth is not about having, but about losing; love is not alignment, but misalignment; dreams are not fulfillment, but collapse.
Everyone else wanted Chainsaw's heart.Only Reze truly wanted Denji's.He gave her a glimpse of happiness, and she gave him the wound that would never close.
That is why The Reze Arc endures — as both a curse and a love letter, written in Fujimoto's hand.
“I like when a romantic partner becomes a kind of curse — something that keeps existing inside you. If everyone who sees Reze can hold her that way in their hearts forever, I'd be really happy.”— Tatsuki Fujimoto
達人
