Even without much prior knowledge of the Weekly Shōnen Jump strip (other than a query if the original writer-illustrator, Tatsuki Fujimoto, has ever come across Kevin O'Neill's work on Nemesis the Warlock or, perhaps, looked at Henry Flint's Shakara), Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is still enormously entertaining. Unlike a lot of other big screen spin-offs, which (at least in the shōnen space) tend to riff on manga movements, imagining concurrent adventures that otherwise fail to fit into a wider storyline, director Tatsuya Yoshihara and MAPPA animation studio's film directly adapts tankōbon volumes. So, instead of this manga being reduced to a television schedule filler, where wheel-spinning intrusions can interject and dilute the overall piece, Fujimoto's prized pages are elevated into an adaptation that, inherently, benefits from the larger spend applied to a ticket-printing medium. The really wonderful thing about Reze Arc though is that, at least to this Manga Video obsessed viewer, the film takes two disparate frequencies from the second Devilman OVA, Devilman 2: The Demon Bird, and combines them into one, city-warping hindrance. The shy, teenage love interest and the monstrously powerful adversary are, here, one and the same; an amalgam that mirrors our saw-toothed hero and complicates his ability to compartmentalise his clashing identities. The inching prickles of a first love - and the stinging rejection that often follows - are therefore scaled up into the pitched, apocalyptic battle befitting of these bubbling hormones.
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