Why Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc Looks So Different From The Show

If you watched "Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc" and thought it looked different from TV anime's first season, you're dead on. The shading and coloring are brighter, the line-art is thicker, and the action is faster-paced and more exaggerated. "Reze Arc" feels cartoony in a way "Chainsaw Man" season 1 didn't.

This is not just because the movie had a higher budget than any one episode of the show. Made at Studio Mappa, "Chainsaw Man" season 1 was directed by Ryu Nakayama, a veteran animator but rookie director. "Reze Arc" was directed by Tatsuya Yoshihara, because MAPPA wanted a new vision for their "Chainsaw Man" anime.

Tatsuki Fujimoto, author of the original "Chainsaw Man" manga, is a huge cinephile and his love for movies shows up in his comics. His one-shot manga "Goodbye, Eri" is a comic drawn through the camera lens of a cell phone, or in the style of a found footage film. "Reze Arc" features an early sequence of our hero Denji on a movie marathon date with his boss/crush Makima. Makima tells Denji that there are a lot of mediocre movies, but a good one can change your life.

Nakayama, a fan of Fujimoto and movies too, thought the best way to adapt "Chainsaw Man" would be to veer away from typical anime flourishes and towards a more grounded style. In an interview published in an October issue of Japan's Nikkei Entertainment! Magazine, Nakayama said he "thought it would be interesting if [he] could incorporate the essence of the realistic and the cinematic [in 'Chainsaw Man']."

Writing for anime blog Sakuga Blog, Kevin Cirugeda described Nakayama's approach as "animating live-action." Take note of the title sequence for "Chainsaw Man" season 1, which literally recreates famous live-action movie scenes in homage after homage.

Season 1 of "Chainsaw Man" can be slow and subdued. The color palette is dulled down into naturalism; the colors of a scene or character are not supposed to pop out in the way you'd expect them to in a cartoon. The way the light and shadows fall on characters' faces suggests cinematic lighting instead.

Nakayama's direction for "Chainsaw Man" season 1 received some mixed responses. While he saw his approach as honoring Fujimoto, others decried it as watering down the "Chainsaw Man" manga's madcap energy. Writing for Anime News Network in 2022 while the anime aired, animation writer Sean Aitchison described the style of "Chainsaw Man" season 1 as "off" and missing the beautiful chaos of Fujimoto's manga.

"The 'Chainsaw Man' manga is gritty, goofy, brutal, gut-wrenching, hilarious, insane, and beautiful all at once, and it needs more than smooth animation to encapsulate that. It needs style," wrote Aitchison. Yet others disagreed; Nikola Teodosić, writing at Anime Herald in 2023, praised Nakayama for achieving "filmic realism" in "Chainsaw Man."

Ultimately, the deciding factor for MAPPA appears to have been domestic reception. Anime Blu-ray sales are a typical gauge of success, and the "Chainsaw Man" season 1 Blu-Ray sold poorly in Japan. While anime has taken off internationally (see how "Reze Arc" is slicing up the box office right now), Japanese audiences are still the primary target audience for Japanese productions.

Tatsuya Yoshihara had worked on "Chainsaw Man" season 1, and even directed the fourth and tenth episodes himself. However, he had a different approach for "Reze Arc" — an approach of sticking closer to Fujimoto's own manga, rather than trying to fuse the story with the author's cinematic inspirations.

In the October 2025 issue of Nikkei Magazine (translated by Anime News Network), Yoshihara sat down with his assistant director on "Reze Arc," Masato Nakazono. Together, they discussed switching up the "Chainsaw Man" style for the movie.

Yoshihara explicitly said he, Nakazono, and their team wanted to bring in "more anime-style techniques" (the kind Nakayama avoided) for a wide range of expressiveness. The character designs were tweaked to more resemble Fujimoto's art style, too. One of Fujimoto's trademarks is thick and clean line art, a simplicity that belies how detailed his drawings can be. The character animation in "Chainsaw Man" season 1 largely hid the black lines on the edges of characters' faces to, presumably, make them look more like people and less like drawings. Compare how Denji looks in "Chainsaw Man" season 1 to how he looks in "Reze Arc" and you can see how the movie added in Fujimoto's penciling.

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"In terms of character design and animation we made a conscious effort to reflect the original manga's expression," Yoshihara continued. "For details regarding character design, we created notes and shared them among the team. Things like removing highlights from the eyes, reducing the amount of shading, and indicating how to depict clothing wrinkles and joint textures."

Makima's light pink hair from "Chainsaw Man" season 1 was recolored bright red in "Reze Arc," which Yoshihara said was meant to "leave a stronger impression on the viewers." If Yoshihara and Nakazono return to direct a "Chainsaw Man" season 2, I'll be curious to see how they carry the "Reze Arc" style on for a whole anime season.

"Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc" is playing in theaters.