How Chainsaw Man – The Movie Draws On And Transforms Classic Myth

By Autumn Wright | October 31, 2025 | 4:00pm

Anime Features Chainsaw Man

How Chainsaw Man – The Movie Draws On And Transforms Classic Myth

Tatsuya Yoshihara and MAPPA’s Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is a mostly one-to-one take on its manga source material. The movie does little to possibly alter what made Tatsuki Fujimoto’s original story so popular. While a few moments of strong tonal choices in color and lighting highlight the animators’ additive contributions, other changes largely serve to draw out the film’s climactic action sequences, which only forestall the prescribed development of characters, world building, and plot. But there’s one addition that, while not transformative, is truly notable: a painting.

In the school that Reze lures Denji through with promises of normal teenage experiences—like sitting at a desk to answer questions or going skinny dipping with the manic pixie dream girl completely obsessed with him—hangs French Rococo painter François Boucher’s 1743 painting Daphnis and Chloe. It depicts the titular lovers, who grew up abandoned on the island Lesbos to face many tribulations and fall in love, enjoying their pastoral idyll together. It suggests the vision Reze offers Denji, that they could perhaps find love together after being similarly dispossessed as children, its pastoral setting invoking the country mice in Aesop’s fable. The framed framing device contextualizes this moment of Chainsaw Man in the classical tradition in a way that one might imagine Fujimoto himself envious of.

Chainsaw Man’s classical allusions are many. Angel Devil, who also makes his debut in the Reze arc as a lazy and attractive androgyne, is based on the red haired, white-winged depiction of Lucifer in Alexandre Cabanel’s The Fallen Angel. In a late manga chapter, Gustave Doré’s engraving of Satan falling to Hell in Paradise Lost is prominently featured in Makima’s apartment. Mappa’s serial adaptation, released three years ago, would add another Doré engraving (a scene of demons hunting sinners from Dante’s Inferno) to her office. The manga is steeped in the classics, inheriting even their structure as present in Reze Arc’s tragedy.

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And there’s another myth that emphasizes the importance of Reze and her teen hypersexuality in the movie and manga, one that, alongside its 16th-century renditions, shapes the bedrock of Reze Arc: Venus and Adonis.

A condensed version of the original myth recorded by Ovid: Adonis was born of incest and taken by Aphrodite to be raised in the underworld by Persephone. When Aphrodite returned, she became enamored with the grown, mortal man, as had his foster mother, which isn’t weird for a goddess apparently. So Adonis had to choose between the two, and he chose Aphrodite. Later, while hunting, he is killed by a giant boar, possibly sent by another god to get back at Aphrodite for a grudge. As he dies, the goddess turns his blood into anemones—white, red, and purple flowers.

Like Daphnis and Chloe, the story of Adonis was one of many myths from antiquity that became the inspiration for Renaissance art. Titian’s 16th-century painting depicts a nude Venus (Aphrodite’s Roman form) clingily embracing Adonis as he gets up to leave for his final hunt, a somewhat suggestive depiction of the goddess and a then subversive depiction of their gendered roles that Shakespeare would further emphasize in his early erotic poem “Venus and Adonis.” Published in 1593, Adonis is depicted in the poem as a beautiful young man who couldn’t care less about women, even with the goddess of love throwing her naked body at him. She wrestles him when he rides away and whines for affection when he gets up to leave, and Adonis only ever relents to stay her. When he is killed by the boar shortly after, she curses mortal love to be fickle and the desires of others unknowable. Shakespeare uses the myth to declaim on the differences between love and lust, to consider the necessity of consent in romance, and to highlight contemporary gender roles through their subversion.

Seeing Reze Arc as a remix of myth and poem lends more immediate weight to the movie’s scenes with Makima, who, as a Persephone-like figure, represents love against Reze’s lust. Denji calls Reze a sex crazed girl, and her true form is almost as nude as the goddesses. But whereas Adonis rejects Venus’ advances, Denji goes along with Reze, repeating to himself and to Pochita that he can’t control himself—lust does. Makima appears outmaneuvered, though her long game ultimately prevails. Denji finally rejects Reze as he recalls his movie date with Makima, the life she has given him with Aki and Power, and her amorous promise. As Shakespeare wrote: “Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain.“

But Persephone loved Adonis from the underworld. With hindsight, the real tragedy of this arc is that Reze is the woman who truly wanted Denji’s heart.

There’s more to suggest a poetic reading of the manga and film in its imagery. Typhoon Devil’s role in the final battle is given symbolic weight: “Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,/ But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun.” Knowing Fujimoto, I don’t think we can rule out the intent of the devil as a punny nod to Shakespeare’s more iconic Tempest, but the Typhoon Devil’s alliance with Reze easily maps onto the metaphors of the poem. Consider also the flowers. In the poem, Adonis’ blood colors the flowers around his grave. Denji’s flower, a gift to Reze, is white, while Reze’s flower for Denji is red. And if we wanted to be overly literal in reading the poem, we could consider its ending. In her curse, Venus says love “shall be cause of war and dire events.” We could draw a line to the events of the manga’s second part from here.

Reze Arc does not stand alongside Titian’s painting or Shakespeare’s poem; it recontextualizes them in the same way those works once transformed myth. Perverts them, even. But then, Shakespeare’s appeal was his pop culture fusion of raunchy comedy, romance, and classic tragedy with pointed political commentary. And that? That’s just Chainsaw Man. But if all that can’t convince you that Fujimoto is the Shakespeare of our time, maybe voice actor Faaiz Mbelizi’s Shakespearean English rewrite of the anime can.

Autumn Wright is a critic of games and animation. Find their latest writing at @theautumnwright.bsky.social.