‘Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’ is currently ruling the U.S. box-office, prompting speculation that it’s reshaping anime cinema forever - columnist Andrew Osmond takes a wider look at the film and suggests that it’s more complicated than that.
In the winter of 2020, in a world frozen by COVID, one of the rare moments of hilarity involved a blockbuster film director. It was on a Japanese road in the early hours, outside the home of legendary director Hayao Miyazaki, who’d gone out to pick up trash. (Which is completely unexceptional behavior in Japan, if you’re wondering.)
There, Miyazaki was ambushed by a rude reporter. (I’m relying on the account on the soranews24 site, though that’s not who the reporter worked for.) Miyazaki’s nationally-beloved Spirited Away had reigned at the top of Japan’s box-office since its release in 2000. But that position was threatened by a new film, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train. Did Miyazaki have any comment?
“Well, I don’t think it has anything to do with me,” Miyazaki replied, saying there were more important things than box-office figures, such as making harmonious workplaces. The reporter persisted. Had Miyazaki seen Demon Slayer? No, the director replied, surprising no-one who knew Miyazaki’s blunt opinions on commercial anime.
“I’m a retired old man picking up trash… That sort of thing isn’t worth worrying about. There’s always inflation in the world.” The reporter pointed out that, unlike most retirees, Miyazaki was making a new film. Miyazaki advised him to go and badger its distributor instead, and leave him alone. His film, The Boy and the Heron, would be finished three years later and snag Best Animated Feature Oscar a year after that.
Miyazaki may have not have been worried about box-office, though his producer claimed the auteur director saw Mugen Train as a “rival.” But box-office can decide what kind of films get made or not, and if the next potential Miyazaki makes a film or just cleans streets. Miyazaki’s own film career started with 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro, considered a commercial failure. Even My Neighbor Totoro (1988, often rated his best film, was judged as an underperformer on release.
Triumph of the Far East
It’s been five years after Miyazaki’s ambush by a reporter, and another Demon Slayer film rules Japan’s box-office. More generally, the box-office numbers for animated films have been shifting drastically east. At the start of the year, there was the extraordinary rise of China’s film Ne Zha 2, now the fourth highest grossing film in the world, with global takings of $2.2 billion.
Its title hero wasn’t “original” even when the preceding Ne Zha was made in 2019. He was a mythical hero who, as I explained in my column on the film, was already familiar in animation, even more than Western analogs such as Hercules. Ne Zha (aka Nezha) isn’t a corporate property like Spider-Man, but he has a similar commercial advantage because so many people know his name. He’s like Frankenstein, Dracula or Sherlock Holmes, all remade regularly today.
The new Ne Zha films are in CG. However, traditional animation lovers could be heartened by the performance of another new Chinese film, Shanghai Animation’s Nobody. According to Animation Obsessive, Nobody has surpassed $200 million; only a tenth of Ne Zha 2’s takings, but still remarkable. Again, it’s not an original property – it was based on a massively popular Chinese online cartoon, rooted in national literature. (The Nobody film is a comedic riff on the Chinese novel Journey to the West; for another riff on the same source, look to the start of Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball.)
Nobody earned more than Pixar’s original CG film Elio, which had the might of Hollywood behind it. The sweet-natured space comedy made only about $150 million worldwide, and barely $70 million in America (I wrote on that here). It led to much handwringing about the future of original animated films in Hollywood. Does Infinity Castle offer a similar forecast about original animated films in Japan?
30 years of anime blockbusters
In Japan, Infinity Castle comes after nearly three decades of anime blockbusters, Miyazaki made the first of them, and it wasn’t Spirited Away. Rather it was his 1997 film Princess Mononoke, which was briefly Japan’s all-time number one film, before being beaten by that winter’s Hollywood import, Titanic. That was sunk in turn by Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Miyazaki’s box-office zenith, though his Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and Ponyo (2008) came closest to matching it.
Confirming box-office figures for anime films is a trying endeavor, with clashing claims exacerbated by inflation, varying exchange rates and reissues of older titles. I mentioned that Totoro was originally counted as an underperformer in Japan. 30 years later, it opened in China, earning around $25 million there, or more than four-fifths of its entire cinema earnings.
For this article, I’m relying on the rankings on Japan’s all-time domestic box-office chart. To make clear, the chart measures the box-office of Japanese films in Japan, not their earnings abroad. As of writing, Spirited Away ranks third, behind the two Demon Slayer films. Princess Mononoke is at nine, Howl at 10 and Ponyo is in 16th place. Of Miyazaki’s later films, The Wind Rises ranks 35th and The Boy and the Heron 59th.
None of Miyazaki’s pre-Mononoke films make Japan’s top 100, though that may reflect inflation as much as ticket sales. (His Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso were hits in their day.) However, two other films by the same studio, Ghibli, do. One is Arrietty, released in America as The Secret World of Arrietty, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, in 65th place.
The other – and this may shock some readers – is the studio’s controversial, oft-panned Tales from Earthsea, by Miyazaki’s son Goro, in 92nd place. I won’t say more on those films here, but I’ve written on Yonebayashi and Goro Miyazaki elsewhere.
The Shinkai Factor
A few weeks ago, I highlighted how much of Japanese anime cinema, and certainly the most lucrative films, fell into one of two categories. On the one side were films driven by IPs, recognized franchises, like most Hollywood blockbusters today. On the other were films made by directors whose own names were “brands,” the king being Miyazaki. (The most obvious analog in Hollywood live-action today is Christopher Nolan.)
In 2016, another auteur director joined Miyazaki at the top of the Japanese charts. Like Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai paid his dues through more than a decade of modestly-earning films. As late as 2013, Shinkai’s excellent The Garden of Words had only a limited cinema release in Japan, with a DVD of the film available in cinemas which were screening it for fans to buy in the foyer.
But three years later, I went to one of Your Name’s early screenings - early in its Japanese run and an early morning screening, about nine a.m. on a weekday in a Tokyo multiplex. The cinema was almost sold out, and I realized this was something special.
Your Name now ranks at number six in Japan’s top 100, though its world take in dollars surpassed Spirited Away, helped by earnings of over $80 million in China. Of Shinkai’s next two films, Weathering With You is at 20th place, and Suzume is 17th. I’ve seen it claimed that they’re Miyazaki imitations, which was true of an earlier Shinkai film, his painfully derivative 2011 Children Who Chase Lost Voices. But his voice has grown strong and distinct; I discuss his newer narrative tricks here.
The IP blockbusters
Beyond Miyazaki and Shinkai, there’ve been a slew of IP anime blockbusters in Japanese cinemas. The top two, of course, are the Demon Slayer films, Mugen Train and Infinity Castle, ranking in first and second place respectively. (As with Spirited Away and Your Name, their placings are reversed if you compare their global earnings, despite no Chinese release for Infinity Castle yet.)
Then there’s One Piece Film: Red (2022) in seventh place, just behind Your Name; the same year’s The First Slam Dunk at 13; and Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram (2024) at 15. Another Conan film, this year’s One-eyed Flashback, is at 18. If you’re reading in Britain or Ireland, the film will have opened in cinemas about the time this article is published; the trailer is below.
An earlier Conan film, 2023’s Black Iron Submarine is at 22; Jujutsu Kaisen 0, released in 2021, is at 24; the 2024 volleyball film Haikyu! The Dumpster Battle is at 37; and Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time, released in 2021, is at 47. They’re followed by three more Conans: 2022’s The Bride of Halloween at 52, 2019’s The Fist of Blue Sapphire at 61 and 2018’s Zero the Enforcer at 67.
The 80th place goes to Stand By Me: Doraemon, a 2014 CG animated outing for the vastly popular title children’s character (a robot cat). It was presumably Doraemon’s IP which sold the film, though its co-director was Takashi Yamazaki, who has more name-recognition than most franchise directors. His other CG-augmented hits in Japan include the war film The Eternal Zero and the monster reboot Godzilla Minus One, his best-known film worldwide.
There’s another (2D) children’s title, 2014’s Yokai Watch: The Movie at 93, and a last Conan, 2021’s The Scarlet Bullet at 96, tying with Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One from 2023.
Of course, all these rankings are distorted by inflation. That makes the high standing of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl all the more impressive, given they’re more than 20 years old. (The same, incidentally, goes for Goro Miyazaki’s Tales From Earthsea.)
Does Demon Slayer lead the way?
Not all the “IP” films are action-based to the same extent as Demon Slayer. The narrative of The First Slam Dunk, for example, alternates between a single epic basketball game and the tragic family story of one of its players. (It’s also completely watchable if you’re a newcomer to the franchise.) A Conan film like The Million-Dollar Pentagram has action scenes but they’re less important than the plot’s dense barrage of clues and puzzles. One Piece Film: Red was sold by a guest star – the popular female singer Ado – and the fan-baiting mystery of her character (purportedly the daughter of a popular One Piece icon).
It’s also true, though, that Demon Slayer and several of the other new “IP” films pursue a shared strategy reflecting changing times. That they’re closely bound up with TV series is nothing new for anime. What’s different is how they’re much likelier to offer crucial, “canonical,” new parts of the story – often epic final chapters, though Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is a prequel that you need to watch to understand later developments in the TV series.
Many young Demon Slayer fans would feel left out if they missed Infinity Castle in cinemas, unable to discuss it with their friends. In Japan especially, many Demon Slayer fans are elementary schoolers, despite the show’s slides into violence and horror. Infinity Castle’s “PG12” rating in Japan requests parental guidance, but it doesn’t exclude unaccompanied preteens from cinemas. That’s unlike the film’s R-rated release in America and its 15-rated release in Britain.
The smash success of the Demon Slayer films has prompted speculation that they might set a template that overwhelms the rest of anime cinema. You can see them as part of a trend that goes far beyond anime. I suggested last week that Infinity Castle could be compared to the Ne Zha or Spider-Verse films. These are epic movie serials of the kind that already dominate much of live-action cinema.
Maybe that’s the future of anime cinema… though it feels still too early to say. Certainly, we can expect more films “like” Infinity Castle. One opened in Japan only last weekend, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc. Like Infinity Castle, it’s a big-screen continuation of a TV serial, based on a strip in Shonen Jump magazine, full of action and horror (but rated PG-12 in Japan). It will open in the U.S. on October 24.
On the other hand, Reze Arc has opened to far smaller box-office than Infinity Castle. Moreover, Demon Slayer is nearing its end – the manga already ended back in 2020, and the third Infinity Castle film will close it out on screen. We still don’t know if any new title will command the viewer investment and loyalty for Demon Slayer, prompting fan hordes to descend on big screen “episodes” in the cinema.
For now, there’s still a fair variety of hit anime films in Japan, from mysteries to sports sagas. On the auteur side, there’s the theoretical possibility that the diligent garbage collector Hayao Miyazaki might embark on another film. However, that may be a film too far, even for a director who’s been dubbed the never-ending man. Miyazaki is now 84, and his last film, The Boy and the Heron, took seven years to make.
Miyazaki aside, the only “blockbuster” anime auteur is Makoto Shinkai. We’re still waiting for any word on his next film, three years on from Suzume. Perhaps the announcement will coincide with the live-action remake of one of Shinkai’s pre-blockbuster films, 5 Centimeters per Second, which opens in Japan on October 10, though Shinkai’s not directing it.
In the meantime, it’s nice to imagine that Shinkai’s working out the story of his next film while picking up garbage outside his house, like a fellow Japanese director. The only danger is that he might get hassled by a silly reporter, asking how he’s going to take on Demon Slayer.
