In the wake of ‘Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’s remarkable box-office last weekend, columnist Andrew Osmond looks at the history of the franchise and gives his thoughts on the new film.
I didn’t think I could see Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle in a cinema. Ironically, I’m in Tokyo, where the film’s seemingly in practically every multiplex, nearly two months after it opened in July. As of writing, it’s just become Japan’s second highest-grossing film ever, behind a previous film in the franchise, 2020’s Demon Slayer: Mugen Train.
Last weekend also saw the film roll out, English-dubbed and subbed, in Britain and America. In my home Britain, it was beaten, amusingly, by a big-screen film of a rather different franchise, Downton Abbey. (I’ve always refused to watch that, except when it came on TV in the rest area of a Tokyo sento I was visiting.) But the headlines are about the mighty $70 million Infinity Castle took in America last weekend, smashing the 26-year-old anime record of Pokémon: The First Movie, which opened in America in 1999.
I don’t speak Japanese, and thought there was no way to see Infinity Castle in English in Tokyo. But lo and behold, last weekend Infinity Castle also opened with English subs in Japan. Its purpose was presumably to promote the narrative of Infinity Castle as a global phenomenon, not just a local success. Given I’m writing about it here, the maneuver succeeded with me.
The screening I went to was at one of Tokyo’s most visible cinemas – the Toho cinema in the Kabukicho district, with, you’ll note in the photo, a rooftop appearance from Japan’s biggest film star. You may also spot that the cinema is already promoting the film of another anime action franchise, Chainsaw Man, which opens in Japan next weekend and in America next month.
I went on Sunday; my advance booking proved wise. Even on its ninth weekend, many of Infinity Castle’s screenings were selling out (amber) or fully sold (red).
Japanese cinemas, especially multiplexes, sell extensive merch in the foyer for current film releases. The Demon Slayer merchandise filled two stands.
Background
Demon Slayer began as a manga strip in 2016, serialized in Japan’s top-selling manga anthology magazine, Weekly Shonen Jump. That’s the source of many of Japan’s most lucrative manga and anime action franchises: One Piece, Dragon Ball, Naruto and Bleach, and more recently Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. Dan Da Dan arguably counts too, serialized on the magazine’s complementary online app, Shonen Jump +.
The author of Demon Slayer is effectively anonymous, using the pen name of Koyoharu Gotouge and never showing their face. Even their gender’s not been officially confirmed. It’s an accepted practice in Japan – “Gege Akutami,” author of Jujutsu Kaisen, is similarly anonymous. So is the nationally famed female singer Ado, heard on the blockbuster One Piece Film: Red, who’s never shown her face even in live concerts.
As for the Demon Slayer anime, it’s always been made by the ufotable studio, previously best-known for entries in the Fate franchise, derived from the games by the company Type-Moon. My own introduction to ufotable was one of its more ignoble efforts, the schlocky 2012 disaster film Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack – my ravings are here.
The Demon Slayer anime has always had the same director, Haruo Sotozaki. Most of the franchise doesn’t seem to have credited writers, though a script credit does appear on Infinity Castle. It’s given to ufotable’s founder Hikaru Kondo, who has multiple credits through the franchise, including “Chief Director” on the new film.
A viewer coming to Infinity Castle blind might think it an entirely fantastical anime, as the film foregrounds the title structure, an impossibly massive Escheresque building that grows like a living creature. But unlike many Shonen Jump properties, Demon Slayer’s story began in a historical setting. The hero is Tanjiro Kamada, a boy whose family gathers wood at the top of a snowy mountain in Japan’s Taisho period (1912-26).
The ethos and storytelling of the first TV episode echo all the way down to Infinity Castle. The original series opened with Tanjiro leaving home to sell charcoal to the town below. On returning, he finds his home a slaughterhouse; his family was massacred while he was away. The attackers were demons who haunt the country.
Apart from Tanjiro, the sole survivor is his sister Nezuko, who Tanjiro finds injured but breathing. He frantically starts carrying her down the mountain, but Nezuko wakes, snarls like a beast and bares her new fangs at him. You know what happens to people who get bit by zombies, werewolves or vampires? It happens with demons too.
What follows is one of Demon Slayer’s defining moments. As Tanjiro holds Nezuko off, refusing to fight back, the boy can only scream at her sister to stay strong, to stay human. Any horror film fan knows that’s useless, of course. Once a monster, always a monster. But… Suddenly tears are falling onto Tanjiro’s face. Nezuko is crying at his words; somehow his sister’s still in the demon girl.
From then on, Tanjiro is determined to protect Nezuko, and restore her to normal. To this end, Tanjiro ends up being trained by people versed in the way of demons, the so-called Demon Slayers. Despite his gentle nature, Tanjiro must become a Slayer, joining a war on monsters that prey on humanity. A boy who never wanted to be a hero has begun his hero’s journey.
By Infinity Castle, which comes after 60-odd more TV episodes, Nezuko’s no longer in the action. I won’t give away her fate, though she’s referenced in the film. Moreover, Tanjiro’s now only one among multiple heroes, with their own traumas and obsessions. But those early moments in the snow linger, their mix of cruel fate and wild hope. When I wrote up Demon Slayer’s early episodes in a magazine, I wondered if that might be the key to its popularity.
Demon Slayer was a typical Shonen Jump strip, I wrote, but darker. “On the one side, Demon Slayer plays like the magazine’s other hit strips. It has laughs and goofing, lots of fun, many heartwarming moments. On the other side… right from the start, it’s harsh. The stakes are obvious, and they press on the hero in the most personal way imaginable. Tanjiro certainly doesn’t see what he’s going through as a “fun” adventure. He’s far from Luffy (in One Piece) or Son Goku (in Dragon Ball).
“Maybe Demon Slayer hit a sweet spot, midway between the fun of One Piece and something much more angsty, getting the best of both worlds. Extending that speculation, maybe it’s a series that captured two huge groups in Japan, the people who love Shonen Jump sagas, and also the people who fondly remember reading them, but then left that world behind. Familiar but different: it’s the marketer’s dream.”
There are other theories why Demon Slayer has become such a huge hit. Hiroyuki Nakano was Shonen Jump’s editor-in-chief, but he argued that Demon Slayer’s success was bound up entirely with the TV anime, and how it benefitted from streaming binge-watches. He was speaking at the start of 2020, just before the world locked down against COVID. Demon Slayer was trending just when Gen Z was suddenly trapped at home, watching more online content than ever before.
That year, COVID made it possible for Demon Slayer: Mugen Train to become the most popular film in the world – at least those parts of the word where cinemas were still open. In Japan, cinemas reopened over summer, and low COVID figures tempted audiences back to the big screen. By the time Mugen Train opened, cinemas could fill every seat - no “distanced” seating – so long as viewers wore masks and food wasn’t sold. For many people, the opportunity to go out to a film outweighed the lack of popcorn. One Tokyo cinema screened Mugen Train 41 times a day.
Mark Schilling, film critic for the Japan Times, pointed out to me, “Hollywood studios delayed the release of so many films that Demon Slayer had what amounted to an open playing field… (Mugen Train) became an event film that everyone felt obliged to see, even if they weren’t fans of the manga in particular or anime in general.”
Yet not every film in that time and place was a blockbuster. For instance, 2020 also saw Violet Evergarden: The Movie in Japanese cinemas. The tearful finale to Kyoto Animation’s acclaimed series, it performed solidly, but it broke no records.
For myself, I was inclined to prefer Violet Evargeden. Reviewing Demon Slayer’s early TV episodes, I wrote, “This is solid Shonen Jump fare, with more tragedy and horror than in most hit shonen (boys’) strips. The early episodes have a touch of the mythic, as our hero encounters a mentor in a goblin mask, and other characters turn out to have been dead all along. The story’s set in Japan of just a century ago, solidified by some lovely snowy mountainscapes. But there’s nothing exceptional. Soon we’re in the normal round of crazy baddies and epic fights, though with more blood than usual.”
As for Mugen Train, I found it “an enjoyable, largely standard anime actioner.” I was bewildered by its extended last battle with a demon called Akaza, which had little to do with the rest of the action. I conceded, though, that “unlike many anime spinoff films, you get the sense these battles will have a lasting emotional impact on the hero.” That’s borne out by Infinity Castle, where Akaza makes his return, becoming the film’s most important presence.
Infinity Castle
Infinity Castle is one of a growing number of franchise films to make no allowance for newcomers – not even a “Previously…” opening montage of the kind used on this year’s Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye. Infinity Castle just follows straight on from the cliff-hanger to Demon Slayer’s fourth TV season (the “Hashira Training Arc”), where Tanjiro and many other characters are flung into the title castle.
If you don’t know already, this is the final battle, but only the beginning of the end. The new film is a formidable 155 minutes, yet it starts a trilogy, with Parts 2 and 3 in production. The film’s full name includes the subtitle “Part 1 – Akaza’s Return,” which seems to have been left off much of the marketing (shades of what happened decades ago with Ralph Bakshi’s unfinished Lord of the Rings). The vastness of the fantasy castle mirrors the experience of a very long film, where you see neither the beginning nor end of the story
As such, Infinity Castle is like some Marvel superhero films, although the format was established with the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series at the turn of this century. Now animated films are following suit. Anime has precedents like the serial Evangelion films, but now they’re being normalized beyond anime. Both Hollywood’s Across the Spider-Verse and China’s Ne Zha 2 were enormous “middle” episodes.
This approach will get backlash. I’ve already seen complaints that Infinity Castle’s pacing is like TV, and quite unsuited to cinema. The film has many digressions with a miscellany of characters, though fundamentally it consists of three huge fights. Each has different combatants in different places; mercifully they’re shown one after the other to give the film a basic structure.
There are other solid maneuvers – for example, making clear that good, brave, determined characters may not win or even survive. Wikipedia calls Infinity Castle a “dark fantasy,” which is justified. There are images of cannibalism, more than one scene is shown from the viewpoint of a severed head, and a villain is given an extended speech on religion and oblivion. Even the regular character of Inosuke, a boar-masked bruiser who enjoys the hell out of fighting, gets hardly any screen time to lighten things up.
The last and greatest fight involves Tanjiro and the returning Akaza. It’s suitably titanic, with much desperate soul-searching on Tanjiro’s part. A great bear is involved at one point, and it’s no spirit animal but a ravening monster. And then, after all that, suddenly the battle transmogrifies into what’s a different story, and a different kind of story. I’m sure this infuriates some viewers, though the transition is one of the things I liked most in the film. This last story feels in keeping thematically with how the franchise began, with more deep cruelty and wild redemption.
If this sounds like I enjoyed Infinity Castle, I did, very much. It’s no classic, but it’s weightier, bolder and more surprising than most franchise fare. But I won’t join the chorus of fans claiming it has “dazzling” or “incredible” animation. The fighting is graphically busy, but I never felt remotely as agog as I did watching the thousand-Spiderman chase through Nueva York in Across the Spider-Verse.
The castle is pleasingly vast, but it rarely exploits the potential of a Escher space with no up or down, like the live-action Labyrinth or the third Night at the Museum. I was also startled by how little fans complained about the overlay of 3DCG and 2D elements throughout the film, as fandom trashes countless other anime on such grounds.
Even as an action anime, I still prefer Dan Da Dan, which I praised last month. For all its furious action, Demon Slayer treats fantasy with the fundamental conservatism of Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth, but Dan Da Dan has the zanily playful staging and visuals of Terry Gilliam. Dan Da Dan also dispenses with a peculiar trope shared by Demon Slayer and much other action anime. Namely, fights that are subject to constant mental monologuing from their participants, stretching seconds into a minute or 10 as fighters search for a killer tactic or rave in despair or awe as their foe outdoes them.
Anime fans are used to this – even I am, and I’m not fond of the style. Then there are the film’s tremendous number of flashbacks, which even some anime aficionados have found too much. More than once, Tanjiro suddenly remembers past lessons that prove hilariously useful, not only to the fight he’s in, but to the particular split-second of the fight, as if his memories retcon the reality of the present. Perhaps that’s the true secret of Infinity Castle – it runs on pulp storytelling.
I was warned about the flashback thing before I saw the film but found it surprisingly bearable. Much like the film’s overblown scale, its frequent jumping around in time reflected the multidimensional castle of the title. Maybe that’s a silly way to defend artlessness, but even when the film felt ridiculously protracted in its last half-hour, I enjoyed the stretching. In that respect, the film scores over Across the Spider-Verse, whose last scenes (after Miles flees Nueva York) are mostly joyless set-ups for Part 3.
I did catch myself wondering if any non-anime fan watching the film would find all the inner-monologuing and flashbacking actually unwatchable. It took me back to an old argument, that kids loved Pokémon decades ago precisely because no ordinary adult would have the patience to understand it. I had a comparable experience when I tried reviewing the Yu-Gi-Oh! movies as a non-fan.
Perhaps Demon Slayer will bring back the idea of anime as an insider-only fan phenomenon, one that’s so incomprehensible that only fans can talk about it seriously. I hate that kind of separatism. But it’s lingered in discussions of anime, ever since the medium was first sold as anime in countries like mine.
But then I think back to Demon Slayer’s first episode, and that defining image of a girl’s tears falling on her brother’s face, proving that she’s still human, that she can fight the monster that’s poised to consume her. Surely there’s something universal in that?
