Image: Crunchyroll – Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle Key Visuals
If you have watched the recent Demon Slayer movie, you might have felt its horrible pacing and you are not alone. Despite the movies positive reception for its breathtaking animation and action sequences, many also criticized that the arc that this movie covers, simply, does NOT work as a movie.
Demon Slayer is an anime series that gained popularity due to its compelling story and having some of the best animation and hype moments in anime to date, and when the series finale was announced as a movie trilogy, everyone was, unsurprisingly, very excited. The first movie alone earned US$70 million in its opening weekend and recently released in China to another US$52.4 million, lifting its worldwide revenue to a staggering $730 million.
Shinobu Kocho during her fight with Doma Image credits: Crunchyroll – Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle
To put the issues into context, the movie is very faithful to its source material, going on at length about their motivations, revenge stories, or past connections. However, that is exactly why there is a problem. In a manga format, the story is split into weekly chapters, which helps in this arc where the author likes to jump in between characters as they are all split up doing their own fights.
Converted into movie format, it suffers from a horrendous case of start and stop fever, with constant hopping between characters and long flashbacks in the middle of action scenes. It is incredibly off putting when the intensity gets deliberately cut and it really messes with the entire film’s rhythm. This becomes evident in some fights, such as the one between the characters Shinobu and Doma, where rather than having constant momentum, the action is repeatedly interrupted with flashbacks and monologues. Which results in neither the action nor emotional scenes having the impact it is expected to have.
On paper, this arc is perfect as a finale since all the characters get their own time in the spotlight while finishing up their personal story arcs. For example, they could have focussed on the clash between Shinobu and Doma, followed by Zenitsu’s battle with Kaigaku, and ending with Giyu and Tanjiro teaming up against Akaza. This setup would have been amazing with about 2 episodes dedicated to each character, but in a movie, these individual segments end up being strung together very awkwardly.
Akaza during fight with Tanjiro and Giyu Image: Crunchyroll – Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle
In the end, while it is no argument that Infinity Castle is hands down one of the best-looking anime movies of the year. Not only does the story not really work in a movie format, in an act to most likely drag the movies length to ensure there is enough content to make the arc into 3 movies, a lot of scenes are dragged on for way longer than they need to be.
Honestly, it really should have been released as a regular TV series instead.
Guan QiuYu 
REN Ren 
VickyWu