Let’s get one thing straight: I do not “get” Demon Slayer. More specifically, I don’t get why this of all franchises ended up being the biggest mainstream anime property since Attack on Titan. Yes, the action is consistently fantastic, but so what? Plenty of anime have consistently fantastic action nowadays. And once you strip that action away, all you’re left with is an underwritten boilerplate of a narrative, a cast overstuffed with painfully unfunny comic relief characters, and a loose grab-bag of shonen tropes that have all been done better in countless other places. Plus, the only prominent female character in the entire cast could be replaced with a cute puppy and nothing would change. If it weren’t for Ufotable’s insanely lavish adaptation, there’d hardly be anything of value here. So why does this, of all things, get to be the giant breakout smash that’s taken over the world? Why is it the Demon Slayer movie, of all things, that finally unseats Your Name to become the biggest worldwide anime film of all time? I just can’t wrap my head around it, no matter how hard I try. And if I thought that actually seeing the movie might help shed some light on how it got so insanely big, well, those hopes failed to bear fruit as well. Mugen Train isn’t an elevation of Demon Slayer to an entirely new plane of awesome: it’s just more Demon Slayer, with all the good and bad that entails. If anything, watching it has only made me more confused how such a mediocre franchise managed to conquer the anime landscape so thoroughly.
The story picks up right where the first season of the show left off: Tanjirou, Nezuko, Zenitsu, and Inosuke board the titular train to join up with the Flame Hashira Renguko on a demon-fighting mission. Apparently, this train’s been plagued with demon attacks for quite some time now, and Rengoku’s doing his best to protect the passengers and track down the ringleaders. Of course, it doesn’t take long for the demons to launch another attack, and Tanjirou and friends must team up with Rengoku to save the train’s passengers from another one of Muzen’s Twelve Moon Demons. And that really does sum up the entire plot. It’s one location, a small cast of core characters, and a series of battles and mental challenges our heroes must face until the threat is finally defeated. If nothing else, I appreciate how paired-down this approach is; you came to watch big, lavishly animated fights pop off like fireworks one after the other, and that’s exactly what Mugen Train delivers. The production values are still fantastic, even if the stylized character designs still feel kind of out of place against the hyper-realistic backdrops, and there’s no shortage of action beats that just kick ass. Dizzying elemental swordplay, Lovecraftian demon body horror, delirious flourishes of blood and steel, all animated with Ufotable’s trademark mirror polish and bombastic, digitally-augmented panache. If you’re just here to see Tanjirou and company tear shit up you won’t be disappointed.
Unfortunately, just as Mugen Train maintains the heights of Demon Slayer’s strengths, it also falls victim to all the franchise’s weaknesses. Out of combat conversations feel awkwardly directed, with weird pauses between lines of dialogue and jarring cut-in gags that disrupt the flow. The villain is a one-note smarmy megalomaniac. Zenitsu is still a cancer on the concept of comedy itself, though he mercifully spends most of the movie asleep and/or offscreen. I also don’t think the story really fits a movie’s pacing; you can practically feel the episode breaks straining to manifest at points. And then the last half hour completely changes tracks with an entirely new villain showing up out of nowhere, and the story becomes about something entirely different, and that’s where I really started to check out. We just reached as natural a climax and resolution as you can get, but instead of ending, we jump straight into a thrity-minute epilogue chapter that has basically nothing to do with the train or the ideas bouncing around inside it. As separate episodes, that pacing would make more sense; as a single cohesive movie, it just feels like a run-on sentence that should’ve ended at least three commas ago.
And what’s particularly galling about Mugen Train is that it never just lets you appreciate the moments where it IS good. For everything it does well, there’s almost certainly something stupid or contrived waiting right around the next scene change. At one point Tanjirou has to confront the memories of his family in his dreams and let go of the desire to be reunited with them, and it’s the first time I’ve ever felt the tragedy of his family’s death the way it wanted me too. But then it once again completely sidelines Nezuko, letting her do maybe two helpful things before the narrative leaves her behind to be heroically protected by Zenitsu (retch). There are moments in the final battle that just about punch through the stratosphere on sheer hype, and the ending is far braver and more shocking than I was expecting. But to get to that point, you have to slog through some surprisingly butt-ugly CG monster goop during the climax of the train fight. Seriously, Fate/Zero’s eldritch CG monsters looked better than this stuff a decade ago. Nothing in this movie can just be good without complication; there’s always a caveat, or an asterisk, or a ball and chain holding it back from true transcendence. Every time you think it’s finally clicking into place and hitting a perfect groove of shonen awesomeness, it clicks right back out with a big fat helping of cringe. And not even its best moments can dull the growing sensation that your time could be better spent on pretty much any of its modern peers.
Maybe I’m just being a hipster. Maybe there really is some secret sauce to the Demon Slayer recipe that explains why it deserves to be on top of the world. But the more I think about it, both the show and Mugen Train, the more lackluster it reveals itself to be. Sure, My Hero Academia’s had its ups and downs over the years, but at least it’s able to sweep me away at least a few times every season. Sure, Jujutsu Kaisen is pretty unfocused in the writing department, but at least it carries itself with such incredible swagger that you can’t help but enjoy it. Sure, Attack on Titan’s most recent season is struggling from its transition to Mappa, but god damn if it isn’t still one of the most electrifying things to ever come out of this medium. In an anime landscape saturated with countless excellent shonen (and action shows in general), I just don’t see the point of Demon Slayer. This franchise is a gorgeously animated, stunningly produced, intermittingly entertaining piece of stale cardboard, and there’s nothing it’s offering that I can’t get better by looking basically anywhere else in its immediate vicinity.
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