Like a blood-socked Pokémon, you gotta catch ’em all in this cult-smash Japanese anime, which follows directly on from the successful TV show of the same name. And that does mean directly; Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba Infinity Castle, the first in a planned trilogy, begins in such res media that anyone not already steeped in Demon Slayer lore might wonder if they’ve somehow missed the first hour of the movie. That said, though it’s impossible for a newbie to understand exactly what’s going on, Haruo Sotozaki’s visually stunning fantasy has a certain rhythm to it, like Kinji Fukasaku’s hypnotic mid-’70s Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, but with sadistic monsters instead of yakuza.
There is no origin story here, however; and be warned that it will take at least 40 minutes to get up to speed with a YouTube recap video beforehand. Suffice to say, the Demon Slayer Corps. is in full effect when the film starts, and its members have already been sucked into the dizzying depths of the Escher-like Infinity Castle by the arch-demon Muzan, who is somewhere in its depths, seemingly regenerating himself in what looks like a huge, beating heart. It’s a measure of how digressive this 155-minute experience is that the expected showdown with Muzan never comes (presumably that will happen in the third, since if Muzan dies “all demons die”); instead, Sotozaki breaks things down into a series of highly individual fights that play out with the intensity of a Sergio Leone gun battle.
The first and most striking thing about Infinity Castle is how little exposition (i.e., story) there is, in a traditional sense. Though some does indeed come from dialogue, a surprising amount of information comes from the characters’ inner monologues — think of the camp Japanese sci-fi Spectreman — as the demon slayers prepare for battle, usually with the architect of their own personal tragedy. There is a lot of talk of “forms”, usually from one to seven, and each of the hashira — the highest-ranking demon slayers — has their own fighting style, resulting in exclamations as “Water breathing!”, “Slithering snake!”, and most perplexing of all, “Compound eye hexagon!”, apparently a reference to the Dragonfly technique.
If it all sounds a bit like He-Man (“By the power of Grayskull!”), it is, with a dash of Thundercats thrown in via some very dodgy rock that sounds a lot like “The Touch” from the first Transformers movie. The animation, however, is much more sophisticated than that, and also very adult; these vampiric demons — which literally eat or, more creepily, simply absorb their victims — can only be killed by having their heads cut off, and even that isn’t a given. Which means there’s plenty of hemoglobin sloshing around, although the gore quotient is undercut by the level of philosophizing that goes on, with the unexpected result that the surprisingly self-aware villains — like the former child-god Doma or the hard-scrabble warrior Akaza — are more interesting than the good guys.
The end result is like stepping on and off a moving train, and though most of it will fly over the heads of casual viewers, there’s a definite poetry to its many mysteries, like the command center where young women map out the Infinity Castle even as it grows and grows exponentially, dispatching crows to guide the outnumbered demon slayers. Even the character that looks like a wild boar in a tutu has his own personal style. Suffice to say, then, this is hardly entry-level anime, but the fact that so many international markets are falling for its uncompromisingly surreal charms is surely a cause for celebration.
Title: Demon Slayer: Infinity CastleDirector: Haruo SotozakiScreenwriters: Koyoharu Gotouge, Hikaru KondôCast: Natsuki Hanae, Mamoru Miyano, Akira Ishida, Saori Hayami, Toshihiko SekiDistributor: CrunchyrollRunning time: 2 hrs 35 mins
The post ‘Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’ Review: Haruo Sotozaki’s Visually Stunning But Narratively Complex Anime Will Leave Newcomers Struggling appeared first on Deadline.
