Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle Review

Haruo Sotozaki's film is the first part of a trilogy and plays like one: three fights, no ending. The castle itself is the showpiece, an Escher interior of rooms, stairways and paper doors that fold and drop whenever the biwa-playing demon Nakime rearranges them, and ufotable's blend of hand drawing, digital compositing and moving camera has never looked richer. Yuki Kajiura and Go Shiina's score, with theme songs by Aimer and LiSA, lands every blow.

The duels are uneven. Shinobu against Doma breaks off unresolved, Zenitsu's bout with his old senior Kaigaku is brief, and the long Tanjiro and Giyu fight with Akaza carries the film, not least because Akaza's human past as Hakuji is the best character writing the franchise has done. The trouble is placement: that flashback, and several shorter ones, arrive mid-combat and stop the film dead. Anime News Network graded it a C plus for exactly that, and The Japan Times found the 155 minutes long and the lack of closure frustrating.

None of it hurt the box office. It had the biggest opening weekend in Japanese history, grossed about 793 million dollars worldwide, the most for any Japanese film, and won the Japan Academy Film Prize for animation. As spectacle it is the peak of the series; as a story it is a long middle.