Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Review

The production is genuinely historic. ufotable's compositing pipeline, which layers digital effects and camera moves onto hand-drawn cuts, produced fight sequences that reset what audiences expect from a weekly series, and episode nineteen is the clearest before-and-after line the industry has drawn in a decade. Yuki Kajiura and Go Shiina's score matches it, and the theme songs became national hits. The writing does not keep up. Tanjiro is decent and static, the villains explain themselves through flashbacks on a fixed schedule, and the emotional beats are signposted minutes before they arrive.

Zenitsu and Inosuke run the same two jokes for a hundred episodes. What the series does have is legibility, since the breathing styles are visualised clearly enough that any fight reads instantly, which is more than several better-written shows manage. It is the purest example in this catalogue of a production department outrunning its script, and it earned the audience it got for that reason and for no other. Watch it for what ufotable did, not for what happens.