Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba)

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Alternative Titles

English: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Synonyms: Blade of Demon Destruction

Japanese: 鬼滅の刃

Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 26

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Apr 6, 2019 to Sep 28, 2019

Premiered: Spring 2019

Broadcast: Saturdays at 23:30 (JST)

Producers: Aniplex, Shueisha

Licensors: Aniplex of America

Studios: ufotable

Source: Manga

Genres: Action, Demons, Historical, Shounen, Supernatural

Duration: 23 min. per ep.

Rating: R - 17+ (violence & profanity)

Statistics

Score: 8.60¹ (scored by 1,053,771 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #68²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #19

Members: 1,644,768

Favorites: 76,772

8.60

Ranked #68Popularity #19Members 1,644,768

Spring 2019TVufotable

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Episodes: /26

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PV 3 Aniplex USA version

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Synopsis

Ever since the death of his father, the burden of supporting the family has fallen upon Tanjirou Kamado's shoulders. Though living impoverished on a remote mountain, the Kamado family are able to enjoy a relatively peaceful and happy life. One day, Tanjirou decides to go down to the local village to make a little money selling charcoal. On his way back, night falls, forcing Tanjirou to take shelter in the house of a strange man, who warns him of the existence of flesh-eating demons that lurk in the woods at night.

When he finally arrives back home the next day, he is met with a horrifying sight—his whole family has been slaughtered. Worse still, the sole survivor is his sister Nezuko, who has been turned into a bloodthirsty demon. Consumed by rage and hatred, Tanjirou swears to avenge his family and stay by his only remaining sibling. Alongside the mysterious group calling themselves the Demon Slayer Corps, Tanjirou will do whatever it takes to slay the demons and protect the remnants of his beloved sister's humanity.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

The anime covers chapters 1 to 53 of the manga.

Episode Videos

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	Kimetsu no Yaiba
Sequel:	Kimetsu no Yaiba Movie: Mugen Ressha-hen
Other:	Kimetsu Gakuen: Valentine-hen

Kawanishi, Kengo
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Kondou, Hikaru

Producer, Sound Director, Series Composition

Sotozaki, Haruo

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Shirai, Toshiyuki

Episode Director, Storyboard, Key Animation

Suhara, Takashi

Episode Director, Storyboard

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Opening Theme

"Gurenge (紅蓮華)" by LiSA

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Ending Theme

#1: "Gurenge (紅蓮華)" by LiSA (eps 1, 26)
#2: "from the edge" by FictionJunction feat. LiSA (eps 2-18, 20-25)
#3: "Kamado Tanjirou no Uta (竈門炭治郎のうた)" by Go Shiina ft. Nami Nakagawa (ep 19)

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Reviews

Sep 28, 2019

26 of 26 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 5

RebelPanda (All reviews)

2945 people found this review helpful

*This review contains very minor spoilers*

Does fantastic animation trump mediocre writing? When it comes down to it, can you ignore one to enjoy the other?

As for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, most of the anime community falls into one of two extremes. Either they love it for the amazing animation, an abundance of horrifying villains, and incredible fight choreography—or they hate it for subpar storytelling, shallow character writing, and unfunny comedy. The truth is somewhere in between. Demon Slayer has some of the best animation of this generation, but I can’t recommend the entire show because the writing is… pretty bad.

Our hero, no older than fifteen, carries his dying sister as he trudges through a snowstorm, crying out in anguish. Soon after, we flashback to before everything went wrong. We are greeted with a loving family. The scene is saturated with brilliant light reflecting off the snow-covered ground, angels singing with hopeful music. They are going to die. All of them. The cold-open is completely unnecessary. It is obvious this family with zero characteristics other than ‘happy’ will be killed. Violently. The lone survivor, Tanjiro, inevitably leaves them; now that his father is deceased, he is the designated man of the family. Upon his return, he finds his family viciously murdered. Demon Slayer never shies away from violence, and we learn this immediately. Blood soaked with horrific expressions, children protecting one another in their final moments, it’s all the more effective because their deaths are left to our imagination. Tanjiro stares in terror, speed lines on either side of the screen. Aside from the maximum shock factor of a happy family being slaughtered, there’s little reason to care. If you need speed lines to convey the protagonist’s severity finding his family violently murdered, you need to rewrite the scene and start over. It plays out so predictably, and we still know nothing about him other than he was part of the happy family. He carries away the only survivor, his sister Nezuko, barely clinging to life. Soon she becomes the monster that killed her—a demon. Tanjiro vows to avenge his family and cure his sister, by becoming a DEMON SLAYER!! It practically writes itself; a horrific monster-of-the-week for the heroes to fight off, and it works. As the demonic threats become bigger threats, Tanjiro becomes a more capable fighter. There’s a real sense of progression.

Before his family was killed, Tanjiro hadn’t fought at all. Somehow he barely knew what demons were. Demons are enough of a threat in this world that there are demon-hunting squads, yet this family didn’t know about them. Thankfully through a lucky coincidence, Tanjiro gains new powers in a training montage. There was no character progression, but at least there was lots of pretty animation. Nezuko, despite essentially being a lobotomized demon, is trained to believe ‘humans good, demons bad’. Not only is this a cheap way to avoid writing character development, but it also raises even more questions with the internal logic. If people can hypnotize demons to be good, why is this the only time we see it happen? Rather than integrating this information into the story, it is dumped onto us during an action scene as if the author forgot to mention it in a prior chapter.

Time after time, the action is undercut by the awkward dialogue. For example, a disembodied head demon ties it’s hair to Tanjiro’s weapon, then it is flung away and gets stuck to a tree. It struggles, then it says aloud exactly what we saw happen “I wrapped my hair around his hatchet to grab it but it got tangled up!” We could easily assume this from the shot composition and body language. Constant inner monologues, flashbacks, unnecessary comments, and awkward pauses bring the action to a screeching halt. One of the most egregious moments is when Tanjiro angrily stares at his friend being beaten up. Two minutes later, he finally yells and tries to intervene, cut to the ED before anything happens. They’re like five feet apart for two whole minutes, and then it just ends. Early on, this was one of the main reasons many people dropped Kimetsu no Yaiba. Show don’t tell is a rule that Ufotable can follow; their staff is loaded with talent and an unlimited budget. Being a manga adaptation, the moment-to-moment descriptions are necessary to supplement what the paperback art can’t depict. However, a high-budget adaptation like this does not need superfluous descriptions. I frequently felt like I was watching an action movie with someone who pauses it once a minute to comment on what’s happening.

About two-thirds of Demon Slayer is action scenes, and one-third is jarringly out-of-place comedy. When it works, it is a stunning spectacle; the heroes run through the dark moonlit forest chasing after vicious demons, orchestral music excellently hypes up any scene, then the breathtaking fight choreography. The background art is beautiful, occasionally the CGI backgrounds are jarring. Thick lines around the character designs make them (usually) feel suited against the realistic backgrounds. Both the demons and heroes have iconic designs with distinct color pallets. I didn’t notice a single shot with off-model character art. During action scenes, the use of CGI character models allowed for dynamic 3D camera movements, unlike anything I’ve seen since Ufotable’s Fate/Zero. Occasionally, CGI models were unnecessarily used at a distance, it was still distracting.

Suspension of disbelief is bent to the point of breaking in many of the action scenes, but many find it hard to criticize them because they’re so damn entertaining to watch. Every time he unleashes his water breathing technique, I was always in awe; the painterly ink-like waves with lush blues juxtaposed against the photorealistic background look cool every single time. He has tons of different water breathing styles, each with different animations and usages. A basic slash, then combos, a 360-degree slash, and a mercifully quick painless slash to name a few. The whole water breathing technique that he uses to fight is awesome, even if the logic behind it is a bit vague. As it is described in the show, you inhale deeply, and it gets your blood excited! So what does that really mean? Even he says, “I still don’t get it.” On the other hand, what’s less forgivable is Tanjiro’s super-powered nose. Even before he trains, he has this unbelievable ability. He smells emotions, he smells demons from a mile away, and he smells the invisible thread that allows him to make such accurate attacks. There are other unexplained abilities like super hearing; these kids are essentially the lamest heroes from My Hero Academia, except with no in-world explanation for their powers. Demon Slayer takes many shortcuts when writing its story and characters. If only those flaws didn’t permeate through the best part of the show, I might have been able to recommend it.

Tanjiro is a good person. His ideals are unshakable. He fights for his family, he throws himself into danger to save total strangers, he even comforts the demons’ tortured souls after slaying them. The problem is, he’s too good. His ideals rarely come into question. After seeing a few randos get murdered, he learns that not everyone can be saved. However, nothing breaks him. Unlike most monster-slaying main characters, his morals never blur the lines between becoming what he is fighting against. As a shounen hero, he is what you expect, an unequivocally good person. That’s why he’s such a boring protagonist. Motivated solely by his desire to slay demons and save his sister, his personality is essentially a blank slate for the audience to project onto. Unfortunately, he’s the best character we’ve got. Nezuko, as adorable as she is, has next to no lines of dialogue. Other demons can speak, for some reason, she is gagged with a stick. During the daytime, she waits within Tanjiro’s wooden box to avoid being burnt, only coming out when it is convenient for the plot. When her brother is outnumbered against stronger foes, she jumps out and decapitates demons with a dive kick. It’s badass… but their unlikely partnership doesn’t make much sense within the story’s internal logic. In the first episode, Nezuko is a vicious demon, prepared to eat her brother, and somehow unlike any other demon in the show, she can stop herself. Not even four episodes later, we see another kid-turned-demon immediately forget about his siblings and eat them (and he’s also able to speak immediately). She exists solely to motivate Tanjiro to save her, and that constantly made me think, “Why?” Why does he need to make her human? She’s in full control of her demon form, she’s insanely powerful, she doesn’t need that gag, and if she were a human, she would have died fighting alongside her brother. There are kindhearted demons in this show, people who were saved from death by being turned, so why is it such an issue? All I ask for is a story that remains true to its internal logic. She’s lobotomized and nonverbal, but look at this cute demon girl crouching in a basket!

The emotional payoffs lack the impact the visceral presentation they deserve. Right before or after a ‘boss’ demon is killed, we always see a flashback to make us sympathize with them. Trying to get the audience to care about a villain minutes (sometimes seconds) before they die just doesn’t work. They have already lost the fight; who cares if they had a tough childhood if we’ll never see them again? Like most of the emotional payoffs in this show, there is beautiful background music to carry the lacking script, most notably the insert song in episode nineteen. Without the music, the writing isn’t enough. All of the ‘development’ for the main characters happens in flashbacks too. Nezuko gets next to nothing. In the latter half of the show, the script has less time to be redundant. Instead, it’s replaced with comedy. I hoped the other characters shown in the OP/ED would be a lot better. Oh, how I was disappointed once Zenitsu was introduced. If there’s anyone who likes Demon Slayer for the humor more than the action, violence, artwork, and music, I’d sure like to ask them why. The characters are around fifteen years old, and that’s who the humor would appeal to. Over exaggerated reactions, crying, yelling. So. Much. Yelling. Zenitsu almost exclusively speaks with a shrill yelling voice. The few battles he fights alone are so frustrating that I was rooting for the demons. His defining character trait is ‘coward’. He does get a flashback eventually that still does nothing to explain why he is so annoying. Nearly all of the humor in Demon Slayer is jarringly placed right next to series moments. People get violently killed, then within seconds, cut to the main characters in a cartoony art style doing a slapstick routine. In a series as dark as this one, levity is necessary to a certain extent; however, it feels like the author tried to make the mature themes more accessible to a younger audience by using drastic tonal shifts from horror to humor. The maligned tone made the show less scary to me, but only because it was so all-over-the-place that I could barely tell what tone they were aiming for most of the time.

Tanjiro sees his family in flashbacks when he needs motivation in a fight. In the climactic moment of the entire show, he gets a new ability retconned into the story through a flashback. Many argue it was foreshadowed in the ED⁠—however, the flashback explains a new storyline that gives Tanjiro a new power—a retcon. Inosuke is here too, he doesn’t do a whole lot, but he has more relevance than Nezuko, at least. Zenitsu and Inosuke are the most expendable characters. In the final arc, we get the most stilted dialogue in the entire series. A dozen new characters get introduced, each with one gimmick to their personalities. Overly cute, overly angry, completely nonverbal, they added nothing but fluff. Demon Slayer began with a roar but ended with a whimper. Even though it was poorly written, the stunning animation and grimdark aesthetic kept me entertained; it’s a shame they threw most of that out the window for filler and unfunny comedy in the final few episodes.

Either you will think this is one of the best shounen anime ever created, or you will think it has some of the worst writing in a big-budget anime to date. Perhaps even somewhere in between. You could skim a Wikipedia summary of the story, then watch all the action scenes on YouTube and you’d lose nothing. I’ll ask you one more time, are you willing to deal with bad writing to enjoy fantastic animation?

When it comes down to it, you’ll know what to do.

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Sep 28, 2019

26 of 26 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 8

Inferno792 (All reviews)

1181 people found this review helpful

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” - Leonardo da Vinci.

For a show to be good, it’s not always necessary for it to have a complex plot and a deep cast of characters. This is exactly what Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) proves. This show is yet another spectacle by ufotable – the studio that can take an otherwise generic shounen with a fairly linear story and turn it into a show that has fans craving for more every week. The studio has done just that with Kimetsu no Yaiba by making it one of the most popular shows of the year with its animation quality read more

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Sep 28, 2019

26 of 26 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 5

Yuri-Crusader (All reviews)

559 people found this review helpful

Welcome to my review of Kimetsu no Yaiba!! Minor spoiler warning!!

The Kamado family lives happily in peace in their seclude cabin high up in the snowy mountains .After the main protagonist Tanjirous father passing away some time ago, he have taken over he's responsibility and providing for he's family .One day after selling some coal in the village nearby and coming home later than expected, he stubble through the door and are met by a gruesome and horrifying sight!! He's family have been brutally slaughtered .Hes read more

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Sep 28, 2019

26 of 26 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 7

Veronin (All reviews)

539 people found this review helpful

Kimetsu no Yaiba is a pleasant surprise. Though it first appears to merely be another overly grim and dark series lauded for its gore, it is is revealed to be much more as the series progresses. Hypocrisy, mortality, hope and despair run as prevalent themes in Tanjiro's tragic journey. The myriad ways in which this journey could reach its demise run tense in the heart and the mind of the viewer, as mercy is seldom a consideration to the demons he must annihilate.

If there is one single thing to point to with Kimetsu no Yaiba, it would be its atmosphere. Brooding, oppressive, and tense are some of the adjectives I might use to describe the mood of Kimetsu no Yaiba. It is an anime that sucks you in and doesn't let you go... most of the time, anyway. It is around the tenth episode when things make an unfortunate change for mass appeal - the characters Zenitsu and Inosuke: screaming, obnoxious lunatics who you might expect to see from a series like Naruto or Bleach rather than a careful series priding itself in its atmosphere.

That's not to say that all the side characters should have been removed, or that battle shounen tropes are inherently bad. But certainly the show could have benefited from not having dude-with-boar-head yelling at the top of his lungs and some blonde dickweed whose raison d'etre is to burst your eardrums with his constant whining and crying. For one, perhaps two episodes, this is somewhat amusing and does well at giving the viewer a break from the despair, an intermission of sorts... not something you would expect from the entire story henceforth.

Although the roles of Zenitsu and Inosuke are somewhat diminished after the mansion arc, the story introduces the "Hashira" (or 'Pillars' in the localized dialogue), a set of nine warriors who sit atop the Demon Slaying corp as the strongest it has to offer. There are a few more normal faces here, particularly Tomioka, Shinobu, and Kanao (even though the latter is technically not part of the Hashira), but the rest are complete one-note gags much like Zenitsu and boar-face-man. A monk who is constantly in a state of tears, a strange woman who is infatuated with every man in existence, a constantly-angry clone of Bakugo from Hero Academia, and so on and so forth. While this might keep the interest of younger viewers and those of weaker attention spans, this contrast of silly and serious hampers the story and takes the viewer away from the atmosphere to such an extent that by the end of the anime's twenty-six episode run, it has mostly just become another battle shounen series.

But for a battle shounen series, Kimetsu no Yaiba is top of its class, and even on its own still a worthwhile endeavor. Tanjiro and his moral dilemma of having to execute demons while protecting his sister, a demon herself, and harboring feelings of sympathy for those he cuts down, makes for a far more compelling and human protagonist than almost all of his brethren. He is exceptionally weak at the start, but his two years of training make his moderate combat skills seem appropriate, and he is still vulnerable enough that no plot armor will allow him to cut down opponents regardless of their power. Even by the end, he is losing many of his battles.

Though still very much shounen in nature, these battles deserve some praise for their inclusion of wounds and injuries. Whereas most anime of this genre will have characters— especially the protagonist— being beaten half to death and still standing as if almost nothing happened, Tanjiro is repeatedly being crippled by broken bones, internal bleeding, and his body simply giving up on him. There is a limit to his vitality, and he cannot simply get up and retaliate at max power as other protagonists often do. If he is hit in the leg, his leg will break, and he will be unable to escape or to attack at full power. These are small details, but they make the story far more engaging by giving consequence to the battles and a very real potential for death and failure.

Anime set before the modern day are rare enough, but ones set in the oft-forgotten Taisho period are closer to zero. Kimetsu no Yaiba's setting is one of its greatest strengths, the early Taisho period being a bleak, short reprieve before Japan's foray into militarism - perhaps the darkest decades the country had ever experienced. Though the imperial revolution had long since hit Japan by this point, and swords were outlawed and replaced by firearms almost fifty years prior, Tanjiro and the rest of the Demon Slaying corps fighting demons rather than humans allows for melee combat to make sense in a setting where it ordinarily wouldn't. It's certainly an interesting contrast to see the characters wielding katanas in big cities where trains and primitive automobiles are thriving about, and the forlorn atmosphere of the period fits well with the tension and despair entrenched within the story.

The setting and the atmosphere are amplified by the moody and period-appropriate sound design, with the shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and other traditional instruments, as well as up-tempo Buddhist chanting permeating the music. There are occasional tracks that do not fit the setting or the tone of the show, and the opening theme should not have been a generic throwaway J-Pop song, but for the most part the music is a hit.

Which can be said for the entirety of the anime, really. It's a hit. Mostly. Had the manga been published for an older demographic, it would no doubt have been able to tell its story without the usual trappings of the battle shounen genre. But at the same time, a lesser-known publisher means the series would probably not have been published weekly or have been nearly as popular as it is, and so a studio as big as Ufotable would likely not have picked it up for a high-budget adaptation. So I can live with the realities, I suppose, and enjoy my time with the series. But I can also live without Zenitsu screaming my ears off.

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