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Jun 19, 2025
This was a decent piece of medieval storytelling. A bit aimless at certain points, but the main idea rings clear: what is it to be human? What separates good human beings from the bad behavior that corrupts and fails society time and time again?
The story puts virtues and sins on a scale and then tosses all of that out of the window as being human is a more delicate subject than typecasts.
We also get quadruplegic Demon Slayer - very well animated if not as well, and with a much better story to add.
My only quip (a significant one at that) is that it falls
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short on delivering for the promise of a story building up for so long. I wasn't very satisfied when I saw the "End" screen. This could definitely go longer.
Oh, also the horse bomb was a hilarious scene. You'll love it when you see it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Oct 21, 2024
The overall negative views of the already existing reviews mostly focus on the source material at hand. I will refrain from doing so, and focus on the anime itself.
Why disconnect my review from the manga? It is already quite obvious that the adaptation is in fact a different imagining of the events, so taking it at face rather than with its background would seem to do it more justice.
Let's start with the visuals. Even though the crew took a *very* long time to get this anime done (about 4 years, for 4 episodes of TV standard length), the animation quality tends to lack quite
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a bit in places, especially for episodes 2 and 3. However, the art *style* was a perfect approach - it gives you the best Junji Ito feel from all the adaptations I've seen so far. A pity that they couldn't get it done with the best quality possible. Perhaps they did rely on too much rotoscoping.
The delivery of the content is not perfect, but considering that this is just 4 episodes for something much larger, we can take a different angle at this. How much of the horror you'd get from reading a Junji Ito book do you get out of this series? I'd say it's quite close. The live-action movie wasn't bad either - also decent - yet it didn't pack a punch this strong. The reason for watching a series like this is the visceral, gut-wrenching, outworldly horror that you'd get - and with Ito, you must get to visualize it the way he means it. This series does achieve that.
What's left is the music, and the writing behind the content itself. We have Colin Stetson on the soundtrack, couldn't get better for something like this. For the writing, I'd say the deadpan cast just forced to live through this pandemonium and submit to it as mere victims/observers is very typical of cosmic horror (Lovecraft anyone?). The contrast of everyone vs. Shuichi is also executed nicely, as he is no romantic/tragic hero, but also another victim of the eldritch. Everything just clicks together to form a very traditionally written, yet eloquent horror story that parallels an actual masterpiece of the same art.
So what's really wrong with this anime? Nothing *much* other than the animation quality really. It just needs to be criticized heavily if you consider the original source material. Take that with your own grain of salt.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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May 9, 2023
The major problem about Kimetsu no Yaiba has always been that its quality can be observed in two extreme ends.
On one hand, the visual design of the characters (obviously by the mangaka) is sublime - the costumes and overall aesthetics of the them are a couple notches above an average shounen title. This is also coupled by the choreographics of fighting scenes, as canonically most if not all "breathing" moves are inspired by natural phenomena - and as such their visuals are followed by bright and vibrant overlays of what I understand as their representations. Add in ufotable as the studio which is handling the
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animation of all such scenes and you get a seriously stunning animation.
On the other hand, the series is constantly dealing with narrative constipation. The characters are shallow beyond belief - if you'd ever complained about a shounen title's lack of depth and poise in its narrative, you'll be surprised how much better they will seem in contrast to the slop you're served with... this. Every character in this series is built plainly upon a single quirk, with absolutely no development into their personalities. They will always have one-dimensional responses to anything they experience to a comical extent.
If you are reading this, it's highly likely that this kind of a review isn't new for you as you've watched the other seasons as well. However, it just gets worse with this season. 5 episodes in, what we get is a highly elevated visual feast accompanied by a bland, soulless development of a story which could be worded by a character in less than perhaps a minute per episode in full detail. I'm not expecting anything better into the season in this regard. What keeps me watching is just the absurdly good audiovisual quality. What makes me nauseous on the other hand is Tanjiro growing ever shallower, accompanied by the very existence of Mitsuri whose existence is just comedic at this point (just why)
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jan 14, 2021
There are many reviews already explaining the situation very well and probably in better written words than this, but I'll still weigh in.
First and foremost, the most critical flaw of this anime is that it is taking itself too seriously, even though it is very committed to making crucial artistic mistakes or bad storytelling decisions. In an apocalyptic setting of merely 10 episodes, there's no real focus on the decision/consequence mechanics of a survival-oriented story, instead we are continuously presented by a loose string of side events that take about a third or the fourth of the series' length each, which do not contribute to
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the characters' stories or the overall events at all. Most of these event chains are also pushed into the spotlight in the dreadful deus-ex-machina because it is obviously convenient for the writers to just make things happen in the most absurdly convenient way for the characters. Many pop culture references of the "high taste" are also introduced, with many weak jabs at virtue signals, which I would be very well accepting of if not executed badly, but such stuff is really wasted on a "work of art" that is not nearly as rich as the references it is making. Such things could be exemplified by the ethical dilemmas introduced in the "cult" section (not spoiling it further), and the "rave" scene - in which we have a Northern European person very well acquainted with their own club scene - also very well acquainted with the Japanese underground (who would really blast Hiroshi Yoshimura's Green in a rave anyway? That is kind of creative, but not in a sense that makes the anime creative regardless). The virtue signals? Well, they are introduced in the blandest way possible, in the form of "combating nationalism and fascism". I don't like such ideologies myself as well, but I don't see how it is relevant to the plot if it only appears in 2-3 minutes of our characters going "You suck! Hope you don't survive", and then just not having any conflicts or any sensible dialogue about such events at any point again in the story. Most of the time such scenes are also decorated with the deus-ex-machina, as an alternative resolution to their conflict is almost ever present.
Moving on to the characters. If the average shounen protagonist was really disturbingly uncanny to you and you wanted some *realism* out of this anime series, you will be shocked at how oblivious and jaded this anime's understanding of actual human realism can get even more uncanny than that. It's really painful to watch so many "regular" human beings act in so ridiculously unnatural ways. The creators apparently spent so many painstaking hours on making this Eastern European person with the war-affected past to just make him, in quite the dictionary level literal sense, only clown around and say "cheer up" to our characters because it was *yet another* deus-ex-machina moment, this time to cheer Mari up because she had to be the rational mother character of the bunch (she is equally badly written, however). He is also thrown into a few virtue signalling sections because he is an "outsider". I don't even remember how he then disappeared, he is *that* irrelevant to the plot. In general, most of the characters (except for like two or three of them) are, despite the apocalpytic conditions around them, acting as if they are completely unaware of the looming threat of death around them and proceed to be even *less* careful than an average human being as they ever can - so that the story can get some cheap conflicts to move the story forward. The sense of moral values are ridiculously twisted: most of the horribly written characters in the motley crew of our story tend to be self-destructive in any case beneficial or detrimental to themselves or others. It is alright to support such ideas, and to have characters that follow such ideas - but it gets awkward when there is a god mechanism (I am tired of saying deus-ex-machina) hovering above them and rescuing them from almost all of their consequential conflicts. We are only presented with the idea of consequence as a mechanism to reduce the amount of writing that this story requires to move forward. Nothing more, nothing less.
Overall, this has been a very cheap experience, with blatant artistic corner cuttings and mistakes even though it is advertised as an anime of the artistic and moral high ground, maybe even close to the apex. It gets that pretentious, and it is tragicomic to observe such a situation. I will not be able to listen to Hiroshi Yoshimura with the same amount of joy ever again.
3/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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