The Cash-Grab Strikes Back: Demon Slayer Kimetsu no Yaiba — To The Hashira Training Review
Well, here we go again. One year on from Aniplex’s presumably spectacular success at parting gullible Demon Slayer fans from their money with their release of not-movie To the Swordsmith Village (that I dubbed a “blatant cash grab”), they’ve returned with the even-less-exciting-sounding To the Hashira Training. Yes, it’s two essentially narratively-unrelated double-length TV episodes spliced awkwardly together again to create a “cinematic experience”. It’s not a movie. Repeat after me… “this is not a movie”.
To be fair to Aniplex, they’ve been quite open about what this is — it’s a chance for rabid fans to revisit the climax of last year’s Swordsmith Village season on the big screen, followed by the opening episode of the upcoming Hashira Training season six weeks prior to its scheduled broadcast date of April 5th. Now I’m not the biggest Demon Slayer fan — I agree it’s had its spectacular moments, I greatly enjoyed much of the first season and the Mugen Train movie, but the source material has glaring deficiencies, and the adaptation has been stretched out so thinly. The only reason I can think of for this approach is that Demon Slayer prints money, and money is the only reason this not-movie exists. There is no artistic or storytelling merit to presenting Demon Slayer in this odd, disjointed fashion.
First off, this is what I had to say about The Swordsmith Village’s final double-length episode, first broadcast in June 2023:
Despite the stunning animation and smooth, kinetic fight scenes, I found my attention continually wandering. Without decent emotional stakes to ground the action, it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. I actually found myself dropping off to sleep during some particularly egregious extended battles. At least the last episode introduces a compelling emotional conundrum, though even that is spoiled by absurdly slow pacing that makes what should be a heartbreaking moment laugh-out-loud in its idiocy. I suppose this approach to Demon Slayer prints money, though, so I expect the next arc to also take more than twice as many episodes as it needs, and to be as unnecessarily bombastic as this season was. For some reason, Demon Slayer continues to be unbelievably successful.
With that in mind, this is how this not-movie was presented to audiences this time: in 4DX. At least in my local cinema, this was the only evening showing available on Friday night. I have never been to a 4DX showing of anything in my life, and wasn’t impressed that the ticket prices were twice as much as usual. Why even pay this money, I hear you ask? Well, for one, I write an anime blog that tries to cover every UK theatrical anime release and it would seem odd to miss this major event. Two, not every anime movie released in the UK comes to my city (for example we never got the recent, fantastic Blue Giant here, though thankfully I saw that in Edinburgh at Scotland Loves Anime in November.) My hope is that by supporting bigger releases like this, my local cinema will be more inclined to show other, less prominent anime movies in future. It may be a pipe dream, but let me have this, please?
For those not in the know, a 4DX cinema screening is like a cross between a movie theater and a rollercoaster. The seats jostle and move violently, air or water spurts at you from behind and below at (in)appropriate moments, snow-like substances are dropped from the ceiling by loudly whining machinery, and weird synthetic chemical smells not in the slightest bit reminiscent of whatever is occurring on screen are unleashed on sensitive nostrils. For the first half of this not-movie, which consists of mostly wall-to-wall action, the main effect is to leave the audience feeling bruised and battered, actively detracting from the experience of the spectacular visuals. Cinema is a focused experience of the intimate marriage between sound and vision, and judging by my sole exposure to 4DX so far, it’s a gimmicky, uncomfortable, irritating distraction that dilutes and tarnishes this event. If I wanted to be jostled around until I hurt, I’d have gone to a fairground or started a fight with some random drunken bums. Also, this was a made-for-TV episode, goddammit. It presumably wasn’t made with this gimmickry in mind. Or was it…? How far ahead did Aniplex plan for this?
Anyway, the not-movie begins with an wordless extended recap of Demon Slayer’s first few story arcs, set once again to Gurenge by LiSA, which never fails to get the blood flowing — it’s an excellent, exciting piece of music. The recap itself is fairly incoherent, with a weird choice of the least-interesting imagery possible. Also, it seems like the entire first season has now been branded the Tanjiro Kamado, Unwavering Resolve Arc, which is new to me. The recap also hurtles through disconnected imagery from the Mugen Train, Entertainment District and Swordsmith Village arcs, bringing us up to speed and dropping us in media res, with Tanjiro and friends chasing a random diminutive demon dude through a dense forest.
On the big screen, the sheer scale and force of ufotable’s incredible action artistry is almost overwhelming, and almost makes the price of admission worthwhile. It makes me wish they’d hurry up and do more TYPE MOON stuff — their movie version of Witch on the Holy Night cannot come soon enough, the wait is killing me. I guess they need to make Demon Slayer to pay the bills though, so I’ll begrudgingly accept that they need to beautify this very basic show before they can do the same for other, more deserving, material.
This final episode of the Swordsmith Village Arc is generally pretty good, as long as you’re not bored by the very extended fight scenes. Tanjiro is such an earnest good boy that you really want him to succeed, and the story puts him in such a difficult position that he’s unable to choose between saving his beloved (demonic) sister Nezuko from the encroaching sunlight that’s setting her alight, or chasing the evil demon that’s about to devour a bunch of fleeing swordsmiths. That Nezuko makes the decision for him is finally an example of some agency from a devastatingly underutilised character, though when she kicks him into the air he hangs there for an absurdly long time, making what should be a tragic, devastating moment instead utterly hilarious. I don’t think that’s what they were aiming for.
The enemy this time is the utterly despicable and manipulative Hantengu. Tanjiro must once more “level up” and use a new “breathing technique”, in this instance Zenitsu’s “thunder breathing” to overcome his damaged leg and run at near-light-speed to catch his enemy. Once again, upon severing the demon’s head, we get a grainy flashback detailing the circumstances of his life and transformation into an inhuman monster. Instead of attempting to induce belated empathy for the demon, like has occured in every other arc so far, Demon Slayer ensures we learn that Hantengu was always a disgusting piece of work. A thief and murderer who blamed his crimes on anyone but himself, who refused to take responsibility for his actions, and cried about his unfair treatment from others, he deserved everything coming to him. Demon Slayer’s writing is never subtle, but I found this particular enemy’s behaviour to be at least interesting from a psychological point of view.
Then, for some reason, we discover Nezuko has stopped burning in sunlight and is now completely fine. Do we get an explanation for this? No. All we’re told is that she is “the first demon to conquer the sun”, and that now main big bad Evil Moonwalker Michael Jackson (Muzan Kibutsuji) will be desperate to find her and absorb her so that he too can become a daywalker. Then his plans for world domination can come to fruition, bwa ha ha ha ha! Finally we get a bit of backstory about who he is and why he is the way he is, though the explanations are a bit sparse. Something to do with a shady doctor and “blue spider lily” medication. Unfortunately Evil MJ killed his doctor in a fit of anger before learning the secret. That was clumsy of him. I don’t get the feeling we’ll ever get any concrete explanations from Demon Slayer about what demons are other than “it was bad medicine that might as well have been magic”.
So that’s the end of the first half, which is mostly entertaining apart from an overlong “comedy” sequence after the battle where everyone hugs and cries and there is jolly music and laughter and tears and… I want to vomit. Demon Slayer has always been terrible with its comedy — it’s such a weird juxtaposition between its extremely bloody violence (enough to warrant a “15” rating in the UK), and its incredibly juvenile humour. Funny faces are ok once in a while, but Demon Slayer has no other form of humour than utterly basic slapstick, weird facial expressions, and jokes about eating too much or sexually-harrassing women. Whenever the action slows down for any of these comedy “interludes”, I’m struck by a sudden desire to gouge out my eyeballs and scream profanities to the heavens.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the second half, which comprises the needlessly double-length Hashira Training Arc premiere episode, is an extremely slow setup for the upcoming storyline, with an overdose of the aforementioned lame humour. Tanjiro is in bed for the entire episode, recovering from his wounds, while various secondary characters have long, dull conversations that I tuned out of and lost the thread of what they were discussing. Apart from a really cool opening fight between several side-character demon slayers and an army of demons in a creepy castle, there’s no other action. And Zenitsu comes back, and is immediately the most annoying character in the history of the animated medium, ever. Nezuko got a big laugh from the audience though when she completely failed to remember Zenitsu’s name and instead called him Inosuke. I appreciated that. Denigrate him further, Nezuko. Make him suffer.
I do have to wonder about Aniplex’s adaptation choices here — the Hashira Training arc’s opener surely must be one of the least-cinematic episodes of the series so far. It also doesn’t help there was a noticeable visual downgrade from the first half to the second half, with Hashira Training obviously more pixellated than Swordsmith Village, so obvious on the huge screen I saw it on. It’s like someone attempted (and failed) to upscale their blu-ray to 8K. At least with the more sedate pace, there was minimum opportunity for the madman programming the 4DX movements to abuse the poor audience further. About the only good thing I have to say about the second half is that some of the worldbuilding stuff was interesting, but the same effect could have been achieved in half the time. That’s the whole problem with the anime version of Demon Slayer — it looks beautiful (mostly), but is so egregiously padded.
If you’re a rabid Demon Slayer fan with too much money and not enough patience, then To the Hashira Training is exactly for you. Aniplex and its shareholders adore you. It’s nice to feel wanted sometimes, I suppose. For everyone else, this is extremely missable. There’s nothing new here that hasn’t either already been shown on TV, or is about to be in six short weeks’ time. Only the first half holds up to theatrical viewing, and even then it’s bloated and overlong. Don’t be like me — save your money for something more worthwhile, not another artistically desolate, blatant attempt to part you from your cash.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training
Director: Haruo Sotozaki
Based on the manga by: Koyoharu Gotouge
Production company: Ufotable
JP theatrical release: 2nd February 2024
JP distributor: Toho, Aniplex
UK/US theatrical release: 23rd February 2024
UK/US distributor: Crunchyroll
Languages: Japanese audio with English subtitles, English audio
Runtime: 104 minutes
BBFC rating: 15
