Dollars and Demons

Demon Slayer's success shouldn't surprise. We're all otaku now.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle is now the most profitable movie Japan has ever made. It is also rocketing up international box-office charts, and recently out-earned the latest Superman in the United States. Its global, ongoing success is such that it is being bandied about as more than just a hit, but “mind-blowing” (BBC), “a watershed” (Bloomberg), even “a form of cultural asset and soft power” (The Diplomat). Its popularity has grown to the point that my mother, who has to my knowledge never watched an anime in her life, recently mentioned it to me (as “Dragon Killer or something,” to my great amusement.)

The reviews are almost universally positive, so I’m going to get this out of the way up front: Dragon Killer — I mean, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle — isn’t a very good film.

I don’t mean to be contrarian. I watched all of the television series leading up to it, and I covered the previous theatrical release for The New Yorker. But I found Infinity Castle — can we just call it that, please — repetitive, unimaginative, and overlong, less a story than a string of battles punctuated by flashbacks, more akin to watching a chess match than consuming a narrative. There’s no arc here, just a fragment of one. Any hopes for characters changing or dramas resolving will have to wait for the two sequels to come.

And yet, those box office returns.

It is the fate of many a Weekly Shōnen Jump series, of which Demon Slayer is one, to descend into endless battles. Battle-centric manga such as Dragon Ball Z represent some of its biggest triumphs. The reason for this is that a weekly serial is more like sport than art. It’s difficult bordering on impossible to plot out elaborate arcs when you’ve got to deliver nineteen finished pages every seven days, like clockwork. And then there are the weekly reader surveys, the lifeblood of a Jump manga. Conflicts inevitably resonate more with the magazine’s young readership than experimentation or exposition. So there’s a tendency to quickly build up to battles, then draw them out as long as possible, figuratively and literally.

Infinity Castle’s seem to have fallen into a rut. Time and again the protagonists battle a powerful foe to an inch of everyone’s lives, only for it to regroup and turn the tables on the stunned heroes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s classic Hollywood structure, too. The problem is that anime is, or is supposed to be, a dynamic visual medium. Just as fiery prose can resurrect an otherwise humdrum novel, or stellar acting or special effects a pedestrian drama, anime magic can, well, animate even a so-so story. Yet every single fight unfolds against virtually the same video game-y backdrops of a steampunk-y clockwork city, and in virtually the same series of medium shots intercut with closeups. They’re fast and colorful. They also, after a while, kind of blend into one another. This isn’t a Jump problem. It’s a directorial one. Rivals like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen do not suffer from it.

Still, again: that box office. $600 gazillion (okay, maybe only a bajillion) globally. In our era of “poptimism,” where creatives are judged almost entirely upon their financial success, there’s no arguing with it. I am aware that anything I say to the contrary is akin to shouting into the wind. Yet there is something that sticks in my craw, seeing a film without a standalone narrative structure topping Japan’s list of highest-grossing — which is to say, most successful — movies. (Then again, said list includes no Kurosawa, no Ozu, none of the names now widely associated with true excellence in filmmaking.) There’s literally no way to parse Infinity Train without having seen the sixty-three episodes of the Demon Slayer television series plus the 2020 Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train. Even then, you’re left hanging. Is this really a creative triumph?

There’s a tendency to hyperfocus on box-office in reporting on the series’ astronomical success, which makes sense, because art is subjective, while sales figures are — well, everything. But I think the returns are actually the least interesting part of this story. Even less so than the film’s story. Far more intriguing is what Demon Slayer’s success says about us, the non-Japanese consuming it. For many, many years, the manga and anime that hit abroad (or, let me be precise here, in the United States) did not map in any way to those that hit in Japan. Voltron, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Gundam Wing wowed Americans but were seen as fringe features or minor series in Japan. This isn’t the case anymore. What hits or misses in Japan is pretty much guaranteed to be what hits or misses outside of Japan.

There’s a reason for this. Let me preface it by saying I’m not inherently opposed to movies that begin in medias res. As a teen, my favorite was the 1984 Macross: Do You Remember Love? Similar to Infinity Castle, it was a film that didn’t make a whole lot of sense without having seen thirty-six episodes of Macross preceding it (and, truthfully, didn’t make a whole lot of sense even if you had.) But I didn’t watch it for the story. I watched it, over and over, because it looked like nothing else I’d ever seen.

Macross is now famed as the first series made by and for otaku — the Japanese pejorative bestowed upon adults who took kids’ stuff like comic books, cartoons, idol singers, kaiju movies, and toys far more seriously than society believed any sane grownup should. (Why are you looking at me like that?)

To otaku, anime was more than entertainment: it was a lifestyle and an identity. In the late Seventies, the economist (and later Iron Chef judge) Shinichiro Kurimoto dubbed this generation shinjinrui, or “a new type of human.” In 1989 the journalist Tomohiro Machiyama declared otaku “key to deciphering post-industrial society.” The rest of society, Japan and global both, was unconvinced. The authorities and media gatekeepers treated otaku like freaks, and would continue to do so for the remainder of the Millennium.

But then something funny happened: as the post-Bubble financial crisis ground on, otaku emerged as unlikely economic saviors. Unable to land real jobs, and uninterested in doing so, they dropped out of reality to construct new ones, forging relationships with characters from movies, television, pop music, manga, anime, and video games. By the early 2000s, it was obvious that the otaku had won. Consuming pop-culture as a functional adult wasn’t seen as some kind of edge case; it had become so normal as to be unremarkable. This is why he word otaku is hardly used in Japanese today. It’s a linguistic relic as dated as “hippie.”

Is Infinity Train really “mind blowing,” “a watershed",” or “a cultural asset”? I don’t think so. It is a wholly expected sequel to a totally established hit. It doesn’t feel cutting edge, except perhaps if you’re an accountant, toting up all those box-office receipts.

But it doesn’t matter, because anime doesn’t need a breakthrough. It is bigger than any one hit now, even a hit as big as this. And the takeaway is bigger still. Infinity Train reflects how closely the tastes of people all over the planet have synchronized with those of the Japanese for whom this film was originally made. It speaks to audiences abroad, even though it most definitely was not made for them. That’s because it didn’t need to be.

For all of us in the post-industrial world are constructing new realities from the cast-offs of popular culture, whether in the form of social media, streaming entertainment, online influencers, or whatever else is at hand. We see it reflected in the world around us, our societies, our friendships, our fandoms, even our politics. We even see it in revolutions.

We’re all otaku now. Infinity Castle’s extraordinary showing around the globe is simply another example of that. And it won’t be the last.