Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train

A decent film but a bit too long. If they cut 20 minutes from the story as well as removed a few minutes of characters crying, it would greatly improve the overall package.

This is a beautifully animated shonen anime. So while its entertaining and fun and the fight scenes are awesome, the characters shout their attacks and over monologue every action. It gets annoying when it's something that the beautiful art is showing well, but the script decides to tell. Its a problem in general with anime to ignore the concept of "Show not tell" in a visual medium. At least Demon Slayer isn't the worst offender in the genre at this.

The movie is not a spinoff like most anime franchise movies, but a continuation of the manga story. The arc following the first season is a perfect fit for a slightly under two hours movie since it has a cool setting, emotional depths and awesome fight scenes. The CGI flesh tentacles are a bit wonky, but other than that the animation is superb. During the final scenes I cried while also laughing wholeheartedly at the same time. God bless you, Inosuke, you beautiful pig man.

For an arc, it was pretty solid. I did not like that they managed to spend the entire thing more or less on board a train, which made it seem confined as far as the action goes, but they gave every character something to do, and ended in a manner that let you know that this anime, moving forward, is not going to be pulling too many punches.

I am only a casual anime series watcher. This story I did not know beforehand. The first act lasted way too long. I did not prefer much of mixer of 3D and 2D art (in act two) but the fight scenes and animation was otherwise very well done. BTW, I saw it in the biggest Finnish movie theater, in IMAX of course.