Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. Simple shonen story, beautiful actions.

I still read One Piece and One Punch Man. Well, it's been a while I don't read any new manga or watch anime. Last year there was this buzz of new manga called Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. The shonen manga has been one of the top-selling in 2019. The anime adaptation was hailed as "best TV anime of the year".

A shounen with demon slayers at the core, Bleach will easily come to mind. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba needs to reach that high bar set by Tite Kubo from the previous years.

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Shōnen, shonen, or shounen manga (少年漫画, shōnen manga) is manga aimed at a young teen male target-demographic. The age group varies with individual readers and different magazines, but it is primarily intended for boys between the ages of 12 and 18. The kanji characters (少年) literally mean "boy" (or "youth"), and the characters (漫画) means "comic". Thus, the complete phrase means "young person's comic", or simply "boys' comic"; its female equivalent is shōjo manga. Shōnen manga is the most popular and best-selling form of manga. (src)

I took some of my free time to start reading this manga. Here's my take on the manga:

Let's start with the basic premise. Kimetsu no Yaiba has a thin story premise. The story is about a young boy who becomes a demon slayer after his entire family was slaughtered by a demon, except for his little sister, who was turned into a demon as well. This young boy vowing to find a way to make her human again.

The main protagonist is Tanjiro Kamado, a young boy with great fighting talent. He is kind, naive, and have big empathy for anyone, even demons. He is accompanied by Nezuko, his beautiful little sister who turned into a demon but manages to keep her humanity.

In this story world, demons are created by a supervillain called "Muzan Kibutsuji". This supervillain is immortal, but direct sun rays could killed him. All other demons he created can be killed by cutting their neck with special blades called Nichirin. There is a secret organization called The Demon Slayer Corps who always tries to end the chaos made by Muzan Kibutsuji. This battle is already started since ancient times. As for the story setting, this manga is based on Japan during the Taisho Era (between 1912 - 1926). So, expect some beautiful sceneries of classical Japan in this manga.

For a modern shonen, this kind of plot is considered thin. We already seen how a story could be expanded from the like of Dragon Ballz, Rurouni Kenshin, Naruto, or One Piece. I have a hard time at first to enjoy this manga due to this thin plot. It's also hard to root for Tanjiro since his character looks too one dimensional.

The first story arc is quite predictable. Tanjiro got a mission (from a talking crow), he slays the demon, he wounded, he wins. Repeat. Then he starts to get along with his comrades: Inosuke Hashibira and Zenitsu Agatsuma. This is when the manga get more exciting. Not because of the personality traits, but more on the action fighting scenes.

Inosuke Hashibira is short-tempered and a loud boy. His loudness and wild fighting style reminds me of that Kiba Inuzuka from Naruto franchise. But Inosuke looks much cooler, He's wearing a boar mask all the time. Since the 1st appearance, we'd know, this guy is mental! The other guy, Zenitsu Agatsuma, is a coward, he cries most of the time, he has low self-esteem. When his life is in danger, he fainted. In his unconscious state, he can perform his swordsmanship at a high level based purely on instinct alone. Man, his fighting style is one of the coolest in this manga.

It feels that this manga emphasized the action scenes. The characters were not planted well, we don't have enough time to root to one of them. The best example of this was the story arc where we met Kyojuro Rengoku. He is one of those characters that has big potential to be rooted for. He's super strong, kind-hearted, warm, and he's about to mentor Tanjiro. But when we just barely knew him by short flashbacks (Kimetsu no Yaiba use this device a lot), the plot needed him to be lost and killed by an upper-rank demon. This is not unusual when we have a lovable character killed by a strong enemy (Oh, how devastating that scenes when Ace, Whitebeard, and Jiraiya died). If Kyojuro Rengoku could serve the story plot a little longer, his impact would be much bigger. And his last fighting scene could be more epic.

IMO there are lots of potentials here and there left unexplored especially in the effort of making the good 3-dimensional characters. But yes, as stated before, the fighting scenes here are super cool, beautifully done. While reading the manga often I think, how the hell they will adapt these scenes to the anime version?

Enter the Anime. And I was like Holy crap, it's awesome!!!

The anime adaptation is made by Ufotable. They have done a splendid job here. Adding many elements that bring the action scenes so exciting to watch. The smooth blend of CG and 2D is excellent. The ASMR makes the demon-slaying with swords so satisfying. That sounds where each demon neck cut by Nichirin blade, just amazing.

One distinction from this anime would be the camera works. Not only the 3D manages to bring the best sceneries to the audience's eyes, but it also successfully grabs the audience to focus on each battle. Because in Kimetsu no Yaiba, it's quite often that in a time frame, there are several fighting happened. The camera movements were very well done in delivering the fighting details.

In one of the most epic battles, there was a fight scene where Tanjiro facing a demon who could turn a room upside down. When the demon beat a drum on his shoulder, the room will rotate, and Tanjiro will lose his ground thanks to gravity. The camera angle on this fight scene is one of the best in the series, it follows Tanjiro movements as he keeps on falling losing his grip, and we saw the impact on how this rotating room brought big disadvantage for his fight.

The fighting techniques (all the demon slayers have unique fighting styles based on the breath technique they use) is beautifully done with the elements approach. Be it fire, flame, wind, water, insect, serpent, thunder, or moon, all were pictured by beatiful graphics with distinctive colors for each of them. Usually we see this graphic in an anime as a device to show the character's emotion or feelings, in Kitsume no Yaiba, this is actually their fighting techniques.

My favorite fighting technique from the anime would be Tanjiro's and Zenitsu's styles. Zenitsu's fighting style is based on thunder, it's so flashy and fast. As a good swordman battle, flashy fast speed is a clasic approach for a winning. As for Tanjiro's, in the manga, we already saw how Tanjiro is always having this hesitation to slay demons due to his big empathy towards anyone. In the anime, we can see his remorse much clearer, by the sounds effects, pacing, camera movements, changing the tone color. Each demon-slaying action done by Tanjiro left me a weird feeling, It's not like "Go Tanjiro, beats that demon ass!" Definitely not a cheerful one. And the pictures were always gorgeous, like a painting.

Indeed, Manga/Anime is art from, ain't it?