Classic anime outside of Hayao Miyazaki’s work hasn’t really caught on with Academy voters during Oscar season, but Crunchyroll is looking to change that with Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. The film broke box office records, earning $682 million worldwide, making it the highest grossing Japanese film in history. It was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture and Best Animation.
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Mugen Castle” depicts Tanjiro Kamado and the Demon Slayer Corps’ battle against Muzan Kibutsuji and Kozuki at a hideout known as Mugen Castle.
This animated feature created by Ufotable blends both 2D and CG styles.
Director Haruo Tonosaki explains that the characters were hand-animated and one of the main challenges was “merging the 2D frames within the CG backgrounds and environments.” Through an interpreter, he added: “This was one of the most difficult things we’ve had to work through in our marriage.”
Matching the 2D animation to the 3D background required an additional step in the production pipeline.
“We send the keyframes to the 3D team,” Tonosaki says. “They tried to match those keyframe animations to the surrounding 3D environment.”
Once a match was made, the frames were sent back to the animators, who polished each one.
As far as the story goes, Ufotable President and Chief Director Hikaru Kondo revealed that the film was originally storyboarded to be over three hours long. But even at that length, there wasn’t a clear “overall groove of what the journey was like.”
For the animators and studio, it was important to ensure emotional investment in viewers, given how beloved the series, story, and characters are.
The key was not to rush the process. The film took more than three and a half years to make. “We’ve been building it up for our fandom and our fans, building it up from the ‘Unwavering Determination’ arc to this moment.
“The audience can really understand what’s going on in Infinity Castle,” Kondo says.
It was a massive undertaking, but the team had a blueprint.
They faced similar challenges when producing “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train”. “There were a lot of questions about how to put all this information into one movie. I think that learning was put to good use in ‘Infinity Castle,'” Kondo says.
Cinematographer Yuichi Terao played a key role in balancing the visual spectacle of action scenes and battles with an engaging story.
Once the emotional backbone is established, it’s also about creating the “grand space.” Everything had to take place within the Infinity Castle itself. Infinity Castle first appeared in the “Unwavering Resolve” arc of the TV series, but the studio needed to create something bigger.
Terao says that there is destruction amidst the action and drama, which gives fans something new to experience. “We were getting all the destructive effects and physics to make this hybrid effect we designed work. As an audience member, it’s a fun experience, but as a studio we all had to work together to get it to the screen,” he says.
Crunchyroll remains hopeful that “Demon Slayer” will connect with Oscar voters and bring greater animated representation to the Academy Awards. Mitchell Berger, Vice President of Global Commerce, Crunchyroll. has walked the FYC trail. He says participating in the awards conversation is a way to elevate the art form. “It’s a beautiful work of art,” he says of Demon Slayer. “The craftsmanship, care and love that went into this, just being able to share that with people is amazing.”
