Story by Paris Geolas
Related: ‘Demon Slayer:’ A viewer’s guide
See that guy up there with the big eyes, earrings and spikey hair? That’s Tanjiro Kamado and he may become as familiar to your kids as Mickey Mouse.
Demon Slayer anime hero Tanjiro is a teenage Japanese charcoal peddler who is forced to become a demon slayer after his family is slaughtered.
He’s captured the imagination of 650 million fans across 95 countries. His origin story is not so different from that of Harry Potter or Peter Parker — an innocent kid who wakes up one day to find that it’s his responsibility to save the world.
Demon Slayer is leading the march to bring anime culture, a revered Japanese art form, to mainstream United States. If you haven’t already, America, meet anime. It’s about to become Disney’s new standard of storytelling.
The Walt Disney Company first acquired the licensing to stream Demon Slayer in 2019 when it bought the majority stake in Hulu. Three years later, Demon Slayer is the world’s most popular anime, and Disney has something big in the works. Two weeks ago, the Walt Disney Company announced its first ever Japanese produced anime series, Heavenly Delusion.
This comes a year after Disney’s announcement that in partnership with Japanese animation studio Kodansha, it would be hiring Japanese artists and creators to create Disney’s own anime.
Takuto Yawata, Disney Japan’s head of animation, said, “We deeply respect the works of Japanese creators, and we will transmit them overseas just the way they are.”
So Disney, the company that’s maintained its timeless and family friendly image for decades is trying something new.
“I am confident that this will open a new door,” Yawata said.
Demon Slayer came out as a manga in 2016 by elusive author Koyoharu Gotōge and was produced as an anime in 2019. It was popular from the start, but when Covid-19 hit, it exploded globally. Anime had been growing in the United States, and then Demon Slayer rolled in and shattered record after record.
In 2020, Demon Slayer released its sequel arc, Demon Slayer the Movie: Infinity Train, in theaters. It became the highest grossing film of the year globally. To date, it’s the most successful Japanese film.
Beyond that, Demon Slayer as a franchise has been rapidly climbing the charts.
The highest grossing media franchises are nearly all owned by The Walt Disney Company: Mickey Mouse and Friends, Star Wars, Winnie the Pooh, and the Disney Princesses are four out of the five most successful media franchises in the world.
But they all lag behind the most successful franchise: Japan’s Pokémon.
Demon Slayer, the youngest series by three years, is further down the list, but it has already surpassed Pirates of the Caribbean and Sesame Street.
Disney’s animation style hasn’t changed since it acquired Pixar in 2006, and for the most part, neither have the stories. Characters have changed, but the themes, the humor, and the happy endings have stayed the same.
“Japanese anime fills the white space in our content development plans, and we believe this expanded collaboration will be a game changer in Disney’s future animation strategy in Japan,” said Carol Choi, Disney’s executive vice president of original content strategy for Asia-Pacific at an AnimeJapan business seminar in March 2022.
With the widespread popularity of anime on a global scale, Disney’s decision to produce its own anime in Japan with Japanese creators marks a significant shift within the company. Its strategy to make its mark in anime means venturing into a new market and relinquishing creative control.
Demon Slayer’s animation, often considered to be among the best in the world, exemplifies the unique artistry of anime. The animators use a combination of hand drawn and CGI, 2D and 3D animation to create dynamic characters and action sequences. Anime as an art form is generally more detail oriented but less realistic looking than other animation. The characters have noticeably exaggerated and emotive features, in particular large eyes, called “windows to the soul.”
Image via Netflix
Image via Netflix.
Demon Slayer is known for its action sequences. They’re visually and emotionally intense. The combat style in Demon Slayer looks painted. Swinging a sword turns into running water or dancing flames, making the violence paralyzingly beautiful. Paired with this is a running internal dialogue for nearly every character. It puts the viewer literally into the heads of the rivals; you have no choice but to see both sides.
Watch: Demon Slayer tanjiro best fight clips
Raven, hobbyist animator from Durham, N.C.: “Anime is a genre where the emotions are bigger than the people carrying them.”
Beyond the art style, the stories are different. Whether more serious, more explicit, more niche, anime is a different beast. By the time Demon Slayer hit U.S. shores, it had already been making massive waves in Japan, flooding demographics far beyond its target audience of 12-18 year old boys.
“If you look hard enough, there’s something for everyone,” said fan Reginald Colin Brown at the latest theater viewing of Demon Slayer’s newest season’s first episode.
Brown is a 40-year-old security guard from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a life-long anime fan. As a 250-pound Black man, he doesn’t look like most of the characters on screen.
“Even though it’s not necessarily representative of me by color, it covers everything else,” he said.
The character content of Demon Slayer and many other anime is deeply introspective, not just for the character, but for the omniscient viewer. Demons are man-eating monsters, but they used to be human. This series is relentlessly empathetic, giving demons heart-wrenching backstories that are all too tangible. In each battle, the lines between good and evil are drawn and destroyed, leaving the audiences to become just as attached to the demons as they are to the Demon Slayers.
Image via Netflix
A most appealing feature of Demon Slayer and anime is that within the stories, there are few main heroes or villains; most any character can become one or the other. Which feels appropriate to the surreal landscape of our time and place in America. Maybe because in an age where identity politics reign, the love of anime and its genderless and/or gender bending heroes is literally an acceptable form of cultural appropriation.
“The Disney hero is someone who’s untouched and pure versus the anime hero, who can just be somebody good or bad doing a heroic job of trying to save whoever.” – Reginald Brown
In anime, everyone can be a hero.
Demon Slayer didn’t reinvent the hero, but it’s hard to say if Disney would be making this jump without it. This series started something in America that had not been seen in 20 years. Anime had been influencing cartoons for decades prior, as seen in Avatar: The Last Airbender and Teen Titans, but never has anything reached the momentum that Demon Slayer has.
“A lot of Americans are learning how to do that (animation) in Japan right now. They’re gonna bring what they learn here.” – Fumi Iwashita, professor of Japanese Studies at UNC – Chapel Hill
Disney and Demon Slayer weren’t first, but they’re trailblazers, changing modern culture. At the very least, their popularity opened the door for other creators and artists behind them. Now anime and manga are even being produced within American borders.
Frederick Jones, American manga creator and Founder of Saturday AM, the first manga magazine designed to increase diversity in manga, thinks Demon Slayer’s popularity will fade in about a year.
“It hit at the right time. It was gorgeous. It was a lovely story about a brother and sister. But trust me, in a year, there will be another one,” Jones said.
The next one could be Disney’s. Covid made clear that the media industry is not (just) a luxury, but a necessary form of communication, with each other and even with ourselves.
Children idolize Disney characters for a lot of reasons, and parents let them because sometimes a talking fish is better at explaining bravery than an adult. For a 6-year-old, wearing a princess dress makes you a princess, which guarantees you a happy ending regardless of your reality.
Story is how we make sense of the world. And storytelling captures our imaginations, transports us from reality and expands our thinking. It gives us hope.
“If you are an illiterate rube for one reason or another, you can still go watch a program on what it’s like to be an astronaut. You can go watch Space Brothers and learn what it’s like to go through the selection process and how difficult it is. If you want to learn what it’s like to be a ninja of fighting demons, we have Demon Slayer.” – Reginald Brown
In the aftermath of Covid, we still live on screens. We face new threats, new villains and we need new kinds of heroes to show us how to defeat them.
Why not let wide-eyed Tanjiro, a demon-slaying, family-avenging orphan become the next hero? Remember, before Walt Disney, most people thought a mouse was simply a pest.
