Kimetsu no Yaiba S2 – 2 [Deep Sleep]

Hello and welcome to the Kimetsu no Yaiba movie Episode 2 of Kimetsu no Yaiba! That’s right, this week begins the movie retread. For those of you who have already seen it you won’t be getting anything new. And for those that haven’t? Lets dive in and talk about that.

Right off the bat you can tell that this is movie quality stuff. Not because of any of the big scenes mind you. Yaiba was always, and still is, pretty good about those. It’s more the consistency of it all. The small scenes that normally, in a TV anime at least, wouldn’t get animated. Stuff like Inosuke’s various snort effects, the various facial expressions or movement of background characters, etc. Of course the big things have their moments to though. I have issues with Ufotable’s CGI coming up in later episodes but god is this train pretty. The lighting, the tracking, the smoke, this is a good looking train! And Ufotable knows it, as you will quickly find out by the amount of full-model shots in the upcoming episodes. Whatever you think of the story, and I have qualms about it, you can’t deny that Yaiba is pretty.

Speaking of the narrative if you couldn’t tell that this was a movie by the production you can by this. The way this movie has been cut up is… its a thing. That’s not a compliment by the way. We are 1 episode into this movie and already issues are cropping up because of how the scenes have been cut. Context has been lost, scenes deemed “less important” are missing, characters are effectively getting introduced twice. I mean… just look at Inosuke! Throughout this episode we see him yelling about “The lord” and how he wants to race it, etc. But Yaiba completely cut the scene of our main trio getting on the train and Inosuke’s belief that the train is actually the Lord of the Mountain. This isn’t a big thing but these sorts of problems never are in the beginning.

And then there’s the duplicate introductions I mentioned! As you can no doubt tell, Rengoku’s opening scene this episode was his introduction in the movie. Yet because of the anime original 1st episode, we’ve already been introduced to him. We already know his character quirks and core of his personality. So to have that all reintroduced to us here feels… overbearing? To much? Obnoxious? I’m not sure what the right word here is but the repeated “Delicious” and over-enthusiastic attitude Rengoku displays works fine as an intro but starts to grate after a while. Just like with the previous talk of cut scenes my hope is that this issue won’t matter later on. That it’s simply growing pains from trying to splice a movie into an already planned and airing TV broadcast. But you never know. It’s something I’m going to be keeping my eye on moving forward.

My nitpicks aside, how is the actual narrative itself? Personally, I thought the dream stuff was cool. I remember liking it, mostly, in the movie and I’m going to like it again here. It’s a novel way to approach the fight, as we’ve already established that Rengoku is the strongest character have met so far in the story. Like most overpowered mentor characters, he trivializes combat against all but the most physically threatening enemies, the kind our leads have no hope against just yet. So by introducing a more… lets call it “mental” form of combat Yaiba manages to sidestep that. It also serves as a good excuse to explore our characters motivations and personalities in about as literal a sense as you can get. This isn’t going to be a subtle arc. But that’s fine if you ask me, because Yaiba was never a subtle series.

I also think the lead in to the dreams was done well. Yaiba gives us plenty of hints leading into Tanjiro’s dream sequence to figure out what is happening. Lights flickering as tickets are punched, people sleeping in one shot only to be awake in the next after the ticket, those same people disappearing once they exit the cabin. I think that, as Rengoku’s dream progressed, all the information needed to figure out that something wrong was happening was there even if you couldn’t guess at the exact mechanics of it. Top that all off with Tanjiro’s dream being surprisingly emotional just having characters we knew for less than a single episode and I think I would call it a success.

So yeah all in all I think this was a fine episode of Yaiba. It’s clear that it was cut from a movie but if we are being honest there was really no way around that. This content wasn’t made to be cut into 23 minute chunks and it shows. Does that make the content itself bad? Not really. It just makes transitioning between the episodes themselves awkward. I think Yaiba could have fixed this by adding in a bit of connective content but then you run into the problem of matching movie quality with a TV schedule so it’s just something we are going to have to live with. This does make me wonder though: Anime only viewers, how is this for you? If you haven’t seen the movie is this flowing right? Let me know below, I’m interested what this experience is like for you.