Welcome everyone to another episode of Kimetsu no Yaiba! This week is going to be a bit of a shorter post, we don’t have to much to talk about. I’ll do my best to cover everything that’s important though so lets dive into it!
Starting off, animation! And like usual Kimetsu no Yaiba fares pretty well here. I especially like the elemental effects. These things continue to be gorgeous, I absolutely love the Ukiyo-e style water and fire effects. The thick, contrasting lines of white and black within these bright colors sets them apart from everything else. And because of how heavily saturated the colors are I find myself not caring about the lack of detail such as shading or how they are composited. Maybe its just my love for heavy blacks, but I think it looks really good and reminds me of cel-shaded animation and games graphics. And on top of all of that the 3D camera work is actually really solid! At least… as long as you ignore the poop tentacles. Yes, you read that right. Poop tentacles. And they look just as ugly as they sound.
Oooh the poop tentacles. I get it, they already had a lot of CGI integration with the train and a whole render pipeline setup. This was the most efficient way to get the movie made and meant they had less to composite. But my god do they need to glisten so much? Do they need to be so bumpy and… poop tentacle-y? If you ask me this is hands down the worst looking part of Kimetsu no Yaiba. Like… ever. Across both seasons/movie. And it’s a damn shame that it came in such a climactic, huge sequence like the train fight. Because parts of it look good! I already mentioned the 3D camera tracking above but there is also the eyes, the compositing, the interaction between 2D and 3D. That’s all great! Its just the tentacles that look like shit.
Moving on we come to the narrative and this is all pretty straight forward. Tanjiro and Inosuke go after the main demon while everyone else defends the train in a variety of ways. From Nezuko, smol no longer, and Zenitsu, still asleep sadly, to Rengoku being an absolute chad. While those were kinda cool though they don’t tell or show us anything new about the characters. It’s all just an action set piece with slowly escalating stakes. And one I’ve already talked about visually above.
So yeah… all in all I think this episode was kind of mediocre. Visually it had some fun fighting bits but I have no emotional connection to it. This whole arc is effectively a random encounter for our party, at least so far. And the pacing isn’t setup to be split like this, which we can see from the 2 and a half minute opening recap among other things. Luckily the movie, and by extension this arc, has a pretty strong finale. It’s just this bit here was always my least favorite part of the movie and its become my least favorite part of the season as well.
Oh and PS: I am attending Anime NYC this weekend so the next post for both this and Eighty Six will probably be late. Sorry!
