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Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba will go down as a best-selling manga, but the anime series will be one to remember too. In the last 10 years, Demon Slayer has risen to immense popularity. The last time Ufotable produced a Demon Slayer feature-length film, it set box office records in Japan and finished as the highest-grossing film of 2020. The Taishō-period characters and designs are fun and the slayers vs. human-eating demon story is straightforward but captivating, but the animation and visual style will keep Demon Slayer in the conversation of impactful anime far into the future.

The final storyline is getting produced into a trilogy of films, with the first one, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Film: Infinity Castle already released in Japan and hitting US theaters on September 12. While at San Diego Comic-Con, Popverse spoke with Demon Slayer’s director, Haruo Sotozaki and director of photography Yūichi Terao about the challenges of bringing the work of Koyoharu Gotouge to life. 

“One of the most impressionable moments for me personally was the water breathing sequence,” Sotozaki-san revealed to Popverse.

“Water breathing” in the world of Demon Slayer is a sword fighting style that mimics the fluid movement and versatility of water. The 11 water breathing forms, based on warrior’s skill and bending of one’s weapon, arm and body, emerge in the attack in forms of water with an appearance reminiscent of famous Japanese prints, like Hokusai’s 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa.'

“I think that was a very unique visual expression,” continued Sotozaki-san. “So reading the manga, I had imagery in my mind, and we drew some kind of inspiration or used as a motif, the Hokusai’s ukiyo-e collection. We thought, how can we take that type of visual expression and translate it into something 3D?”

“So I spoke a lot with the 3D director [Kazuki] Nishiwaki-san and thought, well, how can we take this sort of visual expression and make it move? A lot of that kind of came down to not just the 3D expression, but also the 2D keyframes, the sakuga [high-quality fluid and dynamic animation sequences], and getting these white waves just right, as a balance, and kind of blending the 3D expression with the 2D on top of it.” 

“I saw the final visuals and it really aligned with my own image of how the manga would translate to an anime and so I thought it was really, really amazing.”

The action sequences and water breathing forms create a set of signature visuals unique to Demon Slayer, and helps place it in its own class for anime style. 

In the vast sea that is Japanese manga, Gotouge-san’s page design is impeccable. The geometric shapes of their figures stand out because they are jagged and angular instead of curved and smooth. They play with line weight and use broken and segmented lines for details. Ufotable maintained the integrity and style of the original art in their adaptation as much as possible. For Terao-san, a memorable challenge came much earlier in the process. 

“From episode one of the Unwavering Resolve arc, the first interaction that Tanjiro Kamado has with Giyu Tomioka, we had a lot of back and forth with the director to determine what the visual language or visual style of Demon Slay was going to be,” Terao-San shared with Popverse. “It was a very defining moment and adjusting the lines and the thickness of those lines in the anime was a large part.” 

“There was a lot of trial and error and exploration to make sure we were getting it correct because Demon Slayer was a new anime at that time. And of course, when you take it into the latter parts of the pipeline, we want to make the visuals look very rich with the effects it oftentimes kind of takes away from those lines. The lines become harder to see because there's so many effects on the screen.” 

“So adjusting the thickness and trying to preserve what the manga has done, but also take it into the anime, while making sure the effects can go on top, look very rich, but also still retain the lines. Trying to find that balance for episode one, for me, was a very impressionable moment.”

That painstaking process of finding that balance paid off at the end. Ufotable’s tireless work not only helped make 84 episodes of Demon Slayer a popular anime, but their devotion to a unique visual style honored Gotouge-san’s manga work, where it all started.

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