One day, Tanjiro returns from an errand to discover that his family has been slaughtered by demons: vicious monsters that roam the land in search of human blood. The hero is Tanjiro Kamado, a boy who ekes out a living with his mother and siblings in the verdant mountains of a rapidly modernizing Japan. #Mugen archive 18+ permission series#The series is set in Japan’s Taisho era, which lasted from 1912 to 1926 the precise date is never specified. “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train” is the continuation of a hit television series called “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba,” which was, in turn, based upon a hit manga of the same title, by the artist Koyoharu Gotoge. Tellingly, the vast majority of media coverage has focussed on its box-office success instead of its director, Haruo Sotozaki, or its writers, who aren’t credited individually but under the name of the film’s production company, Ufotable. In contrast, the hyperkinetic “Mugen Train” is the latest installment in a series envisioned as a mass-market multimedia product from the very start. He is an auteur who wears his politics on his sleeve, pens his own scripts, insists on checking nearly every frame himself, and long resisted merchandising his creations. Miyazaki’s films are meditative, self-contained stories, created and financed independently, outside of the traditional corporate production committees that sustain Japan’s commercial animation industry. It’s tempting to frame the success of “Mugen Train” as a passing of the torch from an elderly master to a younger generation-and, indeed, Miyazaki has said that he considers the film a “ rival.” (Miyazaki, who has announced his retirement numerous times over the decades, is currently working on what is purported to be his final film, titled “How Do You Live?”) But “Mugen Train” is the product of a very different creative process, and a very different media environment. What Miyazaki’s beloved film had earned over the course of nineteen years, “Mugen Train” surpassed in just three months. It had done the unthinkable, unseating Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 epic, “Spirited Away,” to become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. By the end of the year, the film had emerged as more than simply a coronavirus phenomenon. When “Mugen Train” opened there, pandemic-weary audiences flocked to see it in theatres outfitted with socially distanced seating. This success might seem surprising, as anime has long been considered a fringe subculture, but the film’s momentum was presaged by the enthusiasm of its reception in Japan. All of this has conspired to make it the planet’s single top-grossing film of 2020. It quickly set records for the highest-grossing opening weekend for a foreign film, as well as the highest-earning R-rated animated film. Now we have another, in the form of an imported anime with a mouthful of a title: “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train.” It débuted in Japanese theatres in October of 2020, then arrived in American ones in April. The stunning success of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which sold thirty-one million copies worldwide last year, is a striking example. Many of the escapes that we use to nourish ourselves originated in Japan. Others are restorative: the immersive worlds of books, the virtual realities of video games, the hypnotic lull of binge-streamed television series. Some of them are troubling, such as the conspiratorial prejudice that has fuelled QAnon and the recent surge in violence against those of Asian descent. One of the seismic cultural shifts of the pandemic era has been a migration into fantasies.
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