Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba -To the Hashira Training- (2024)

Now it's probably my fault, but I should have remembered after watching "Swordsmith Village" last March that this isn't a film at all, but the tail episode of a series (I hadn't seen) used to introduce the first episode of a new season (which I won't watch either) and so it didn't really make much sense. The ongoing training of "Tanjiro" as he seeks to become Hashira is mixed in with the continuing search for "Nezuko" and "Ubuyashiki" by the increasingly frustrated "Muzan". As with any serialisation, each episode is just a conduit to the next, so this film delivers very little by way of plot development. A tiny bit of closure is soon subsumed into an whole new set of challenges that will beset them as the next slew of episodes follow. Sadly, that means there's precious little story for us to get our teeth into and so we are really just left with some stylish and accomplished animation that we have all seen many, many, times before. As with last time, they didn't even bother to sew the episodes together properly, we get a credit roller amidst the thing. There are loads of interesting characters here but this film relies way too heavily on your having followed the strand elsewhere. As a stand alone piece of cinema, it's watchable, but pretty meaningless.