Anime columnist Andrew Osmond recalls how Asia got so ‘big’ in animation this year, with infinity castles, a chainsaw man, K-pop singers and a Chinese deity.
Happy birthday to me – this anime column began a year ago, in December 2024. (You can find all my previous column entries here.) Since then, Demon Slayer – The Movie: Infinity Castle became the highest-grossing anime film of all time. It was among the top 10 grossing films worldwide and made America’s top 20 of the year. In American cinemas specifically, it out-earned DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys 2, Pixar’s Elio and Universal’s Dog Man.
That’s extraordinary – an R-rated TV spinoff imported from Japan trouncing mainstream animated films on their own turf. Only a few weeks later, another such spinoff opened in America, Chainsaw Man: The Movie– Reze Arc. That didn’t break America’s top 20, but Box-Office Mojo currently ranks it in 46th place (including some holdovers from 2024). It still out-earned big films for comparable demographics, including The Running Man, M3GAN 2.0 and the revived I Know What You Did Last Summer.
I’ll comment on both films below, but this column also looks to anime-adjacent works. In particular, the massive success of America’s KPop Demon Hunters gives context and counterweight to Japan’s violent action hits. And towering over the charts, there’s 2025’s highest-grossing film worldwide, China’s CG-animated Ne Zha 2, the colossus most English-speaking people haven’t heard of.
Where has stand-alone storytelling gone?
Last week, Nicholas Barber, a reviewer for the BBC website, lamented that even though a new blockbuster had a “preposterous, bladder-testing running time,” it didn’t operate as a “standalone film with a beginning, middle and end.” Its creators made “no concessions to any viewers who aren’t superfans of the franchise,” instead assuming “we’re already deeply invested in the characters, their relationships and their surroundings, so that a complete, propulsive story is surplus to requirements.”
Barber was writing about Avatar: Fire and Ash. But it would be easy to make the same case against Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle (though if you’re choosing one to see, the anime is 40 minutes shorter). Not long ago, I thought anime got away with such things because they were aimed at superfans, at least in Britain and America. In March, I wrote, “The fact (anime) films cater to a niche, fan audience means that they’ve mostly sidestepped the criticisms of blockbuster franchises… (that) they’ve forgotten how to tell self-contained stories.”
Then Infinity Castle came along, and “niche” didn’t apply any more.
Most accounts of how anime viewing surged in Anglophone territories highlight two things. One is the ready availability of huge amounts of anime on streaming services, especially Crunchyroll. The other is the experience of the COVID shutdown, when a confined Gen Z filled time by ploughing through screen content. As it happened, it was during the COVID crisis that a previous Demon Slayer film, Mugen Train, became the most successful cinema release in the world - though admittedly most cinemas outside Japan were shut. With Mugen Train, you could see it as a localized blip. Infinity Castle’s global success made clear it was something more.
What was that “something?” Writing on Demon Slayer in September, I suggested the franchise hit a sweet spot between fun adventure and gritty angst, getting the best of crossover audiences. As for the Infinity Castle film, I found its construction sturdy and surprising, if you bought into the anime-action style, and had the patience to follow the sprawling plot. Some people might argue that you’d also have needed to watch all of the previous Demon Slayer anime. But as long as you know the tropes of anime and fantasy media, then you’d be able to pick up much of the film on the fly, and I suspect some of the viewers were happy to do that.
As for Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc, I covered it in October. I argued it was markedly different from Infinity Castle, less continuous with children’s media, and with a far less upstanding hero. Among other things, Chainsaw Man’s protagonist Denji is very interested in sex, though in a sweetly inchoate way that’s its own kind of innocence. It’s plausible that Chainsaw Saw, like Demon Slayer, found a sweet-spot balance, this time between gory carnage and tender moments. The early scenes of Reze Arc let a confused but thrilled Denji experience a charming first “date” in a darkened high school, before things go to hell.
As good as it gets?
To be clear, neither film is outstanding. Infinity Castle is good, though Reze Arc’s best scenes may surpass it. However, Reze Arc is disappointing overall, let down by a numbing second half after a promising first. Even among “spinoff” franchise anime films, there’ve been far better ones in the past, including classics. Hayao Miyazaki’s Lupin film The Castle of Cagliostro is the most famous, but there’s also Mamoru Oshii’s Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (watchable here) and Keiichi Hara’s Crayon Shin-Chan: The Adult Empire Strikes Back.
Anime sequels and spinoffs can still be remarkably good, especially when they bite fans’ hands and subvert expectations. Today, Hollywood looks cowed by the backlash to franchise films with a maverick spirit, such as The Last Jedi and Joker: Folie à Deux. But I still find myself surprised and impressed by such recent end-of-saga anime films as Attack on Titan: The Last Attack, and some of the last Evangelion (which had a whole first act about farming!).
But I’d be happier if more accessible anime films, the ones that didn’t need fan knowledge or a fan mindset, had stormed the U.S. box-office instead. Most obviously, films with new stories and characters have more creative potential. It’s selling anime terribly short to say it’s just for fans, after directors like Miyazaki and Shinkai had done so much to break down those walls over the last 20 years. My own remit has always been to try to cater to both anime fans and outsiders, as I set out in my first AWN column.
Will a self-contained, outsider-friendly anime film ever get U.S. box-office figures like Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle? Worldwide, films such as Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Shinkai’s Your Name have taken in hundreds of millions of dollars. So did the 2022 basketball film The First Slam Dunk, a “franchise” entry that’s completely accessible to newcomers. But Spirited Away took only $15 million in American cinemas; Your Name took $5 million; and Slam Dunk barely $1 million.
Of course, perhaps cinema is so outmoded as an exhibition platform that box-office is irrelevant. (I haven’t even got onto KPop Demon Hunters yet, a phenomenon which didn’t need cinemas at all.) But I’m old-fashioned enough to think cinema still matters as a unifying experience, an experience often cited by anime fans paying to sit in the dark with strangers who love Demon Slayer’s Tanjiro or Chainsaw Man’s Denji as much as they do. I still want to see a film more like Spirited Away or Your Name or The First Slam Dunk, or Look Back or A Silent Voice or The Wolf Children, get the head-turning box-office of those boy heroes.
That, of course, is another issue. Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man are boy-centered hero adventures – what fans loosely call “shonen anime” - though both have interesting female figures. (For example, the hero we root for in the long first section of Infinity Castle isn’t Tanjiro but the girl Shinobu, with Tanjiro not even on stage while she fights her terrible battle.) Disney has shown for decades that girl-centered animated films can be blockbusters. In Japan, girl-centered anime blockbusters were enshrined by Miyazaki, and then taken into the 2020s by Shinkai’s Suzume.
One upcoming franchise entry I’m interested in is The Apothecary Diaries film, which will open in Japan next December. It’s based on an anime series I covered last February, where the action and spectacle takes second place to character drama and puzzle solving. It’s centered on Maomao, a girl in a historic-fantasy China who has the gifts of Sherlock Holmes. So far, the series has been massively popular with Anglophone anime fans. Could the film be a box-office hit in America to break the boys’-adventure stereotype?
But of course, there was a wildly popular girl-centered epic just this year…
Demon Slayers, KPop Style
KPop Demon Hunters isn’t anime, of course. That’s unless you want to say that anime needn’t be Japanese, which is an argument I went through last January, when I looked at the animated Castlevania. I do wonder, though, how many people wrongly think KPop Demon Hunters is an example of South Korean animation. That’s a subject I covered in June, two weeks before KPop Demon Hunters dropped onto Netflix. (If only I had known!) Back then, I was focusing on a genuine Korean animation that Netflix had released, called Lost in Starlight by Han Ji-Won. It mixes adult romance and grounded space drama and it’s well worth trying if you haven’t already.
As most readers will know, though, KPop Demon Hunters is an American film by Sony Pictures Animation, albeit conceived and co-directed by the Seoul-born Maggie Kang and filled with voice-actors and singers of South Korean heritage. A BBC report headed “KPop Demon Hunters sparks pride in Korea” suggests the film was sufficiently respectful and attentive to the country’s culture to be embraced in South Korea. An interviewee cites the accuracy of the Joeson Dynasty houses in the opening flashback. As a non-Korean, I was struck by the montage of Korean singers through the generations, leading to the title trio.
I came to the film late, but I caught a limited London cinema screening around Halloween. Of course I loved it, though I was startled by how much its central conflict owed to Frozen and Elsa, with another heroine frantically hiding her cursed identity. That doesn’t stop the film from often feeling highly anime-ish, such as when the newly-introduced Hunters (especially Zoey) chow down on an airplane meal in the first minutes. Then there’s the combo of Far Eastern culture, monster battles, fantasy lore, teen fears, extreme silliness, girl bands and star-crossed love. None of these are unique to anime, but anime has mixed and matched them over hundreds of series and films.
It’s a long way from KPop Demon Hunters to Demon Slayer, let alone Chainsaw Man. I’m guessing, though, that there may be a large number of viewers who’ve watched all three and already know that anime doesn’t need a boy action hero. For the record, if I was recommending anime titles to someone who loved KPop Demon Hunters but was new to anime, I might skip the obvious “magic girl” titles like Sailor Moon and instead point up Suzume, Fruits Basket or A Place Further Than The Universe.
The massive success of KPop Demon Hunters plainly makes it more likely that an anime that’s not a boys’ actioner could succeed in American cinemas. Of course, it could also lead to more American hits, drawing on and bypassing anime and Asian media. But the Hunters’ popularity shows how corporations can’t control which cartoon films hit big in an online world. As Britain’s Private Eye magazine pointed out, if Netflix had known how big KPop Demon Hunters was going to be, they would have released it to thousands of cinemas and made it the year’s Barbenheimer.
Ne Zha looming
That leaves the matter of China’s CG animation Ne Zha 2. As I mentioned at the outset, it’s the highest-grossing film of 2025 as of writing. (The new Avatar might surpass it, but it looks unlikely to do so by December 31.) I covered the film in March, arguing that while it was based on venerable religious traditions, the CG version seemed plainly influenced by DreamWorks’ Shrek and Kung Fu Panda. As for anime, I pointed to Ne Zha 2’s humorous use of bishonen (beautiful boy) figures and its climactic imagery of collapsing flying structures, close to Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky.
Ne Zha 2, though, is unlike any of the other titles I’ve covered here. In contrast to them, its Anglophone footprint has been minimal, even though I was impressed to see it playing in London multiplexes and IMAX cinemas. It’s taken more than $2.2 billion, meaning that it’s just under Titanic in terms of world box-office. But the vast majority of that was in China, where it was another animation to stir local pride. In America, it earned just $23 million, or around one percent of its total takings.
That puts Ne Zha 2 in an interestingly comparable place to the anime blockbusters from 20 or 30 years ago. To be personal a moment, one of the first anime articles that I ever wrote was a UK newspaper piece in 2000. It mourned how so few Anglophone viewers had heard of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, despite the film’s record-breaking success in Japan. Of course, comparing Princess Mononoke to Ne Zha 2 is a flawed analogy. On the one hand, Ne Zha 2 earned many times more than Princess Mononoke. On the other hand, it’s certainly not as good a film. But it’s ambitious, visually dazzling, and it and its successors will have the might of the most powerful Far Eastern nation behind it.
I wouldn’t bet on a Chinese animated film becoming a hit in U.S. cinemas in the foreseeable future, certainly not on the level of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. But I wouldn’t bet against it either.
