Demon Slayer Was Never Going to Win an Oscar

Anime fandoms can never be normal when a Japanese animated film doesn’t get considered during awards season. It’s always a thing when this happens. Anime fans freaked out when Your Name wasn’t nominated back in 2016 over Zootopia, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, The Red Turtle, and My Life as a Zucchini. They freaked out in 2017 when A Silent Voice wasn’t picked as one of the five nominees over The Boss Baby, Loving Vincent, Coco, The Breadwinner, and Ferdinand. You get the big idea. Every time the Oscars or other major award groups, such as the Annies, the Golden Globes, or any of the critics’ groups, don’t nominate anything from the anime industry as a default nominee, they act like these groups personally took their lunch money and forced them into school lockers. 

Let’s be clear here. I understand why people are frustrated that Japanese animation isn’t taken seriously. Even outside of the well-known names in the industry like Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Naoko Yamada, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, and Masaaki Yuasa, it’s very rare that anything other than Ghibli gets nominated by other awards groups. So, what does this have to do with Demon Slayer the Movie: Infinity Castle Part 1?  

While it was one of the most successful animated films from Japan to come stateside and also be a box office success, outside of a few Japan-based awards, it hasn’t taken home any Best Animated Feature awards or any nominations outside of the surprising Golden Globe nomination that it ultimately lost. Is this simply more bias in the world of award season shenanigans, critics, and animation? Let me ask you a follow-up question: if it were already an impossible task to get an animated film from Japan that wasn’t from Ghibli nominated, then why would you think a non-Ghibli Japanese animated franchise film has more of a chance now?

Sure, anime is now better known and watched to the point that one producer who worked in animation basically came out and said that the only animated shows that do well right now are preschool shows, adult animation, and anime. Even then, no matter how massive the medium has become, there are still stigmas attached to the medium of anime as a whole. Animation already has a hard time getting respected by the wider entertainment world, and non-action anime has an even harder time being embraced. In Demon Slayer’s case, why would voters who are already too lazy to do their jobs want to jump into a franchise with multiple seasons and a movie that, unless you saw the press announcements, is part one of three movies? The movie doesn’t even do a good job of catching newcomers up. Yes, yes: I know some of you are going to yell at me about how there are recap specials that you can catch up with the series before you go see the new movie. But you know what Oscar voters hate more than having to watch movies? Homework. They already need to watch multiple movies, why add on non-movie stuff on top of it all? 

The nail in the coffin for this movie was not just the fact that Crunchyroll got Channing Tatum in the movie. Honestly, he was actually pretty solid in the role he got. If you really want to know what hurt this movie more than anything else, it was the pacing, and the fact that this was the first of three movies wrapping up this franchise’s final arc. The more cynical part of the bad pacing that plagues the entire movie is that you can tell that they are pacing the movie in this way, because they can later on possibly chop it up into episodes of a final season alongside the other future movies coming out. Which may sound harsh to say, but we know it’s going to happen, because that’s what happened to Demon Slayer: Mugen Train! The first quarter of the second season was the Mugen Train movie, with some additional animation added to make it work as a batch of episodes before they jumped into the Entertainment District Arc part of that season.

It won’t matter if you have seen the movie, and it worked as a movie, because they know fans of this franchise will double or triple dip into the same stuff that they already watched. Then you must be saying, “Well, it made a lot of money and got good reviews, so why doesn’t that count towards a possible nomination?” Whether consciously aware or not of the irony, a lot of people claim that movies that earn a lot of money shouldn’t be eligible for nomination, even though many of the top 10 most successful box-office films in the past made it into the Oscar race for Best Picture or other major awards. So, if you still believe ‌that there’s no failure like success, then the movie should be disqualified from being considered one of the Best Animated Feature noms. Even the most positive reviews from critics still paled in comparison, overall, with the critical appraisal of films like Little Amelie, 100 Meters, and KPop Demon Hunters. Fans who highly praised this movie were probably fans of the franchise who only watch a few action anime franchise series and not much else. 

Given such odds, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle Part 1 never had a chance. With a voting body that already struggles to take animation seriously, the other major competition in both Japanese and overall animation, and a heavy bias against anime lingering in both the public and voting audience, it was never going to be one of the major nominations. 

This desire to see the Oscar voters embrace foreign animation has its own inherent challenges. It’s short-sighted to think they will vote for anime franchise films when, in general, they won’t be swayed to give any of the bigger Oscars to any major action franchise from comics or other tentpole stuff. Honestly, the bigger mystery should be why Nezha 2 and Nobody, two of China’s biggest animated films from 2025, weren’t considered. At the end of the day, while awards can and do help with careers and what kind of films get made, a movie being successful is more important, no matter whether if it’s through awards or the box office. The entertainment industry is in a rough spot right now, and the fact that an anime franchise film can do so well these days, and that anime is more openly welcomed in the public movie-going crowds, well, that’s a victory in and of itself.