The best part? We aren't even at the climax yet.
I spoke about demon slayer before here and here. I really think the plot is average at best. What is ground breaking is the quality of animation.
This isn't really a fair comparison, but here an episode from one piece about 3 years ago. Notice the animation quality, sound direction, choreography etc. If you've watched enough one piece, you will also note that a lot of this is reused.
It's not a fair comparison because one piece is a weekly ongoing series that has spanned over a thousand episodes, so the animators have to rush out a product every week. But this is what we see when we talk about a decently popular anime that isn't very well animated.
Now there's a studio called Ufotable. Back in 2015, there was this meme going around in the anime community regarding 'unlimited budget works'. This was a reference to the anime 'Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works' animated by Ufotable which had animation quality that far surpassed industry standards then. Here is an example of a fight in UBW.
Since then, we've started to see more anime reaching and surpassing the quality of UBW. Such animation has now become the gold standard of a good action anime.
Then in 2020 Ufotable stunned the anime community once again with demon slayer episode 19. The animation, the music, the sound direction, the choreography, everything was perfect. Unlimited budget works was back better than before.
And now in 2022, Ufotable is looking to surpass themselves again with season 2 of demon slayer. This was absolutely a treat for the eyes.
Personally, I would say if we were looking at animation only, some would argue this episode surpassed episode 19. I don't quite agree though I do think it is close. However, what I am absolutely certain is that once you factor the overall package of sound direction, music, key reveals, emotional significance of episode 19, episode 19 is still by far a significantly superior episode.
Like I said though, this was just a random episode lmao. We havn't reached the climax. I am excited to see what Ufotable will do the next two episodes.
---
Random note 1: Watching the above sequences, I come to realise one thing that makes Ufotable's animations so good is the way the camera perspective moves to capture the action. It's really fluid and I imagine it must have been a huge pain to animate since it means every frame is completely different (unlike sequences where you just have a still background).
Random note 2: I think it's interesting how the whole sequence linked above was actually only 3 minutes. Sometimes when we watch something good, it feels shorter than it actually is. Good action sequences are the opposite, as more things happen in a short span of time and it tends to feel longer than they actually are.
---