The Blockbuster Anime Dominating Netflix Features The Best Animation Of All Time
While it’s tough to beat everything that Crunchyroll has to offer, Netflix has increasingly become a reliable source of quality anime entertainment. One of the most kickass titles you can check out on there is Demon Slayer, which is an anime that pushes everything from its writing to its dub to the absolute limit.
If you’ve been looking for something to scratch the itch that the too-short One Piece live-action season left you, this anime is worth streaming today.
While we know purists prefer to watch Demon Slayer and other titles in the original Japanese with subtitles on, it’s worth pointing out that this particular anime has a great English voice cast that genre fans may be quite familiar with.
Like most hit anime series, Demon Slayer began as a manga. It began appearing in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 2016 and quickly built an international fanbase due to its cool plot and compelling characters. If Weekly Shōnen Jump sounds familiar, it should: this is the publication that first brought us some of the most highly-revered anime titles in the world, including Dragon Ball, One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and so many more.
Due to the high popularity of the manga, Demon Slayer was adapted into an anime in 2019. The story begins when young protagonist Tanjiro Kamado’s family is attacked by demons, forcing him to become the titular Demon Slayer.
Even by the standards of modern anime, this is a show that looks really, really beautiful.
In fine anime tradition, however, he encounters some complications in his quest to rid the world of demons. For example, while these monsters utterly killed most of Kamado’s family, his sister wasn’t so lucky. She was instead transformed into a demon, leaving the young man with the added stress of knowing he would likely have to fight and kill someone he truly loves unless he could find a way to save her from the demonic conversion.
While we know purists prefer to watch Demon Slayer and other titles in the original Japanese with subtitles on, it’s worth pointing out that this particular anime has a great English voice cast that genre fans may be quite familiar with. For example, Tanjiro’s sister is voiced by Abby Trott, someone anime fans may be familiar with from her portrayal of Eliza in Hunter x Hunter. And Tanjiro Kamado himself is voiced by Zach Aguilar, who (among many other roles) so memorably brought to life Genos in One Punch Man.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the first season of Demon Slayer has a 100 percent critical rating, and that’s a powerful testimony to the show’s ability to win over professional critics who don’t always appreciate the finer points of anime.
Western audiences first got the chance to watch the dubbed version of Demon Slayer when it premiered on Adult Swim’s Toonami back in 2019. Longtime Toonami fans likely felt their ears perk up when they heard the voice of Giiyu Tomioka.
This character is voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch, and while he has had more great roles than we can shake a donut at, we’ll always remember him for perfectly voicing Vash the Stampede in Trigun (a role he reprised in the more recent series Trigun Stampede).
Aside from the interesting plot and great voice acting, why else do we think you should watch Demon Slayer? For one thing, even by the standards of modern anime, this is a show that looks really, really beautiful. With all due respect to the excellent writing, we frequently had to pause and back up because MAPPA’s animation was so breathtaking that we got lost in the flow and lost track of the dialogue and plot.
You don’t just have to take our word for it, either. On Rotten Tomatoes, the first season of Demon Slayer has a 100 percent critical rating, and that’s a powerful testimony to the show’s ability to win over professional critics who don’t always appreciate the finer points of anime.
The show also has an audience rating of 88 percent based on hundreds of different ratings, which is equally impressive when you consider how hard it is to get the anime fan community to agree on whether a show is awesome or not.
And for fans checking out Demon Slayer for the first time on Netflix, we have good news and bad news: the bad news is that the anime’s first movie is not available to stream on the platform, but the good news is that the movie was adapted into its own short arc that you can watch on Netflix today.
The first episode of this arc is even a bonus episode that helps to contextualize what the character Kyojuro was doing right before the movie started. Just be careful: once you start watching, you might find that Kamado is just as adept at slaying your free time as he is at slaying demons.
