Spoilers ahead.
President Trump announced Monday that he’s slapping a 100 percent tariff on foreign films. Maybe he saw the box office numbers and panicked: the Japanese juggernaut Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is crushing American animation. The film sits at 98 percent from audiences and critics on Rotten Tomatoes and raked in a record-breaking $70 million in the United States alone on its opening weekend. Meanwhile, DreamWorks Animation’s Dog Man pulled in $36 million over its domestic premiere weekend, and Disney Pixar’s Elio flopped at $21 million in its debut.
So why are Americans shelling out for a Japanese anime movie about a boy with a sword and a demon sister, instead of American-made media? Simply put: Demon Slayer gives audiences what they’re starving for — sacrifice, redemption, courage, family, discipline, and the age-old struggle of light against darkness. In other words, the stuff that makes stories worth telling.
Infinity Castle begins the final war between Muzan Kibutsuji — the Satan-like progenitor of all demons — and his elite upper rank demonic lieutenants against the human Demon Slayer Corps. It is the first of three films, concluding the epic saga built up over four seasons and another movie.
Among the upper rank demons is Akaza, the demon who previously killed Kyojuro Rengoku, the mentor of main protagonist Tanjiro. Rengoku and Akaza’s stories form a deliberate mirror — two men shaped by hardship, both desiring to protect the weak, yet embodying opposite visions of masculinity.
Rengoku was a man of fire in both spirit and appearance. His mother, dying young, left him with a charge: “You were born with more strength than others … so that you can protect the weak.” When Akaza attacked a train full of innocents, Rengoku fought with blazing resolve. Even mortally wounded, he radiated peace: “Set your heart ablaze,” he tells Tanjiro and his other mentees as he dies. “Don’t feel bad that I’m going to die. As a Hashira, it’s natural I’d protect you all.” His sacrifice echoes Christ’s words, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Akaza’s path was the tragic inversion. Born a human named Hakuji, he stole to buy medicine for his sick father, but Hakuji’s father, ashamed of his son’s crimes, took his own life. Crushed by guilt, Hakuji was given a second chance when a martial arts master took him in and treated him with dignity. Training under him, and falling in love with — and eventually becoming engaged to — the master’s daughter Koyuki, Hakuji finally has peace and purpose. He vowed to protect Koyuki and to become the man his father longed for him to be.
But tragedy struck again. An enemy dojo poisoned his master’s well, killing both Koyuki and her father. Hakuji snapped. In his rage, he slaughtered the rival dojo with his bare hands, then abandoned his humanity altogether by accepting Muzan’s blood and becoming a demon. The boy who once vowed to protect became Akaza, the destroyer.
Side by side, Rengoku and Akaza represent two very different destinies for men. Both were strong, both endured suffering, both longed to shield the vulnerable. Yet one transformed grief and hardship into joy and service, while the other let it curdle into rage and hatred. In Christian thought, this is the difference between a life ordered toward love of others and a life consumed by self. One burns with self-giving love; the other is consumed by wrath.
It’s no accident Tanjiro finally defeats Akaza by entering the “transparent world,” a state of perception beyond the physical. The metaphor is clear: True victory comes not from brute force but from discerning the spiritual battle beneath the surface.
Demon Slayer has obvious Buddhist and Shinto influences, and the story’s Japanese creator clearly did not set out to write a Christian parable, yet the eternal truths seep through anyway. There’s a reason for that.
In The Last Battle, the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia, Emeth, a Calormene soldier, is welcomed into Aslan’s Country (heaven) despite never having served Aslan in life. A sincere worshipper of Tash, Emeth had sought to live faithfully and honestly, and when he dies and meets Aslan face-to-face, he learns that every act of love and integrity he performed belonged to Aslan all along, for nothing good can be done in the name of Tash and nothing evil in the name of Aslan.
In this, Lewis shows that truth and goodness are not bound by human labels but flow from God Himself. It is for this reason that stories written with sincerity, love, and a longing for the good — whether intended or not — inevitably echo Christian themes of sacrifice, redemption, courage, and the triumph of light over darkness.
And this is precisely why Demon Slayer resonates while much of American animation flounders. Hollywood insists on stories that purposely deny the eternal patterns — sacrifice, redemption, good versus evil — and so its offerings feel hollow. Atheistic Japan tells a tale about demons and swordsmen, and somehow it strikes closer to the heart of reality than a multimillion-dollar Pixar production.
Don’t get me wrong: I want American animation to do well. I’m not happy that foreign media is better than our own, and Trump is right to be disturbed by films like Demon Slayer thriving in the United States. But the problem isn’t that Americans are watching Japanese anime; it’s that Hollywood has stopped telling the kind of stories that “set hearts ablaze.” And while I love Trump’s tariffs, I fear no tariff is going to fix that.
