# Demon Slayer Passed Spirited Away, Not Mugen Train
> Fifteen rankings put Demon Slayer next to Cowboy Bebop, Astro Boy, Berserk and ufotable's own back catalogue. The craft lists and the writing lists disagree.
*By YPB Team · Published September 6, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/demon-slayer-ranked-many-ways*
---
JR Kyushu ran a real Mugen Train in 2020, lettered 無限 on the smokebox door. Photo: Rsa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Demon Slayer started as a mid-selling Weekly Shonen Jump serial and now holds the record for the highest-earning anime film ever made. The first Infinity Castle film reached Crunchyroll worldwide on 28 July 2026, six weeks ago, after returning to North American cinemas that March.5
In Japan the film sold 27,455,968 tickets for ¥40.2 billion. That was enough to pass Spirited Away and not quite enough to pass Mugen Train, the studio's own film from 2020.1
With the next film still unscheduled, this is a good moment to ask what the series is actually good at, because the answer is not the same on every list. Fifteen rankings on YouPickBest hold Demon Slayer, or one of its characters, films, arcs or soundtracks. The company it keeps changes completely from one to the next.
> Every list that rewards how Demon Slayer looks and sounds treats it as a peer of the classics. Every list that rewards what it says files it somewhere else entirely.
## Demon Slayer vs Cowboy Bebop: the newest name on an all-time list
The broadest anime ranking on the site puts twenty-two series against each other with no category to hide behind.
Demon Slayer is one of the youngest entries in it. Koyoharu Gotouge's manga ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from February 2016 to May 2020 and closed at 23 volumes; the ufotable adaptation, directed by Haruo Sotozaki, premiered in April 2019.7
Cowboy Bebop, in the frame above, was finished before Gotouge was in secondary school. So were Neon Genesis Evangelion and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and Hunter x Hunter has been running in some form since 1998.
That age gap is the whole tension of this list. Every other name has had two decades of rewatches, retrospectives and anniversary re-releases to build its reputation. Demon Slayer has had six years and a very large audience.
The broadest list on the site, and the one where Demon Slayer stands next to shows three times its age. Play it →
## Ufotable and the craft argument
This is the question Demon Slayer was built to answer. Ufotable composites hand-drawn effects over digital camera moves, and the water and flame animation in the fight scenes is what people quote when they recommend the series to someone who has never watched anime.
The commercial evidence is unusually direct. Infinity Castle took US$134,487,320 in the United States, the biggest anime release in North American history, past the US$85.7 million Pokémon: The First Movie took in 1999.4 People bought tickets to see it on a large screen, which is a craft purchase more than a plot one.
Violet Evergarden, in the frame, is the counter-case, and it comes from Kyoto Animation rather than a Jump property. So does Fate/Zero, which is ufotable's own earlier work and set the house style Demon Slayer inherited.
The awkward entries here are the ones that win on invention rather than budget: Mob Psycho 100's paint-on-glass sequences, Ping Pong the Animation's deliberately ugly lines, Land of the Lustrous rendered entirely in 3D.
The craft question, which is the one Demon Slayer was built to answer. Play it →
## Mugen Train: the film that broke Japan's box office
Mugen Train came out in October 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, and finished on ¥40.75 billion in Japan.2 It is still the highest-earning release in Japanese cinema history, and Infinity Castle, from the same franchise five years later, came close without passing it.
The field here is other shonen films rather than other blockbusters, which changes the comparison entirely.
Dragon Ball Super: Broly, in the frame, is the film that made Broly canon and gave that franchise its best-animated fight. One Piece Film: Red arrived in 2022 with a soundtrack that occupied the Japanese singles charts for months. Jujutsu Kaisen 0 did the same trick Mugen Train did, adapting a prequel volume into a cinema event.
What most of them have in common is that they are side stories. Mugen Train is not: it adapts the arc that follows directly on from the first television season, which is why it reached an audience that had never sat down for an anime in a cinema.
Mugen Train against every other shonen film ever released. Play it →
## Tanjiro Kamado vs Monkey D. Luffy
Tanjiro is the politest protagonist in shonen. He apologises to demons as he kills them, he carries his sister in a box on his back, and he has no ambition beyond curing her and getting home.
Monkey D. Luffy, in the frame, announced his intention to become King of the Pirates in 1997 and has not stopped saying it. Naruto Uzumaki wanted to be Hokage. Son Goku wanted a stronger opponent. The genre runs on stated ambition, and Tanjiro's is domestic.
That is the case for him and the case against him in the same sentence. Readers who find the others exhausting point to Tanjiro's steadiness; readers who want a lead who changes point out that he is much the same person in the last volume as in the first.
Edward Elric and Gon Freecss are the names that complicate it, because both are also driven by family rather than glory, and both were doing it a decade earlier.
Tanjiro in a field where the older names have twenty more years of story behind them. Play it →
## Muzan Kibutsuji: the villain with the shortest CV
Demon Slayer sends its weakest character to the villain ranking, and that is not a controversial reading among people who like the series.
Muzan is petty, vain and afraid, and his plan is to keep existing. He spends most of the story off-screen, and when he does appear he is usually punishing a subordinate for a small failure.
Dio Brando, in the frame, is a century-spanning family curse with a stand and a catchphrase. Light Yagami argues his way into godhood over 37 volumes. Johan Liebert barely raises his voice and is still the most frightening person in Monster.
The counter-argument for Muzan is that pettiness is the point: a creature who has had a thousand years to become interesting and used them to become fussy is a genuine idea. It is just an idea the series does very little with until the end.
The antagonist question, where the series sends its most divisive character. Play it →
## Tanjiro and Giyu vs Akaza, judged as one scene
Strip away the series and rank a single fight, and Demon Slayer is on firmer ground than it is almost anywhere else.
The Infinity Castle rematch with Akaza is the sequence that carried the 2025 film. Giyu and Tanjiro fight the demon who killed Rengoku, and the animation does the emotional work that the script leaves implied.
Gojo vs Sukuna, in the frame, is the Shibuya set piece Jujutsu Kaisen built two seasons toward. Goku vs Frieza ran across nineteen television episodes in 1991. Gon vs Neferpitou is the one people warn each other about.
Nine of the ten entries here come from series with far longer runs, which is the quiet advantage a fight ranking gives a young show: it only has to be good once.
One scene, judged on its own, against nine of the most replayed fights in the medium. Play it →
## The Entertainment District arc, judged as structure
An arc ranking asks a harder question than a fight ranking, because a single frame cannot answer it.
The Entertainment District arc ran from December 2021 to February 2022 and sent Tanjiro into Yoshiwara with the Sound Hashira, Tengen Uzui, against two Upper Moon demons.7 It is eleven episodes long and it is essentially one extended fight, which is either its strength or its problem depending on who you ask.
Yorknew City, in the frame, is a heist, an auction and a revenge plot with almost no fighting in it. Return to Shiganshina spends its length rearranging everything the audience believed about Attack on Titan. The Chimera Ant arc takes sixty episodes to change what kind of story it is.
Demon Slayer's arcs are shorter and cleaner than any of those, and they do not withhold anything. Whether that reads as discipline or as thinness is the argument that follows this series everywhere.
The arc question, where structure counts for more than any single frame. Play it →
## The Hashira vs the Survey Corps
Nine swordsmen, each with a different breathing style, ranked as a unit rather than as characters.
The Hashira work as a group for the same reason the Straw Hats and the Gotei 13 do: the design language tells you who they are before anyone speaks. The Survey Corps, in the frame, get there differently, through a body count that makes membership itself the characterisation.
Nine swordsmen ranked as a unit rather than as characters. Play it →
## Giyu Tomioka vs Guts: the swordsman who is not the lead
A series about swords sends two names to the swordsman ranking, and neither of them is Tanjiro.
Giyu Tomioka is the Water Hashira and the character the series uses to demonstrate what competence looks like. Zenitsu Agatsuma made the list too, and he is asleep for most of his best work.
Guts, in the frame, carries a slab of iron too big to be called a sword and has been swinging it since 1989. Roronoa Zoro fights with three. Mihawk does not need to fight at all.
Tanjiro's absence is the interesting part. He is the protagonist of a sword series and he is not the best swordsman in it, which is unusual enough in shonen to be worth noticing.
A sword series on a sword list, and the two names it sends are not the lead. Play it →
## Berserk, Made in Abyss and the dark fantasy shelf
Demon Slayer is filed as dark fantasy, and the filing is technically correct and tonally odd.
The premise is a boy whose family is eaten and whose sister becomes one of the things that ate them. The execution is bright, warm and frequently funny, with a comic-relief boar-headed swordsman and a recurring gag about Zenitsu crying.
Made in Abyss, in the frame, looks like a children's cartoon and does things to children that most horror will not. Berserk, Devilman Crybaby and Hellsing Ultimate never pretend to be anything other than what they are.
Demon Slayer is the entry on this shelf you could put on for a ten-year-old, which is a real distinction, and it cuts both ways.
Filed as dark fantasy, next to series far more willing to be bleak. Play it →
## The overrated list, and why Demon Slayer keeps being nominated
Every fandom keeps one list as a punishment, and Demon Slayer has been a fixture of this one since about 2020.
The complaint is consistent and it is not stupid. The writing is plain, the power system is a list of named attacks, the humour repeats, and Nezuko spends much of the story asleep in a box. What the series has instead is ufotable, and the accusation is that the animation is doing work the script has not earned.
The 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards put the split on record. Infinity Castle won Film of the Year in Tokyo on 23 May; Anime of the Year went to My Hero Academia Final Season.6 The best-made thing in the room was not the best thing in the room.
Sword Art Online, in the frame, has answered this question for most of the internet since 2013. Attack on Titan is here for its ending, Death Note for its second half, Dragon Ball Super for its power scaling.
The honest defence of Demon Slayer is that being enormously popular and being overrated are different accusations, and this list collects both.
The list nobody wants to top, and the one Demon Slayer keeps being nominated for. Play it →
## Astro Boy, Dragon Ball and the influence problem
Sales and influence are different measurements. For Demon Slayer the gap between them is widest right here.
The franchise announced in July 2025 that the manga had topped 164 million copies in circulation in Japan and 56 million outside it, across 23 volumes.8 By raw numbers it belongs on any list of the biggest manga ever printed.
Influence is a different claim. Astro Boy, in the frame, is Osamu Tezuka's 1952 series and the template for the postwar industry that produced everyone else here. Dragon Ball wrote the grammar of the shonen fight. Akira changed how Western publishers treated the format. Rose of Versailles rebuilt what shojo was allowed to carry.
Demon Slayer arrived after all of that and has not yet visibly changed how anyone draws or plots. What it did change is commercial: it proved a single well-animated adaptation can take a mid-tier serial to the top of the charts, which is a lesson for producers rather than for artists.
Sales are not influence, and this is the list where the gap shows. Play it →
## Fate/Zero vs Demon Slayer: ufotable against itself
Narrow the field to one studio and Demon Slayer stops being the young outsider and becomes the house's biggest asset.
Infinity Castle took ¥117,917,539,329 worldwide from 98,520,310 tickets, the first Japanese film to pass ¥100 billion.3 No other ufotable production is within an order of magnitude of that.
Fate/Zero, in the frame, is the work the studio's older audience defends: a 2011 prequel about seven mages, adapted from Gen Urobuchi's novels, with adults doing terrible things for defensible reasons. Kara no Kyoukai is seven films that barely explain themselves. The Heaven's Feel trilogy took three years to finish.
The catalogue also holds Tales of Zestiria the X, a game adaptation, and Today's Menu for the Emiya Family, in which the Fate cast cook seasonal meals and nobody dies. A studio ranking is the only place a franchise has to compete with its own back office.
The studio's own catalogue, where Demon Slayer has to beat the work that built the house style. Play it →
## Yuki Kajiura: the composer credit nobody expects
Here is a ranking about a composer, and Demon Slayer is on it.
Kajiura wrote the score with Go Shiina, and her back catalogue drags the series into conversations about magical girls and virtual reality: Puella Magi Madoka Magica, in the frame, plus Sword Art Online, Kara no Kyoukai and .hack//Sign.
That is the sort of connection this format exists to find. Nobody searching for Demon Slayer expects to arrive at a 2001 spy series called Noir.
A composer's catalogue, and the reason the series reaches lists about entirely different genres. Play it →
## Which Demon Slayer arc is the best?
The last ranking has no outside competition in it at all. The options are the series' own nine chapters, from the Final Selection to Infinity Castle.
Mugen Train and Entertainment District are the two in the frame, and both were built as showpieces: one became a feature film, the other closed on a two-Hashira fight in Yoshiwara.
The four arcs nobody talks about are what makes this question worth asking. Final Selection, Asakusa, Tsuzumi Mansion and Mount Natagumo carry the whole first season, and none of them has ever been anyone's headline.
The last list has no outside competition at all: the options are the series' own chapters. Play it →
## Fifteen questions, and the craft ones answer differently
Put the fifteen side by side and the pattern is not subtle. Ask about animation, about a single fight, about a composer, about what one studio does best, and Demon Slayer holds its own against anything made since 1998. Ask about influence, about villains, about what an arc does with sixty episodes, and it is a young series among much older ones.
The next data point is a long way off. Ufotable has listed part two of Infinity Castle as a future project rather than a 2026 release, which puts it in 2027 at the earliest with no date announced.9 Until then the record stands and nothing about the series gets settled.
Both kinds of question get resolved the same way here, by [voting in pairs](/articles/how-head-to-head-voting-works) until an order appears. The fastest way to answer back is to build a sixteenth question.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Attack on Titan Is on Every List. Never in the Same Place](/articles/attack-on-titan-ranked-many-ways) — sixteen headings for one series
- [Dragon Ball vs One Piece: Two Kings of Shonen, 14 Lists](/articles/dragon-ball-vs-one-piece-ranked) — the two franchises Demon Slayer had to follow
- [Death Note: Thriller, Shonen, or Best Cartoon Ever?](/articles/death-note-ranked-many-ways) — a Jump hit with no fighting in it
Sources
Anime News Network — Infinity Castle's final Japanese gross (¥40,200,019,000 from 27,455,968 tickets), its worldwide total and its second place all-time in Japan: animenewsnetwork.com (checked 2026-09-05)
Anime News Network — Infinity Castle passing Spirited Away on 15 September 2025, and Mugen Train's ¥40.75 billion Japanese record: animenewsnetwork.com (checked 2026-09-05)
Nippon.com — the film passing ¥100 billion worldwide, the first Japanese production to do so, announced 17 November 2025: nippon.com (checked 2026-09-05)
Cartoon Brew — the North American anime box-office record and the Pokémon: The First Movie figure it replaced: cartoonbrew.com (checked 2026-09-05)
Anime News Network — the Crunchyroll streaming date of 28 July 2026 and the 6 March 2026 North American cinema return: animenewsnetwork.com (checked 2026-09-05)
The Hollywood Reporter — 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards winners, Tokyo, 23 May 2026: hollywoodreporter.com (checked 2026-09-05)
Wikipedia — serialisation dates, the 23-volume count, ufotable and Haruo Sotozaki, and the season and arc air dates: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-09-05)
Anime News Network — the franchise's July 2025 circulation announcement: 164 million copies in Japan, 56 million overseas, across 23 volumes: animenewsnetwork.com (checked 2026-09-05)
ComicBook — ufotable's promotional reel listing Infinity Castle part two as a future project rather than a 2026 release: comicbook.com (checked 2026-09-05)
