This year’s Anime Expo featured many exciting panels, including the highly anticipated Demon Slayer panel! The panel featured the voice actors Natsuki Hanae, Saori Hayami, and Takahiro Sakurai, who voiced Tanjiro Kamado, Shinobu Kocho, and Giyu Tomioka, respectively. As a huge fan of Demon Slayer, I was very eager to attend this panel, and since Shinobu is my favorite character from the series, I of course had to rep Shinobu’s butterfly haori. It was actually Hayami’s very first time visiting Los Angeles and Anime Expo, so the audience was especially excited.

The panel gave us some incredible behind-the-scenes insights into the recording process for the Infinity Castle arc. Sakurai revealed that they recorded the Akaza battle alongside Natsuki Hanae and Akira Ishida (Akaza), admitting that Ishida’s aura was so powerful that he stayed completely silent out of pure nervousness. Hearing Hayami talk about playing Shinobu was especially emotional; she shared that knowing her character's fate from the manga made her deeply nervous, but she entered the studio with a strong determination to match Shinobu's exact level of intensity. She also mentioned how Mamoru Miyano plays Doma in such a "wonderfully hateful way" that it instantly fired up her own performance to want to defeat him.

One of the funniest highlights of the panel was when Sakurai was explaining Giyu's quiet nature and mentioned his infamous mindset: "I am not disliked." Hayami cracked everyone up by teasing him, saying, "That's exactly why people dislike you!"

Hanae also touched upon Tanjiro's continuous hatred toward Akaza since the heartbreaking events regarding Rengoku’s fate during the Mugen Train arc. When discussing Tanjiro's emotional evolution, he explained that he approached the "Transparent World" state by trying to inject a bit of the peaceful, "plant-like atmosphere" that Tanjiro’s father had into his acting.

Instead of just talking about the scenes, the voice actors treated us to some mind-blowing live readings of the anime while the clips played on the screen. Watching Hayami deliver Shinobu’s fierce anger against Doma, Hanae furiously screaming "Akaza!", and Sakurai cooly delivering Giyu’s iconic "Water Breathing, Eleventh Form: Dead Calm" right in front of us was surreal.

Following the live reading, Aniplex producer Yuma Takahashi joined the stage to share a special video showing the illustration process of characters Tanjiro and Giyu, drawn by animators at ufotable studios. He revealed that the film has already been seen by a staggering 11.6 million people in America. As a surprise and a token of gratitude from the studio, the audience was gifted with physical postcard copies of that same illustration. It was also announced that the Infinity Castle arc would be available for streaming on Crunchyroll on July 28th, with digital pre-orders kicking off the next day. The panel concluded with a trailer of ufotable’s upcoming project, Witch on the Holy Night, a magical fantasy anime movie set to premiere in Japan later this year, with an American release currently in the works.

Attending the Demon Slayer panel was a special and memorable experience, especially being able to watch the live readings by the voice actors. Each of them gave it their all during their readings, and their powerful and emotional performances paired with the scenes playing onscreen gave me goosebumps. The panel gave me a renewed sense of excitement for Demon Slayer, and I’m looking forward to the release of the next and final arc!