Bright Samurai Soul
Following in the footsteps of such august properties as Star Wars, Altered Carbon and the Witcher, the beloved haha okay no sorry that muddled racism parable and Will Smith vehicle Bright is the latest movie to get an anime follow-up sequel. Or not a sequel. Not really a prequel either. It's. Um. Something. Definitely a viewing experience of some kind.
The world of Bright--essentially our world, but with elves and orcs--is now transformed into an oddly CGified woodblock print, so it looks a bit like an extended video game cutscene that someone mistook for a feature length movie. Instead of American urban decay, we're now in post-restoration Japan of the late 19th century, though as with the original movie the presence of elves and orcs and magic is the only difference between the real world and this, making the whole exercise kind of pointless theme-wise. The whole fantasy element adds nothing to the Meiji Restoration, nor does the Edo Japan have anything to say about fantasy. It's all just kind of there, in the same movie for some reason. At least the original had its fumbling and inept racism parable, while this just has, um, pretty colors.
Very pretty colors. Really. The colors are wonderful, the lines and details ravishing, the artistry superb, the soundtrack a sort of mid-tempo upbeat electronica which literally could not be a worse match for 19th century dueling samurai if you tried.
I'm struck, as I was by Star Wars Visions, how little these anime excursions take away from the original. It's just Edo Japan with a few extras tacked on, taking essentially nothing from its putative source material other than the name.
Though in this case, that's probably for the better.
No comments:
Post a Comment