Bright: Samurai Soul

TDLR: Movie feels like it was written by a bunch of 12 years olds for school project.

Story: 20 minutes into the movie and i still have zero clue what is this thing even about. Ok, we have some humans fighting against each other and there are not only humans but other races also like elves, orcs, goblins. The only thing I know after 20 minutes is that they fight about something. Don't know what yet because movie didn't bother to tell you what it's gonna be about.

Only later we find out it's about good guys vs. bad guys fighting over some magical rod ... and magical elf that can handle the magical rod to it's full potential. Whatever, nobody cares at this point - should have told me that before both sides started to fight, maybe then i would care a little.

Art: CGI. A bad CGI to be precise. Movie had maybe like 1 or 2 moments when i wasn't feeling like vormitting.

Sound: Soundtrack would be good if it wasn't used in this movie, lol. Very unfitting in 90% of scenes.

Character: So we have 3 main characters. The very first one is some samurai dude that has a flashbacks about loosing his eye every 5 minutes. Second main character is some goody goody good orc whose character design is a copy paste of other baddy baddy bad orcs. There is also an annoying elf that screams and bites people whenever we can see her on screen. We also have 2 main bad characters that are baddy baddy bad guys. Pretty much all the characters in the movie are one dimensional and boring af. As for the NPC's that are slaughtered by our main trio - they're literally a copy-paste of each other. I've seen same dude dying over 4 times, lol.

Enjoyment: There is no enjoyment. Don't watch this.

Netflix is by far the biggest streaming platform in the world, with 222 million subscribers to second-place Disney+, which has 130 million, and adding more every financial quarter.

With all this money, they have been buying up the rights to countless movies and series, as well as producing ones of their own. And since they want an ironclad monopoly, they are doing so for every genre and medium, including anime.

"Bright: Samurai Soul" is an example of a Netflix original, and if this is a sign of the future, anime is doomed.

Even from someone who typically dislikes Netflix productions, I had decent hopes for this, since ... it was based on the 2017 Netflix live action movie "Bright", starring Will Smith. I liked the earlier picture, a fun action ride that introduced an interesting world blending a modern urban city with a fantasy featuring elves, orcs, magic wands, and a Dark Lord.

Thus, the anime needed relatively little to be competent. It already had an established, exciting mythology and built-in premise. So long as the action scenes were solid, it would be a decent anime.

And yet, they even failed at that. The first thing one notices about Samurai Soul is how ugly it is. Now, I appreciate a very wide range of animation, including styles most users on this website hate, like the Korean "The Story of Mr. Sorry". And I am very open to 3D CGI, which I believe can be done well. However, Samurai Soul is absolutely hideous and bland 3D CGI, resembling a render a single Youtuber would have made in 2016 or even 2011. It beggars belief that an actual studio with dozens of animators would produce a work this cheap and lazy in 2021.

The faces are generic and boring and the colors are muted, which would be bad enough in most anime, but there is a further problem which is especially bad here. The movements feel very slow and deliberate, and this largely ruins the fight scenes, robbing them of their dynamism and intensity. It's a shame, because some of the choreography is solid, I'm a sucker for sword battles, and there is plenty of blood. My score for the anime would have been at least 2 points higher if the animation hadn't been a vomit of muted colors, dull faces, and ruined battle sequences.

This anime also fails in every other regard. Instead of building off the original "Bright" and expanding its mythology, it's a dumbed-down, simpler retread. "Bright" was all about protecting an elf who is a Bright, a being who can wield the power of a mythical wand, and so is this anime, only with fewer factions, less complexity, simpler cardboard characters, and less lore. It does, however, have some of the worst exposition of any movie I've ever seen, and in a particularly nonsensical manner.

At the beginning, "Samurai Soul" seems to assume that the viewer is familiar with its predecessor, offering no explanation for why the Meiji Restoration period is littered with orcs and elves, the qualities of each race, or why there are also dwarves and goblins, two races that didn't appear in the original.

Later on, however, through tortuous exposition, we're repeatedly told what a Bright is, what a wand is, what the Inferni are, and everything else the live action movie covered. These spoken explanations aren't just bad scriptwriting, they're more excessive and unncessary than double-masking outdoors. Even the most easily distracted eight year-old has figured out what is going on long before the exposition ends.

Don't get me started about characters, either. In the original "Bright", there was a well-executed mismatched cop dynamic between Will Smith's and Joel Edgerton's characters. Smith was a decent but hard-boiled human cop who disliked and distrusted orcs for good reason, as one had almost killed him, while Edgerton was an unctious but kind-hearted, competent orc desperate to make the human accept him, especially since he is the first of his race given a shot at being a cop.

There is a human and an orc teaming up in the anime, but they have no reason to either hate or later warm up to one another. Moreover, they're both boring individually, without personalities.

Perhaps the worst character is the elf girl Sonya that they're protecting. She is a rare case, being irritating and unlikable but also having virtually no personality. We see her scratch and bite when captured, then we see her wide-eyed and docile when captured, and that's essentially it. And yet, every protagonist, whether human, orc, or elf, loves her and is willing to give up their lives to protect her.

The dialogue is nauseating. It sounds like it's written by a 14 year-old, and the attempts at philosophizing from either human and orc sound especially lame and moronic, doubly so given how childish and full of plot holes the story is.

And yet, despite all these flaws, I have saved the worst for last. The ending effectively makes the entire movie pointless. Turns out that the elf Sonya had no need for a skilled human samurai or hulking orc warrior after all. The main antagonist, who had easily beat her two bodyguards, gets obliterated in a few seconds by Sonya using the wand. Again, contrast this with the live-action film. Smith and Edgerton defend an elf Bright user with a wand too, but in the climactic battle, they're the ones who defeat the villains.

In the anime, the main plot about a human, elf, and orc going on a journey together, not to mention all the bloodshed, death, and sacrifice along the way is rendered utterly meaningless. The elf could have defeated everyone with the wand.

The movie isn't just riddled with flaws, but its finale is a massive middle finger to an audience who thought any of it remotely mattered.

What does matter is that Netflix buying up and producing anime is a very pernicious development for the medium. They're the true Dark Lord.

Recommendation: Skip it.

It can be hard to evaluate shows and movies that are in full CGI because, to be perfectly honest, a lot of them look like garbage and it's hard to look past that and evaluate the film that lies beneath the surface. There is no such problem with Bright: Samurai Soul, which has little substance and is simply going through the motions in every aspect of its existence. Aside from the visuals, there is nothing necessarily "wrong" with the rest of the film, but it's a basic adventure story with little to recommend, and the lackluster visuals simply take it down from being ... mediocre to being bad.

The basic setup of the story is that an elf child, Sonya, has been sold to the brothel where a disgraced and crippled samurai named Izou works as a bodyguard in Meiji Restoration era Japan. Soon after, a group of orcs attack the brothel to kill the courtesan that Sonya attends to, and with her dying breath, the courtesan tells the girl to take her hairpin to the elf colony in Hakodate. Izou and Sonya then set off on an adventure along with one of the orc raiders they captured, Raiden, who turns out to be a decent guy. Your typical "makeshift family goes on an adventure" story in other words. It progresses in the most predictable way you can imagine, running through the story beats it needs to hit at a breakneck pace and taking no detours at all to get this simple story to clock in at a brisk 80 minutes. The runtime feels about right given how thin the story is, but if it had ambitions beyond being a quick cash in off a memeable Netflix property, it could have fleshed out the characters and story more and made it worth being a longer film. The villain is introduced late and lacks menace, so he never really feels like a major obstacle even though he is written to be very powerful. There is also not enough time with the lean pacing to establish any sort of bond between Izou, Sonya and Raiden, which makes the entire "found family" theme the film is based around feel hollow.

This is where we have to talk about that memeable Netflix property mentioned above that serves as the source material for the film, Bright AKA "the orc cop movie". Much like the original, Bright: Samurai Soul takes an objectively absurd premise about orcs and elves hanging around in feudal Japan and plays it with a straight face, steadfastly resolving to wring a serious and contemplative story out of B movie material. Also like the original, it completely fails at this, delivering a film that's too inherently silly to take seriously while also not indulging in the fun and ridiculousness that could be had without the expectations of trying to make it critically acclaimed. The one time we get anything like this, a man somehow acquires functional octopus tentacles as a prosthetic hand with zero explanation and uses them to dual wield shotguns, which is the kind of thing that this film should be leaning in to. Sadly, it's a short sequence that comes late in the film, and proves to be the exception rather than the rule. Additionally, the commentary on race relations and the police that was the core of the original film is nowhere to be found here with the American context stripped away. While that is no great loss, given that the original was ham-handed at best and inadvertently racist in portraying orcs as stand ins for black people at worst, it makes you wonder why they even chose this setting for a continuation of the series if they were simply going to discard the central metaphor of the original. Lord knows that racist treatment of foreigners is still a major social issue in Japan to this day. But aside from a few quick scenes of innkeepers crudely saying no orcs allowed to Raiden, there is no racial or social commentary of any kind here.

The visuals, well, there's not much to say that doesn't feel like piling on with criticism. I've seen worse CGI, but it's not good by any means. Water and smoke in particular look terrible, and the lack of facial expressiveness is a major weakness during scenes that are meant to be emotional. Eventually you do get used to it, but "getting used to it" isn't the same as being good. It feels like full CGI was a choice that was made for obvious budgetary reasons and then retroactively justified as an artistic one to make it look like traditional Japanese woodblock art. I never really got that impression from it. Instead, it looks more like a cutscene from a cel-shaded video game like Borderlands. I do think that the laziness that went into the decision to use CGI is ultimately reflected in the film itself, which ends up as an unambitious cash-in on a middling American franchise that delivers the bare minimum across the board to call itself an anime film.

It's not very bad but there's no way I can give this a pass mark. It's has a good rhythm and it can be entertaining as a Saturday afternoon TV movie when you are bored but it have a very problems. The principal problem is the script, but also many others.

Spoilers from now on.

Worldbuilding: it seems like there was a war which ended magically. As dogma, we have an historical Japan where humans live with fantasy creatures. There seems to be racism with orcs and elves. The firsts because they are brute and smell bad and the seconds... i dont know. Goblins and Dwarves ... and others don't seem to have problems. We're told that there are cities of only one race but we don't see any. And, why only the elves can activate the only one magical thing that appears of the program? Nobody knows.

Aesthetic decisions: it's ok for your anime to have bright colors and modern music but in this case it doesn't fit.

GCI:I have no problem with it. It isn't the worst I have seen nor the best.

Character: We have a friendly and good orc that changes sides for a memory and this is the best character of all. We have a "gray" samurai that protects the child because she is an object of the brothel and also is a friend of a person who he admire. And the main female character, scream, bite, kick and activates things magically. In the other side we have two villains that are not worked and they seem empty and we don't know why in the final battle one of the arms of one of them is replaced by a squid.

Story: It is very hasty and there is a lot of things that doesn't make sense. Our samurai survives a stab to the heart without any problems. Coincidentally, a centaur passed by, saves them and tells them everything they need to know. They use the twin sister trick. Characters are magically resurrected. And there are random scenarios like: a great battle, a fight in big building on fire, a fight in nature, a fight in a boat...this increasingly looks like a fighting video game. And the end is lazy.

Maybe there is something that I forget but summarizing "Bright: Samurai Soul", yes, It's a bright anime but it have a Samurai that it doesn't seem like it and I doubt very much that it have a soul.