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.
