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.
