On the opening sequence of the battle: I found the animation to thow me off and annoying as heck. New tecnology was favoured over the original intensity and better humanization of the characters. The "epic battle" looked a lot like a ripoff from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and was completely unnecessary.
Also, the animation might look good in comparison to the stills in a 90 movie, but it's in no way realistic. Constant movement doesn't make a good animation, and when overused it kills the emotion because they are not making you enter the battle. Instead of moving around like mindless puppets, you have to consider weight, muscular strain, force of impact in a blow (which I saw done only once: Gatsu' battle with Caska). You can have great movement when you balance the 3D animation with real life movement. Take a Pixar movie for example: it's all 3D, caricaturesque, and you still can see a real human moving that way. This movie does not do that.
Though I have to give it to them on the gore of the first scene, the rest did nothing for me. The art, I must admit, also annoyed me, not only because I was used to another kind of character design, but because the faces are not as expressive. The overuse of the shadows and the brightness effects killed me.
And god was I annoyed to no end by the music. As a composer myself, I was completely unmoved. I found it was all so very unoriginal and abusive of obvious resources. I don't know how it's even comparable to Susumu Hirasawa OST, without which the series lacked its original feel.
About the director... it's not bad, but he didn't make any brilliant calls either. And good as it was that Susumu Hirasawa composed the intro "Aria", it did little to improve the major disaster that was the "opening" sequence. Anyone who knows anything about how to make a film knows you CANNOT be adding 2D patches -be it fire or whatever- in front of moving pictures (check the Berserk PS2 videogame opening if you want to see how to make that sequence correctly). It felt fake and bad taste and dizzing, which made it, again, annoying.
But I haven't even covered the most important part: the story. I knew they wouldn't be able to fit everything but, if there was a way to defile such a great story as that of Berserk it was by omiting a lot of important details. It's like they took only the most cliché parts of the epic story of Berserk and made it superficial and lacking. Neither does the movie find the time to develop the characters' relationship with one another, which is a pityful thing, with coherence-hurting consequences.
It also affected dramatism and the impact of happenings: as for the removal of characters, of course, some of those removals would be more questionable than others, like how they erased the bald politician and, together with him, his conspiration plot, and I'm guessing they will cut off the Queen assasination entirely.
And it hurt verisimilitude: whoever has a grasp about Japanese animation knows these people added cliché where originally there was none (Griffith saying he would chose the place Gatsu dies is a common resource with samurai and their lords, it feels odd in an occidental medieval setting. The same goes for the gossiping nobles.)
On the list of very bad calls, the worst might have been that they jumbled together significant dialogs that would help delve into the psyche of the characters, only to add redundancy instead (Griffith saying Gatsu is "his", a commoner getting a nobility title being scandalous - we get it, move on).
I was somewhat relieved they seemed to capture Griffith's childish behavior, but they left out the truly bright and calculating side of him. From this alone you won't understand why Gryffith was so captivating to those who followed him, you know nothing of his impressive strategies and never get his smooth talking winning him a nobility title and the heart of (almost) all he met. Most of all, you miss how intelligently he made his way to the royal court and the things he had to do to achieve it. (Gryffith selling his body to get gold for the Band of the Hawk, anyone?)
But also, things like why Caska is mad at Gatsu all the time, along with why Gatsu is a "mad dog" or why people joined Griffith without him ever asking, all are completely unclear. They also showed nothing of Gatsu's past, which in turn would explain why him holding the hand of Adonis was significant, or how other actions were similarly important, like Gatsu's traumatic childhood that will later translate into his other traumas and why he identifies best with children and women than the men who abuse them. (Just how honorable our hero Gatsu is, a guy who kills people for a living suddenly shocked because he killed a little boy... isn't there a big explanation missing here? Or are we just hypocritic?)
What about the Witches' Hanging Tree? What about some explanation as to why Caska, a woman, is a mercenary? Why does Gatsu even think Gryffith as a friend and not just a playful boss? Get my meaning? This things is totally lacking and fatally incomplete!
Finally... my last complain is that if these are only three movies, I'm going to get pissed they used up most of the screen time in the retelling of the old series instead of developping the part after the Eclipse. Now I feel like most of what was told about the new movies and how much it would cover was false advertisement.
