Traditionally, I’ll start with a good one... but the good in this series is all the credit of Kentaro Miura. Characters, plot, setting – all this comes from the original manga. Yes, it is nice to see on the TV screen favorite heroes, once again remember their adventures.
But everything else is terrible.
3D models seemed to migrate from the games of the late 90s. Unnatural, looped, mechanical-rhythmic movements create an unplanned comic effect. Well, a human can't move like that, not even a doll or a robot can move like that! It looks like a repetitive GIF animation. It is enough to see how Eric waves his hands on the run in the first episode of the second season to understand what we are talking about. And yet, someone explain to the creators of the series that anime is not the same as colored and animated manga. You can’t just so stupidly transfer to the screen every frame with the same angle (better with the same detail, but alas). Cartoons and comics are different types of art, with different, damn, means of artistic expression!
Complements, no, finishes the hatching schedule. Its sacred meaning is still unclear to me. Was it worth spending on 3D to then try to give the picture a “drawn” charm in this clumsy way?
Censorship. Everyone knows that “Berserk” is a very brutal franchise, it has enough sex, violence, and those cases when they are together. But you have to show it on TV, so the nude characters have Barbie anatomy. Was it possible, as in the first series, to do with static stylized pictures, or to draw what is happening in a “decent” angle (you do not have a feature film, Hollywood operators manage to shoot a mass orgy under such an angle that nothing reprehensible in the frame does not fall, and you, fellow creators of the new “Berserker”, even could not draw)? In the end, would they send a particularly juicy scene to that scripted Sheol, where Vyald’s comrades had already vanished in darkness and oblivion? We want to show, but we can not, so admire the orgy of 3D-buratin without signs of gender.
We didn’t even touch the plot until the second season, which is one of the reasons I felt good about the new Berserk first. Yes, the arch with Rosina was thrown out, but it is quite possible to do without it, nothing important for a cross-cutting plot does not happen in it, and moments too acute even for soft Japanese censorship, in bulk. It is much sadder that there is no history of the Graf Slug (arch “Guardian Angel of Desire”) – without it, a person who did not read the manga or at least did not watch the 1997 series will not understand where Guts has behellitis (in the anime and manga different explanations, in the anime boring and easier but at least some). But at the end of the second season of the new “Berserk” screenwriters began to cut live: the Moon Child disappeared, did not show Azan, only verbally mentioned the fate of Princess Charlotte. The creators of “Berserk” decided to go down the murky path of the creators of “Game of Thrones”, cutting and changing the storylines? But in “Game of Thrones” there is at least a magnificent acting ensemble, and in the new “Berserke” – only bad animation and nothing more.
If in terms of angles and scenes, the creators of the series bluntly took the manga as a storyboard, without showing a drop of creativity, then in terms of the chronology of events, their approach, on the contrary, is too original. The scene of the first skirmish of the new Hawks with the Kushans is stretched for a couple of episodes, and the scenes are mounted so that the impression remains that ten minutes in the Griffith storyline correspond to several days in the Guts storyline. Relativistic effects?
Well, and of course, "CLANG"! It's the damn sound of a battered copper pan. With this sound in the first season, Guts' sword cut not only the armor of enemies, but also bodies of flesh and blood, and dried bones of skeletons, and even ... disembodied ghosts! Damn it, that sound was even heard when the Dragon Slayer just blew the air! You just have to ask the sound director to take a sword and wave it in the yard. And ask him how many times he'll hear "CLANG"! In the second season, there are almost no “klungs”, at least they are not so “hurt in the ears”. But in the first they lead to hysteria.
The soundtrack is not bad at all. Stressingly, battle themes are songs (literally, with lyrics and vocals). Still, it would be better to do with instrumental compositions, songs with frequent listening begin to “load”, however, in a foreign language this effect is minimal (English I know poorly, Japanese – no, so most often I perceive vocals as another instrument). True, to the soundtrack of the old series does not reach, nothing equal to “Tell me why” and “Waiting so long” there is not, but it will come down and so. The battle theme of "normal" Gatsa, for example, is quite flashy and pathetic, resembles the title theme of “Pirates of the Caribbean” and even memorable.
There is no trailer for the third season finale. That’s a bad thing – suddenly the creators would have done some work on the mistakes, and the third season would have been better (although, given the cut plot, it’s hard to believe). And all right, what if another studio takes over? Not until 19 years later.
I don’t know who needs this series or why. Not someone who has read manga. Unless it will attract new readers who will be pleasantly surprised by the magnificent drawing of Kentaro Miura and the mass of plot details missed by the serialists.
Result: for the first time to show on television something other than the Golden Age? Screen the cult manga, the benchmark of dark fantasy? The project was doomed to shoot, shake minds and souls. But it was just "CLANG!" 5 out of 10
Original