Bright: Alma de Samurai

Where do I start? This anime has the worst animation I have ever seen and I used to watch 'Clutch Cargo', I have seen better animation in 60s anime. The character art is poorly done, and the characters do not seem to be a part of their environment, nor do any of them move naturally. This movie looks worse than the back screening of 50s movies, the background is completely separate from the characters. The story line is average, the voice acting is good, and the best part of the movie is the music. The movie feels incomplete though, as if they put together the first few episodes of an anime. It also feels a bit rushed. This anime was made in 2021 and should be much, much better.

This could have been good.

But honestly it just wasn't developed enough. I get the themes, the goals, where they were trying to go with it but just not enough dev. The animation could have been great but it needed editing, refining. Script could have been great but it needed-again, refining. It felt like SO much content was missing. Why make a movie that has a story that should be 1h40m into 1h20m?

It just felt incomplete. I get the push to be good enough and get content out fast but this movie was definitely a failed by-product of that philosophy.

Netflix serving up raw cake and expect us to be excited about it.

First off let me say for the record that I am one of the rare anime viewers that loves CG anime. But just because a studio opts for a 3D approach doesn't mean they can skimp out on coloring. This movie looks like it was done in technicolor. The shading is so poor that the forest scenes look like they were done by one guy using Adobe flash.

The fight scenes are very well done, but they are so few and far between that you have to suffer through the movie just to see them.

This is a dark and tragic story involving prostitution, sex slavery and rampant racism. Every character is a bad person and some varying degree of unlikable. It may be called bright, and be brightly colored, but there are no happy endings to be had here.

As much as I enjoy samurai flicks and cool sword fights, I cannot rate this higher than a 4. It feels unfinished. The lord feels randomly thought out. This is not the best intellectual property and I think Netflix ought to just move on.

If almost every live action adaption of an anime or animation film was a disaster, does that mean that creating animes based on live action films will yield better quality? This film argues that it is not the case. I liked the 2017 Bright film which, much maligned, combined the present buddy cop formula with a fantasy concept of a world shared by humans, orcs, elves and what have you. However this felt like one of those lazy productions made for the sole purpose of maintaining an IP.

The animation was decent, but also a combination of traditional anime drawing and 3D that made it look fake. The story, for some reason dealing with samurais and the Meiji restoration, was also about a human and an orc bonding to save a Bright elf, but less interesting than any anime fantasy story set in the same period and also less engaging. I bet that if this was a traditional hand drawn anime I would have felt better about it, but even if it was, how could it even approach something like Ninja Scroll with such a simple and formulaic story? And the editing was atrocious.

Bottom line: nothing was above average in this film, and many things were subpar. I like the Bright universe, but they have to try better.

"Backstories missing" pretty much covers this review. Tremendous lost opportunity. Unlike some other reviews, I did like the 3D cgi and the choice of using earth tones for the colour scheme, which provided a warmth to all the scenes. In fact, it was beautiful! The musical score, although uninspiring, was adequate. The characters were probably engaging but it's hard to tell when you don't understand their motivations. In all, I did want to give a higher rating but couldn't, even though the story was good. It's just that context was missing on why the characters did what they did. Another 20 minutes would have added a lot and could have placed this in the top tier of anime. Instead, I watched a medium tier effort that barely made an average grade. Sigh! I am honestly saddened as this could very easily, with very little effort, been so much better. :-(