The Witcher: Les Sirènes des abysses

I admit, I am biased. Spoiled by the excellent writing and story of the books, I expect more and more from the series. Not everything has to be perfect, or even royal. But it HAS TO captivate the same soul.

It has to....

This show does not.

I am furious, how they decapitated the story. It had love, determination, conflict, understanding, regret.. This is the story I recommend to my friends if I want them to get into the Witcher universe or even fantasy fiction. I don't remember how many times I've read that story from the books, and cried.

I love crying, when it is over beauty. Yes, drama can be art.

This one isn't.

It is silly, unprofessional, absurd, shallow, ugly and most importantly, soulless.

I can understand what you did to the show.

I can understand why you did a silly spin-off.

But this animation is like drawing a mustache to Mona Lisa.

I understand the reservations people have with The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf - which I really liked, but that isn't the case -, but this production is by far a worst production than that animation. I wish I could brush it off by saying "what else could you expect from the same two writers that also wrote the Netflix series?" however this was proved wrong with the before mentioned animation, also written by one of the writers of the show - even though Beau DeMayo wrote another great show in the X-Men '97 adaptation - or maybe he is an exception and it is not wrong to assume that re-hiring writers from the Netflix series is a bad idea.

However, something is clear, even for the people that have not read the books, you can clearly tell what comes from the books (Sword of Destiny) and what was adapted from Netflix writers. There is even this part from the books that shows how witty Essi in their investigation, but she was robbed to create a "cool scene".

Overall, this adaptation of the short story "A Little Sacrifice" does way more harm than Vesemir's prequel did.

As a side note, why is the voice acting from Essi so weird?

As books and games fan I have to say. Netflix still doesn't understand what Witcher is even about. They made it another Hollywood movie with lot's of fights and very little amount of dialogue. Everything that made the short story so emotional and beautiful in the book is gone here. Also, for the most part I was just bored and that's because Geralt is so overpowered here. He literally has all human-sized monsters on one hit. He killed at least 30 of the vodniks. We simply aren't worried for the main characters. As its own thing this is just another generic animated movie with a generic plot. As a Witcher adaptation, it's just poor.

Something has happened to the Witcher. Somewhere along the way, he has become a side character.

Story: It's not well developed but is serviceable.

Characters: As mentioned, somehow the focus is no longer on our hero - where it should always be - and it's not even on recurring characters important to our hero. This was a major error.

Animation: Passable but clearly on a very limited budget. Had the story been very good, this would have been easily forgivable.

Sound/Music/Voice: Low quality. The voice actors aren't very good, unfortunately. There's not much emoting, if any.

Verdict: Unless you're a die-hard Witcher fan, this anime is not worth your time. I gave six stars, mostly for nostalgia.

I had high hopes for this. Thinking back on the damage they've done to The Witcher IP, this was naive. I re-read the short story that gives the movie its inspiration, and found myself, again, in awe of Sapokski's writing and characterization. In my opinion, it's one of Sapkowski's best short stories. Now, I don't want to be one of those people who harps on about an adaptation not being faithful to the original, but Netflix had so much to work with here. Sapkowski's writing is full of nuance and depth and pathos - everything this adaptation is lacking. The movie goes for cheap, surface-level fantasy action and vandalizes the unique creative depth and character-work that makes Sapkowski's writing, at its best, exceptional. At its best, Netflix has been able to capture some of this - I think back to Renfri from the first episode of The Witcher. But in large part, Netflix has failed to capture what makes the IP special. This is just the latest example.