Bright: Samurai Soul

The story had good potential, but the voice acting, specially of Sonya is beyond terrible. It really throw off all the good that could come from this animation.

"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. :-(

Decent animation, good action, and a simple but effective story. Like the original movie, the growing bond between the human hero (a Samurai in this case) and an orc is interesting. And their protection of a young elf girl is heartwarming :-)

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.

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.