It's OK. Just OK

arorashadow_2003

After years and years of rumors and attempts to make the beloved Konami franchise Castlevania into an animated series, Adi Shankar with Warren Ellis and Netflix deliver but is it as good as everyone says? Kind of. As someone who is only thinly familiar with the games I went into this fairly open-minded or maybe indifferent just hoping for a good short series to enjoy.

This Castelvania animated by Studio Frederator adapts the anime aesthetic seen in series like Avatar the Last Airbender, Boondocks or the many DC Animated films of the last few years, going for a middle ground of meshing the two styles of western and eastern animation. Overall it's a solid attempt visually. We have some really wonderful art direction, providing some terrific Gothic style art, fitting of a dark vampire driven horror, some creative character designs to appeal to those who probably aren't down with the cute and flashy styles of anime and also paying homage to the art styles of Symphony of the Night.

But the trade off is animation corners are cut, drastically. Character animations are stiff, action scenes are stiff and our main character doesn't get to use his signature whip as much as we might like. Of course this is new ground for Netflix moving forward in a genre cluttered by so much mediocrity it's only reasonable to expect they're not throwing a huge amount of money at this right now. Let's hope moving forward the animation quality can improve.

There are some callbacks to the games, a little bit of action; platforming action that looks like it would be from a level in Castlevania but the references don't overstay their welcome and feel like nice nods to fans.

The series also suffers greatly in its sound. Many characters are mumbling their lines, the sound mix and audio levels are unbalanced and the music drones on, non-stop. You won't hear any iconic tunes of the game series here, just basic filler orchestral music that never stops.

The story isn't all that creative, mostly going on the old cliché of how horrible humanity is. The story's criticism against the Church seems reasonable given the era is the mide-to-late-1400s, I didn't find it anti-religious but heavy handed and blunt enough where I can see where the lines between true to the period and location to soapboxing are blurred. This series also jumps ahead in the lore, skipping over the first Castelvania story to the story of Trevor Belmont. Trevor is like the other dozen gruff anti-heroes out there and feels like a carbon copy of many other characters of this arc type.

Because of how experimental this series is the show has a 4-episode first season, equating to basically a pilot movie but there is no skimping on character development. The next eight episodes should be interesting to see where they push the story further but a bland main character, poor audio and substandard character animation leaves me a bit more mixed and not as enthused as many others.

score 6/10

arorashadow_2003 18 July 2017

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3757693/