This animated function is a part of the bigger Witcher fantasy franchise which began with brief tales by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski and has advanced to outlive on all method of platforms, from video video games and comics to live-action TV sequence and movies. Because of the wealth of wiki data on the market, you will get the gist fairly rapidly. There’s a dude with magical powers, fearsome pectorals (and the platinum hair of a Finnish steel band lead singer) named the Witcher, AKA Geralt (voiced right here by Doug Cockle); he wanders round a medieval-ish countryside battling monsters, partly for rent and partly out of the goodness of his personal gruff coronary heart. He’s like a ronin or a knight or TV-show beginner detective of the Lovejoy classic, however with a sword. Geralt’s wisecracking sidekick Jaskier (Joey Batey) is cowardly and comical, and performs a lute-like instrument on which he performs ballads celebrating Geralt’s heroics. We additionally meet (largely in flashback) Geralt’s on-off romantic companion Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) who can go to his goals in an effort to flirt with him, however she’s much less of an enormous deal right here than in different Witcher merchandise.
As a substitute, Geralt and Jaskier wash up in a seaside kingdom the place merpeople and common people are at loggerheads as a result of the people hold decimating the oyster beds searching for pearls. Shockingly, they don’t make use of the oysters as meals, which depletes meals sources for the varied fantasy animals the merpeople really feel are their buddies as a result of all of them reside within the sea collectively. It’s the equal of a post-colonial western the place the merfolk are the Native People and the people are rapacious land-grabbing whites. However the script additionally threads in a star-crossed lovers’ story involving a mer-princess and a dopey human prince which performs out like a mix of Romeo and Juliet and The Little Mermaid. Plus, as a result of no gen-Z skewed animation could be full and not using a trans subtext, there’s a little bit of that too on the finish.
That stated, all of the biology and gender stuff is kind of complicated right here as a result of at one level the mer-girl and human-boy fall out and he or she says she favored him higher once they solely “fucked and didn’t speak” – however then an enormous fuss is made about how they’ll’t marry as a result of they couldn’t consummate their union, given the genital incompatibilities of fishy mer-bodies and human ones. Clearly, it’s finest to not overthink any of this.
Like The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, an earlier function animation additionally on Netflix, this was made at a Korean animation outfit referred to as Studio Mir who do a reasonably bang-up job of pitching the look between the prevailing animation kinds of Europe and Asia, to create one thing extremely exportable to each continent. Actions are very fluid, however expressions restricted and there are buckets of cartoon gore, in a deep ruddy purple that remembers mass-produced tonalities of faux Persian carpets.
Supply hyperlink
