Berserk Golden Age Arc I: Egg of the Supreme Ruler [Review]

How would you rate this movie?!

  • AMAZING. Loved every second!

    Votes: 21 13.1%
  • Enjoyable, but disappointing in certain aspects.

    Votes: 66 41.3%
  • Indifferent. It is what it is. Nothing more.

    Votes: 10 6.3%
  • Meh. I'll only keep watching cuz it's Berserk, but I'm not happy with it at all.

    Votes: 34 21.3%
  • HORRIBLE... it's an abomination to Berserk and Miura.

    Votes: 29 18.1%

  • Total voters
    160
Apostle Judeau said:
I just hope most of the omitted characters from the series final episodes (Skull Knight, the Bakiraka and Wyald) make their screen debut.

Sorry to say that neither of the latter two make it into the 3rd movie. Although I'd say Skull Knight's appearance did the character justice and Silat makes a short but impressive appearance.
 
Ohh thats disappointing. Still Skull Knight was the most notable missing from the '97 series so as long as they've done him justice thats a plus at least.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Apostle Judeau said:
Skull Knight was the most notable missing from the '97 series so as long as they've done him justice thats a plus at least.
He appears in broad daylight to Guts, but carries a little dark cloud over him. :ganishka:
 
Walter said:
He appears in broad daylight to Guts, but carries a little dark cloud over him. :ganishka:

:ganishka: A very weird precendent to set for these movies. I wonder if now whenever he appears it will become dark and creepy. The Apostles and the God Hand will see him coming from a mile away!

Still, I'm looking forward with how they handle his confrontation with Zodd. Will it be a drawn out fight? Or few strikes and a cut back to the Eclipse. If we do see a longer fight that might be a change I'd be willing to endorse. Though if handled bad (more DBZ physics like Guts super mario jump) I reserve the right to loath it.
 
You know I have a somewhat interesting story that ties in to just how shoddy and thrown together this movie is. As an adaption that is supposed to potentially pull in new viewers and satisfy old ones it falls really short. (But really I am just stating a redundant fact at this point by saying that, and I realize that). But I got first hand how crappy it is from an outsiders perspective.

My boyfriend and I like to share each others fandoms and try to get each other into what we like. He introduced me to Game Of Thrones through the series and I liked it, and recently has gotten me into the books as well. I am a fairly new Berserk fan, (just over a year have I been an active fan) and I got introduced through the 97 anime series, and I was hooked. I was not even finished with the anime series when I was trying to get him to watch it and give it a try. I was like, "hey, if you like Game of Thrones you might like this series I just found called Berserk." However my boyfriend is iffy about watching animated series and refused to sit through 25 episodes, so I found the movie online and sat him down (he only agreed to watch the movie to get his feet wet) of the first installment. And God...do I wish I had sat down and watched it myself before I had pulled him in to watch the first movie. It was embarrassing. As early as the dream sequence when Guts is remembering the "rape" by Donavan and the image of Gambino, I had to fill in the blanks on who he was and what was going on in that scene. By the time we got to the attack on Zodd my boyfriend stopped me and said, "how is it you have to fill in so much for me on what is going? I understand it is a movie adaption, but even the shittiest movie adaptions at least have enough where a new comer can piece together the skeleton of what is going on." He then told me to stop filling in details for him and that after the movie is done he will tell me what he got from it.

At the end he said he was kind of "meh" and said he did not get any of the political stuff and that Griffith just seemed self serving and weird and that he did not get any of the emotional tension. Like why Guts got all flustered when Casca yelled at him after the time skip. Or why one minute Guts and Griffith want to kill each other and then suddenly they are ready to die for each other. My boyfriend actually rolled his eyes when Guts told Zodd not to touch Griffith (after he was knocked out) saying he was his friend; my boyfriend looked at me said "really?"He thought Guts was low on intelligence and almost oafish and that Griffith was just using him and saw him as inferior. He made no emotional connection when Guts seemed sad after hearing Griffith's speech to Charlotte about what he thought a friend was. He thought Guts was stupid for wanting his approval. The only emotional tension he was clearly interperted right was Casca's hostility toward Guts (well it is kind of apparent why) but he thought Casca was out of place and did not get why she was there at all. Just for the sake of having warrior chick?

Over-all he thinks Berserk is kind of dumb and does not get why I am so hooked on it. He said it looks like it might be interesting but has no desire to check out the anime series let alone the manga.

As for me. Meh! The only thing I sort of liked was that Guts and everyone else look more age appropriate after the 3 year time skip. In the anime series, I thought they looked too old for it to have been only three years after Guts joined the hawks. At least in the movie Guts looked reasonably like a 18/19 year old.
 
It's too bad your boyfriend got such a crappy intro to the series. I understand him not wanting to read 37 volumes or watch 26 episodes of a series he's skeptical of.

While the new movies are better animated and prettier (most of the time), they suffer a lot from giant chunks cut. Characters have no motivations, and we rarely care about them. There's no real bond of friendship with the Hawks, and the slow understanding between Guts and Casca makes no sense.

It's probably too late to mention now, but I did a recut of the movies using the '97 anime to flesh things out. My fanedit attempts to fix a lot of the issues you and your boyfriend had while keeping a movie like pace.

Here it is:
http://www.skullknight.net/forum/index.php?topic=14116.0
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Patou244 said:
Over-all he thinks Berserk is kind of dumb and does not get why I am so hooked on it. He said it looks like it might be interesting but has no desire to check out the anime series let alone the manga.

Like ApostleBob said, it's too bad your boyfriend was introduced to Berserk through that travesty of a movie. That being said, he only has himself to blame for not wanting to read the manga, which is the only proper way to enjoy the story at this point. It's his loss!
 
Actually maybe not. My birthday was earlier this month and my boyfriend knows how crazy I am about Berserk so what does he do? He bought me the first dvd volume of the anime series and the first volume of the manga from Darkhorse, and he admitted that he was persuaded by my "the manga and anime is better!" entreaties and actually thumbed through the first volume of the manga and his reaction
was "not bad" he said he liked the art and he thought Guts was a whole lot more fascinating as a soulless bastard then the idiot trying to get approval from Griffith, and he liked the dynamic of him and Puck. What he was most impressed with was build up of the apostles and behelt. Though not nearly hooked (yet) he said it was interesting and if I ever get the second volume on my own he might look through it to see what happens (I guess volume one ends on a cliff hanger. Though he was confused on why the story of the first volume is not the one in the movie. I explained to him it was the events of volume four and it was a flash back. He asked why it did not start with the true beginning of the story and what the point of the flash back was. I explained to get why he is friends with Griffith before everything went south for them. He asked me why they did not use this first. I do not have an answer, why did they start with the golden age instead of the black swordsman arc first?


Also quick question, did the anime movie portray Casca's appearance accurately to the manga? I have seen a few people around the net complaining that the anime movie white washed her appearance while others have said that the Casca's appearance was on of the few things it did right and that the 97 anime took liberties in Casca's skin tone and features. I always thought the 97 anime gave Casca a slightly more exotic look but I did not think the anime movie white washed her that badly in comparison, other than just having a different animation style.


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Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Patou244 said:
why did they start with the golden age instead of the black swordsman arc first?

Stupidity and incompetence are the likely reasons.

Patou244 said:
Also quick question, did the anime movie portray Casca's appearance accurately to the manga? I have seen a few people around the net complaining that the anime movie white washed her appearance while others have said that the Casca's appearance was on of the few things it did right and that the 97 anime took liberties in Casca's skin tone and features. I always thought the 97 anime gave Casca a slightly more exotic look but I did not think the anime movie white washed her that badly in comparison, other than just having a different animation style.

Her skin is light brown. Maybe it should have been a bit lighter in the TV series and maybe it should have been a bit darker in the movies, but honestly in their respective contexts it's never shocked me. Like for everything else, some variation is to be expected, and it's not like her character design is especially faithful to the manga in either case anyway. If you want to decide for yourself there are more than enough color illustrations from Miura that can be used as a comparison.
 
Patou244 said:
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[/spoiler]

wow, this is fucking ridiculous. People on tumblr are a bunch of loons, they obsess over the dumbest things, has any one ever taken a stroll through tumblr for any fandom not just berserk? Where do these people come from.

Why are there people so hung up on Casca's skin tone and features like it really makes a difference to her stupid character or not? People in the fandom try so hard to shoe horn her into some category of "dark people" I don't know why people think she is Kushan or something, ever notice that in spite of her complexion and features no one in the context of the story ever comments on them as though it is out of the ordinary?

The worse people are the ones that try to make Casca like she is a black chick. I have heard things like, because she acts like a "sistah!"

ok...so Casca having an in your face obnoxious attitude is a sign of her being a black girl? Kind of racist don't you think? Casca is not black get over it people, and stop saying it is because of how she acts or looks or the size of her supposedly hot ass.

Unless Miura himself states in the story that Casca is something other than a dark skinned midland peasant girl from the mountains, then I am not going to to think her ethnicity is anything exotic. And certainly not black. If he does, she is probably kushan. And even then Kushan seems to be a medley of Indian and Arab ethnic back ground not black. I don't think black even exists in Berserk.

Of all the things for people in the fandom to get riled over when it comes to these movies, Casca's supposed white washed appearance is the least of them. Holy shit....
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Heavenly Maiden said:
her stupid character [...] Casca having an in your face obnoxious attitude

Could you stop, like, insulting the character? It's not the first time you do it, and that makes it look like you're the one having a problem.

Heavenly Maiden said:
the size of her supposedly hot ass.

:schierke:

Heavenly Maiden said:
Unless Miura himself states in the story that Casca is something other than a dark skinned midland peasant girl from the mountains, then I am not going to to think her ethnicity is anything exotic.

Well she's "exotic" by virtue of her skin being dark. That alone suffices, you don't need to see a birth certificate.

Heavenly Maiden said:
I don't think black even exists in Berserk.

There are actually black people in Berserk... Not many though, but that's to be expected given the setting.
 
Heavenly Maiden said:
I don't know why people think she is Kushan or something, ever notice that in spite of her complexion and features no one in he context of the story ever comments on them as though it is out of the ordinary?

Her featrues are exotic, just because no one comments on them does not mean she is not mean her ethnicity is not "different" then the other midland people. Although I do agree she is probably not black. Her skin tone is not that much darker then Guts really. Look at this colored shot from the manga:

Casca04.jpg


ok...so Casca having an in your face obnoxious attitude is a sign of her being a black girl? Kind of racist don't you think? Casca is not black get over it people, and stop saying it is because of how she acts or looks or the size of her supposedly hot ass.

Why does so many people get on Casca's case for her attititude? I don't even know what to say here...
 
Aazealh said:
That's an illustration from the Trading Card Game; it wasn't done by Miura.

While listening to the latest podcast, I noticed that their skin tone in vol. 7 cover is not that different.
http://a.mpcdn.net/manga/p/123/400035/1.jpg

That being said, I do think that the pattern used in the B&W manga for Casca's skin clearly shows they have a very different skin tone.
 
Aazealh said:
Well she's "exotic" by virtue of her skin being dark. That alone suffices, you don't need to see a birth certificate.

There are actually black people in Berserk... Not many though, but that's to be expected given the setting.

I know that Berserk is a different kind of "Europe" but even Europeans can have dark features like Casca with out being "exotic" as in not European. I mean look at pippin? That is why I do not believe Casca's ethnicity is anything special like some people seem to make her out to be, and like I said no one ever comments on her features as though they are out of the ordinary. Which you would think they would do since Midland was not exactly friends with the Kushan people. You would think if she was exotic enough in appearance to be mistaken as one the she would have been challenged over it.

As for their being actual black people in Berserk, I honestly do not recall there ever being any. Were they refereed to as Black or did they just like Pippin? Or are you referring to Donovan?

he said he liked the art and he thought Guts was a whole lot more fascinating as a soulless bastard then the idiot trying to get approval from Griffith

soulless bastard? Guts? You corrected him right on that account didn't you?
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Heavenly Maiden said:
I know that Berserk is a different kind of "Europe" but even Europeans can have dark features like Casca with out being "exotic" as in not European.

Berserk isn't "a different kind of Europe". It's a work that takes place in a fictional world that is inspired in some ways (and not in others) by medieval Europe. Anyway, you talk a lot just to try and get around a simple fact: Casca is a dark skinned woman who's among a majority of fair skinned people. That makes her exotic. I don't know why you're wasting everyone's time arguing otherwise, because you'll never change that fact.

Heavenly Maiden said:
I mean look at pippin?

What is your point supposed to be?

Heavenly Maiden said:
As for their being actual black people in Berserk, I honestly do not recall there ever being any. Were they refereed to as Black or did they just like Pippin? Or are you referring to Donovan?

Well then look again, I'm not your secretary. Although yeah, Donovan certainly fits the part, so in itself that should be enough.
 
There is a black gentleman in the band of the hawk in volume 5 of the manga. Right after Pippin carried Guts into the after battle celebration. The black gentleman says some welcoming words to Guts. Shortly thereafter.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Jaze1618 said:
There is a black gentleman in the band of the hawk in volume 5 of the manga. Right after Pippin carried Guts into the after battle celebration. The black gentleman says some welcoming words to Guts. Shortly thereafter.

Yeah and there's a black guy among Gambino's mercenary group too (notably seen when Guts is found with Gambino's dead body), and those aren't the only ones. These details wouldn't have to be pointed out if everyone checked their facts before posting.
 
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