New Berserk Anime for 2016

So here's my thoughts:

It looks like we're at least getting 'The Brand' episode, and the Puck footage implies we'll get the first one too... or a version of that bar scene. This is all good in my book, as I was expecting them to cut right to Lost Children and lose Black Sworsdsmen completely. The story absolutely needs to show Guts on his Apostle hunting quest for a bit before he's interrupted by the Holy Iron Chain Knights. It sets up his character at this point, the hopelessness of his quest, and shows us the horrible world he lives in now with spirits after him. So I'll give them respect for this so far.

We haven't seen any of the count, or Rosine for that matter, but we know that the season will be 24 episodes, and this is clearly from maybe 2 or three of them so I still have hope. The count was featured in the movies after all, so they may as well connect the two by having him hunt down a recognizable apostle. Perhaps even the female apostle that got Corkus.

I hate the look of the Holy Iron Chain Knight's leaders. The colors look garish and out of place. Why is Farnese, who's sigil is a clover, wearing purple? They look like they are out of some bad music video. I get that they are flashy nobles, but the Golden Age movies were able to do this without looking ridiculous.

Also, I'm not loving the style, either in the angles chosen, nor this hatching style. Both seem too showy and ultimately distract. Why does the whole fight with the skeletons have the camera seemingly attached to the Dragon Slayer? I can't see what's going on, how he wields it, how many he's facing. Maybe this is right after he kills Collete and it's supposed to feel frantic, but I am not digging it so far.

Also the weird sketchy shading. This feels like a desperate choice to appeal to people who are against CG and it's super distracting. The style of the movies was fine in my opinion. Clean and strait forward. This, with it's extreme perspectives and bendy Dragon Slayers feels desperate to make it "Badass!"or "Hardcore!" Maybe as I see more this opinion will change, but it all feels more stylized than is needed.

Despite my misgivings though, I'm happy to see this happening and in a series form no less. 24 episodes is plenty to get us to Griffith's incarnation, maybe the hill of the swords. Here's hoping.
 
I never saw the third movie. Did they show Skully saving the day? Did they show the aftermath? I don't mind them merging black swordsman and conviction if they will stay faithful going forward but how are they gonna fill the viewers in on Caska, Godo, the dragon slayer, on and on. There is a massively important part of the story that is going to be hard to squeeze into this amalgamation.
 
It ends with Skully saving the day and taking guts to the cave with Rickert and Erica. Casca is insane and Guts runs off in hysterics when he remembers what happened. He runs until night fall and is attacked by ghosts, and Skully tells him what his new life is going to be. Guts fights all night until dawn, and then we see him leave the cottage with the Dragons Slayer as the Black Swordsman. Godo is never seen.
 
ApostleBob said:
It ends with Skully saving the day and taking guts to the cave with Rickert and Erica. Casca is insane and Guts runs off in hysterics when he remembers what happened. He runs until night fall and is attacked by ghosts, and Skully tells him what his new life is going to be. Guts fights all night until dawn, and then we see him leave the cottage with the Dragons Slayer as the Black Swordsman. Godo is never seen.

Thank you so much of filling me in! After watching the first movie I decided ignorance is bliss haha.

Sounds like they botched it a bit BUT the silver lining is that seems like a great outline for strategic flashbacks. I recently read volume 17 (I think) where Farnese is about to be assaulted by the demon horse. Guts has PTSD about the eclipse and Puck feels it, comments on it, and we are shown imagery from the eclipse. That, for example, is a perfect time to break away and show Guts getting the Dragon Slayer or to explain how Casca was able to keep safe without Guts' protection. As I just said, I'm willing to call all the material covered by the 97 anime and movies a wash and move forward as long as they get it right going forward.

I know hardly anyone can be bothered to spare a kind word for the movie trilogy team, but you have to admit it is hard to pick up a story now when (forgive me) the "meat" has been shown but we are missing both "buns" (I'm sorry). You know the folks producing this show want to get to the action and are not going to like opening their hip new show with backstory and exposition. Remember, we were told the movies were the beginning of the adaption of the entire saga but they made foolish short sighted errors in choosing to focus on the exact same material the 97 anime covered while neglecting to fill the holes necessary to finish the saga. I think Miura could write his way out of this problem with a wave of his hand but the question is will they follow his lead.

On another note, I have been spewing posts all over this thread for the past couple of days and I hope it isn't wearing on anyone. I'm just really excited about being able to show Berserk to people (like my wife) without asking them to read a comic book backwards :ganishka:
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Theozilla said:
Also for Griffith's voice actor to still get billed as a main character, even if we assume there will be a couple of Golden Age arc flashbacks that I can't imagine that would be enough to get main character billing, and the only other times Griffith could have dialogue occurring are during episodes 127-128 from the beginning of the Birth Ceremony chapter and his appearance in the The Guardians of Desire episodes. So if the anime is indeed two cours and not one, I don't think it is that unlikely for The Guardians of Desire episodes to be adapted, especially for it's importance of showing Guts getting the Beherit.

This is perillous logic. The reason Griffith is listed is likely because he's the main antagonist and they're expecting to animate more than just a season of this show. Either way I wouldn't use that to draw conclusions.

Uriel said:
So, is the voice at the beginning Slan... or Rochin? Seeing as she is saying "It's futile. You cannot escape. You are ours." I assumed Slan. If so, her voice is so impish. I much preferred her sultry voice from the previous anime and games. Based on the voice alone, I'd guess Rochin, but cannot confirm if she ever spoke those words.

It is obviously Slan. I think the voice fits her, it's just what they went for that's throwing you off: no music, no distortion on the voice, and the actress starting with a gentle, intimate tone (almost murmuring) before turning "impish" as you say. It's fitting of how she treats Guts though.

ApostleBob said:
I hate the look of the Holy Iron Chain Knight's leaders. The colors look garish and out of place. Why is Farnese, who's sigil is a clover, wearing purple? They look like they are out of some bad music video. I get that they are flashy nobles, but the Golden Age movies were able to do this without looking ridiculous.

Like I said earlier on, her wearing purple isn't the problem, it's just how it's done.

Farnese_TGC_bk4_14.jpg


ApostleBob said:
Also the weird sketchy shading. This feels like a desperate choice to appeal to people who are against CG and it's super distracting. The style of the movies was fine in my opinion. Clean and strait forward.

Nah, I think this is much better than what the movies did, even though it's far from perfect.

buttonmasher said:
Sounds like they botched it a bit

Trust me, they botched it a lot. Skipping them after the first one was the right choice.

buttonmasher said:
BUT the silver lining is that seems like a great outline for strategic flashbacks. I recently read volume 17 (I think) where Farnese is about to be assaulted by the demon horse. Guts has PTSD about the eclipse and Puck feels it, comments on it, and we are shown imagery from the eclipse. That, for example, is a perfect time to break away and show Guts getting the Dragon Slayer or to explain how Casca was able to keep safe without Guts' protection.

I don't know man, those are a few panels in the manga, what you're proposing would really take the viewer away from the scene. I'd rather have it happen between scenes.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Uriel said:
Okay, I thought so. Aaz, does Slan ever utter those words? If so, when?

Nope, that line (and the following one from the male voice about the Brand) is from the specters who confront Guts in the woods when Colette is killed. My guess is that they're following the shortcut taken by the 1997 adaptation, meaning they'll have the God Hand appear to Guts phantasmagorically amidst the specters. We'll see how it goes (maybe the voice is just that of a female specter), but for now I'm not getting my hopes up about a full adaptation of the Black Swordsman arc.
 

Kompozinaut

Sylph Sword
If we get the Black Swordsman, I feel like it'll be consolidated in some way. Like maybe putting the bar scene in the Count's city. I agree with Bob, it really would hurt the narrative if Guts isn't at least shown killing a couple apostles (like, more than Roshine) to evoke the pursuit of the HICKs.

I'd love to see both the Black Swordsman and Conviction arcs animated, but since we're obviously going to be getting into Conviction, I would hate for them to try and do too much and fail both. I think the less Black Swordsman (maybe two or three episodes?), the better chances we have of getting a decent Conviction.
 

Lithrael

Remember, always hold your apple tight
Aazealh said:
The colors themselves are fine, but I think it comes across as garish because they're so uniform, undetailed and brightly lit. The characters are supposed to be in a forest after having traveled for weeks or months, so this crude texturing gives them a "plastic" look more than a "textile" one. Of course, this also applies to every other part of the characters...

Yes, this exactly. It's the huge broad uninterrupted swaths of bright color that make them look off. There's just too much of the plain base color and not enough shadow and no hilight. The same color scheme would look fine if the cloth was being drawn by an animator instead of carelessly rendered by a machine. A good CGI lighting/surfacing guy would change the lights/cloth settings to make sure the final renders didn't look this appallingly flat. An animator would put in a lot more shadow to break it up. Just look at any anime, the bright colors will be broken up by the shadow color in probably a good ten percent of the area. They should only look like this in unusual circumstances like being hit by a frontal spotlight. Which they aren't.
 

False

May you find your worth in the waking world.
ApostleBob said:
Also the weird sketchy shading. This feels like a desperate choice to appeal to people who are against CG and it's super distracting. The style of the movies was fine in my opinion. Clean and strait forward. This, with it's extreme perspectives and bendy Dragon Slayers feels desperate to make it "Badass!"or "Hardcore!" Maybe as I see more this opinion will change, but it all feels more stylized than is needed.

I kinda get what you're saying, but I vastly prefer this way over the way the movies did it. The movies CG came off as very flat to me with the lack of styling in them.

I'll agree about the bendy Dragonslayer being bad though, it just looks so off.
 
Hey, longtime lurker, first time poster. This PV drew me out and I felt like sharing my overwrought opinions.

I feel a lot more positive about the whole project with this second PV. There are details in the second PV that make me strongly think that the first one was just from a proof of concept for the studio. The shading texture on the CG models is missing in the first PV, the CG model for Guts in PV2 has a different face and expressiveness than in the first, and more alarmingly they did change Guts' pauldrons in the second PV, but you'll notice that the one repeating shot of Guts swinging his sword between the two uses the Tower of Conviction pauldrons. Even the shot of Guts walking at the end looks acceptably fluid and less robotic, and hopefully we can limit the Terminator resemblances to all the skull-stomping that seems to be going on in the previews. :ganishka:

The visuals between both previews look very low budget, and I'm mostly okay with that. The thing I'm most concerned about visually is how the hand-drawn animation is going to blend with the CG. I wish we'd seen more of the traditional animation, but the snippets we have seen make me pretty hopeful. The CG models are an awful lot more expressive and less jarring than in the movies, but I still feel that CG lacks the expressiveness of line weight and style that can only be achieved by hand drawing. Miura does such a great job during the Conviction arc of conveying Guts through nothing but his facial expression that I'd be upset if the anime failed to match up. In fact, subjectively speaking I'd say the art in the Conviction arc is probably the starkest and most appealing period of Miura's artwork for me.

The thing I can really praise about the promotional material we've been seeing is that it's really nailing the uncompromisingly bleak tone and atmosphere of post-eclipse Berserk really well. I really hate those fucking movies because they totally fail to convey the actual atmosphere of the Golden Age arc. The '97 series was a lot more successful at conveying the tone of the manga, but it treated the Golden Age like a historical soap opera, whereas the Black Swordsman and Conviction arcs are more like a series of action heavy, visceral, self-contained horror movies. It requires a really different emphasis in terms of the animation, and I think CG was probably the only cost effective way to do that. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic at this point, a lot more so than when they first announced the project. I've just got my fingers crossed that Miura's involvement in the scripts means that they can't fuck things up as hard as the trilogy did.

The characters, story, and themes of Berserk are so strong and unique while simultaneously feeling universal and archetypal that I desperately want to share it with more people in my life. My friends are busy people and it's really hard to get them to start reading an ongoing 38 volume long manga, so I've tried to screen the anime, and between the really dated visuals of the '97 series and the incoherent stupidity of the film trilogy it's really difficult to find a way to unapologetically demonstrate why I find Berserk so appealing. I'm just hoping this series is at least representative enough to attract more people to the story.
 
Aazealh said:
This is perillous logic. The reason Griffith is listed is likely because he's the main antagonist and they're expecting to animate more than just a season of this show. Either way I wouldn't use that to draw conclusions.

Hmmm, I thought it was was a relatively safe assumption to think that main character billing for a voice actor generally implies that they will have a significant amount of dialogue, but if you don't think so I'll take your word for it.
 

Uriel

This journey isn't ov--AARGH!
Theozilla said:
Hmmm, I thought it was was a relatively safe assumption to think that main character billing for a voice actor generally implies that they will have a significant amount of dialogue, but if you don't think so I'll take your word for it.

Not necessarily. Primary antagonists (or important characters in general) are often billed as main characters, regardless of how much dialogue they have.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Theozilla said:
Hmmm, I thought it was was a relatively safe assumption to think that main character billing for a voice actor generally implies that they will have a significant amount of dialogue, but if you don't think so I'll take your word for it.

Just consider Casca's dialogue.
 
I know this doesn't matter to most, but the sound track to the original Anima was absolutely the best part of the anime, in my opinion. I really hope they don't at least mess that up in this new series. Just a thought I had.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
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GiantSword Mufasa said:
I know this doesn't matter to most, but the sound track to the original Anima was absolutely the best part of the anime, in my opinion. I really hope they don't at least mess that up in this new series. Just a thought I had.

Contrary to your belief, I think this is a sensitive issue to a lot of fans (especially old ones). In this regard, I think having an insert song from Susumu Hirasawa is a good sign. As for the rest of the OST, we'll have to see, but I believe the responsability for the movies' terrible soundtracks lied more with the director than the composer. The choice of what track to use in what scene was often extremely perplexing to say the least.
 
Aazealh said:
Contrary to your belief, I think this is a sensitive issue to a lot of fans (especially old ones). In this regard, I think having an insert song from Susumu Hirasawa is a good sign. As for the rest of the OST, we'll have to see, but I believe the responsability for the movies' terrible soundtracks lied more with the director than the composer. The choice of what track to use in what scene was often extremely perplexing to say the least.

Aaz I always appreciate your insight. The OST has a very special place in my heart. All we can all do is wait and see, or wait and listen, LOL
 
Honestly, I'm not too enthused. Berserk only deserves the best treatment, damn it, and this does not look like that to me so far. Right now I'm looking forward way more to the next episode of the manga coming out than to this. I'll try to keep an open mind, though, and who knows? Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. (fingers crossed)
 

DarkSideWarrior

Till you got the brand...
I'm impressed by how this 2nd trailer seems.
The CG is well done and the shading is particular...cool!
Here we can clearly see some scenes from episode 1 and so (aside some promotional postcard pics) we know for sure that they will animate the Puck's entering scene in the bar and Charlotte.
We have the Holy Iron Chain and Isidro too.
Now, I would really like to see the Count and the Snake Baron animated in this tv adaptation.
Studio 4c in the previous 3 movies animated 10 volumes (the Golden Age, from number 4 to number 13) in about 270 minutes (about 90 minutes per movie).
The Conviction Arc ends with volume 21, so if they would animate till the end of this part of the story, they have to adapt 11 volumes (21 - 10=11) in 600 minutes (24 episodes x 25 minutes).
So they have to insert about 1/2 volume per episode.
This assumed and thinking to how much they have cutted away in the movies, is it possible to have everything adapted (my heart is still crying for the lack of Wyald in the movies..) in this new tv anime??
They have more than the double of the space to animate about the same number of volumes...
I hope they will insert everything, the Count and Snake Baron too.
Do you guys think that the Conviction Arc could be decently adapted in 24 episodes adding Count and Snake Baron??
 

Walter

Administrator
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DarkSideWarrior said:
Studio 4c in the previous 3 movies animated 10 volumes (the Golden Age, from number 4 to number 13) in about 270 minutes (about 90 minutes per movie).
The Conviction Arc ends with volume 21, so if they would animate till the end of this part of the story, they have to adapt 11 volumes (21 - 10=11) in 600 minutes (24 episodes x 25 minutes)

I know you're eager to determine the scope of this project, but that's not a very reliable comparison. These are different studios, working with different sections of the manga and even different mediums, thus they'll inevitably be structured differently (TV shows usually end with cliffhangers every 22 minutes, and with movies it's different).

Short of it being revealed in an interview, the only thing we have to go on in this regard is what we're shown, which ... doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment. Put together, the two trailers show parts of Vol 1-Ep1 (Puck in bar), Vol 1-Ep2 (Guts exiting wagon and taking on the possessed skeletons), Vol 16 (HICKs) and Vol 18 (Isidro, likely chasing after Guts, given the time of day). The second promotional poster showed a scene from Vol 14 (windmill).

Based on just that limited material, it seems there could be a brief introductory section at the beginning, not dissimilar to the 1997 anime, skirting around certain scenes of the Black Swordsman, skipping the Count's section, jumping straight into Lost Children, which is where they'll spend the bulk of it. Of course, that doesn't explain the HICKs scene we see (from Vol 16) or Isidro.

There's also no logical end point with this direction, unless they're planning on adapting bits of Black Swordsman along with the entire Conviction Arc, which sounds extremely daunting, to me, particularly since this production seems to be a much more scaled back depiction of Berserk. I just don't see this team animating the fall of Albion, and all the insane visuals that would demand of this production.

But then, we've truly only seen what amounts to about 25 seconds of footage...
 
Let's also not forget that the promotional videos for the movies had a reborn Griffith and Guts as the Black Swordsman. This all turned out to be proof of concept demo footage that was actually never in the movies at all. So even the clips we have available are no guarantee of where they're going.
 
Well they made the hilt black, preorder cancelled. It looks alright though, it's hard to judge the quality of the 3d animation for me since we only get a few seconds of each shot, at least they're doing some rotoscoping too. Having Isidro meet up with Guts in a forest doesn't look promising, looks like they're going to screw up the canon again, probably have him tail Guts through his misty valley journey or something.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Now that I think about it... There's not necessarily any indication we'll even get Lost Children. None of Rochine's minions, Jill or Rochine herself, nor any Misty Valley imagery. It could just skip from the Black Swordsman bits to after Misty Valley.
 
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