Last year, Netflix released the first season of Castlevania, an “Americanime” that surprised even the most skeptical fans. Season 2 has finally been released, but let’s do a quick recap of season 1 first.
It seems worth saying saying that I never played the games as a kid. However, I’m a huge animation and anime geek. So, I won’t speak to how well the series keeps to the story line of the game. Instead, let’s focus on its value as an animated series.
A Brief Recap
The story starts with an aspiring doctor named Lisa as she seeks out the mysterious Vlad Țepeș to learn what he knows about science. This begins a relationship that leads to marriage. Twenty years later, Lisa is burned at the stake as a witch for her scientific practices as a doctor. Enraged, Vlad declares war on all humanity, vowing to return in a year’s time to kill all the people of Wallachia. True to his word, Vlad sends an army of demons throughout the land to destroy everything in their wake.
Elsewhere, in the city of Gresit, Trevor Belmont, the last son of the noble family of monster hunters, is drunk and doing his best to ignore the chaos. While there, he saves the elder of a group of mystic speakers, who pleads with him to go find a missing member of their group. They had gone looking for a legendary soldier in some catacombs underneath the city. When found and rescued, Trevor discovers the missing member is Sypha Belnades, the granddaughter of the Elder, and a powerful mage.
Trevor tries to convince the speakers to leave because the people of Gresit blame the speakers for the nightly demon raids. They refuse, choosing to stay. Trevor then helps defend the speakers from the people and the demons, and in the fight Trevor and Sypha fall deep into the underground catacombs. There they find the resting soldier, who is also a vampire. Trevor fights the man, which ends in a draw.
The man reveals his identity as Alucard, son of Vlad and Lisa. He had been recovering underground from a fight with his father, and now joins Trevor and Sypha in putting an end to Vlad once and for all.
Americanime
For the uninitiated, Americanime is a piece of animation made in America, but done in the style of Japanese anime. Anime has become immensely popular, and its influence is seen an increasing number of American animated films and series. These works can be hit and miss.
The animation quality of Castlevania is top notch. The backgrounds are luscious, beautiful, and the character designs are exquisite. It’s rare to find animation quality this good. Or this close to the anime style that inspires it. The two biggest flaws I noticed were with movement and facial expressions.
Japanese anime characters always seem to have this fluidity to their movements, especially in epic fight scenes that make them so captivating to watch. Here, there seemed to be a lot of hitching. Instead of smooth movement, everything feels jerky. It’s a flaw that can take you out of the moment of the scene.
The faces of the characters, while beautifully drawn, seem flat and lifeless. Japanese anime has this wonderful ability to capture subtle facial expressions that tell us so much about a character’s thoughts or emotions without any words at all, and that adds a nice layer of depth to the characters as well as the story.
With this series, their eyes always feel like they’re not really looking at anything, kind of like a doll. The eyebrows and facial expressions are oftentimes set instead of changing with the characters’ emotions. I found it harder to connect to the characters because of it. Despite the nitpicking, the art style is overall very well done.
Acting and Story
The voice acting on this one is not bad. The main cast is full of actors from several favorite geek series, like Richard Armitage, James Callis, Graham McTavish, and Tony Amendola. It did feel like all the characters were on the same level with their voices. Not monotone, but it’s like everyone has the same speech patterns instead of having variety. This was a directing choice, and probably something not everyone is going to share this opinion on.
The story is only getting started in these first four episodes, but it’s off to a good start. The bar for expectations wasn’t set very high, but I was pleasantly surprised with the series overall. It’s a good, dark, animated horror series. I love animated horror stuff, and this one does a good job of reaching that Japanese anime balance between grotesque and beautiful. The visible violence is pretty intense, kind of like the violence in the manga/anime series Berserk (another great series to check out for you fantasy/horror fans).
Now that I’ve re-watched season 1, I’ll be checking out season 2. It was exciting to wait for the second season, and I’ll be back next week to discuss it, so stay tuned!
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