Berserk: The Golden Age Arc II - The Battle for Doldrey

Toshiyuki Kubooka's Berserk trilogy continues with Berserk: The Golden Age Arc II - The Battle for Doldrey, a more assured attempt at adapting Kentaro Miura's long-running, now never-ending, manga. The lifeless computer animated dolls, that stood out like a sore thumb in Berserk: The Golden Age Arc I - The Egg of the King, have melted into the background for this sequel. Although figures and their movement routines are still often sourced with 3D animation techniques, Kubooka's follow-up does a much better job of arranging them in ways that are sympathetic to tone and visual style of the overall piece. While it's likely every single frame has at least some element of computer-assisted correction, the stuttering, glaringly artificial, touch that marred the previous film is largely absent. 

The Battle for Doldrey's server banks are instead used to provide the massive backgrounds and frothing extras that add a sense of scale to events that teeter on the edge of world-changing. Tolkien-sized castles come under siege - hammered with rotting livestock hurled from enormous trebuchets; scaled by expendable knights who are blasted and burnt for their trouble. When considering our main characters, a digital affect is most obvious in the film's swirling, repetitive, action. Real, observational, detail remains pointedly two dimensional - hand animators trusted to communicate snarling disgust or the first prickles of human affection. For their centrepiece, Kubooka and his animators quote the swirling, simulated, ballroom of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, staging a choreographed dance in which The Band of the Hawk (now elevated to the level of nobility as a reward for their consistent military successes) effortlessly match the Baroque movements of a ruling class who previously spat on them.

Where The Egg of the King centred Guts and his horrifying past, Battle for Doldrey selects Casca, the Hawk's only female commander, when exploring an interior perspective. Her early life, much like Guts', was one marked by violence and cruelty. Casca is preoccupied with one moment in particular, Griffith rescuing her from a brutal nobleman attempting to rape her. In Casca's recollection Griffith is a beautiful fairy tale prince who towers on his horse, radiating light and warmth - a prophet portrayed as an armoured innocent. Casca's dream is at odds with her slowly dawning realisation that this outwardly angelic man views people in stark, transactional, terms. Clarifying this point, Griffith concludes the film by mechanically seducing a naïve Princess, partly to subsume his fixation on a now departed Guts, but also to reassert the sexual power that underlines his hold over other people. While Princess Charlotte responds, delightedly, to his every touch and tweak, Griffith remains impassive. When their mouths first meet, Griffith doesn't even close his eyes. 

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc I - The Egg of the King

Much like the television series that proceeds it - 1997's Berserk: The Sword-Wind Romance - Toshiyuki Kubooka and Studio 4°C's 2012 adaptation of Kentaro Miura's long-running manga has very little interest in the assured but episodic run-ins that introduced Monthly Animal House readers to Guts back in 1989. Kubooka's film elects instead to focus on a later, flashback, saga that explains - in part - how this monstrous mercenary was physically and mentally shaped. One enormous cleaver aside, Miura's conceptual coup was to place a brawny, Japanese presenting, street tough in a Medieval milieu. He stands out, his mere presence subversive. In this filmic context, Guts feels shaped by the titans of genre - the wandering Ronin or the spaghetti western bounty hunter - as well as the cocksure performances of Rutger Hauer (particularly when working with Paul Verhoeven), or the charming shitheads essayed by Bunta Sugawara. 

Miura was careful to temper this mountainous, swaggering, machismo with an obvious psychological damage that goes far beyond vague standbys like a fallen kingdom or a distanced love. Guts is clearly and explicitly portrayed as a product of abuse, a trauma reaching back into an (initially) unseen childhood that seems to be of a sexual nature. As an adult, manga Guts is able to withstand the lash and branding iron but is apoplectic when a sympathetic fairy places their tiny hand upon him. The nightmares Egg of the King uses to convey this information may be stuttering and deliberately incomplete, but there are glimpses of the genuine pain that underlines this person. Following a crucial defeat for the character, the film adopts a perspective derived directly from Guts. We watch through his eyes, seeing moments from a childhood in which he is threatened then abandoned; sold then horribly abused. Adults tower over this young boy, massive and physically repulsive, rendering him helpless. 

Although outwardly calm, Guts - in every medium - is wound up and broken, a character suffering in different temporal dimensions. The future black swordsman's presentation in The Egg of the King charts a simple growth, from a precociously powerful teen merc to a Captain in The Band of the Hawk, a company of highly successful child soldiers. Their leader, the outwardly beautiful and charismatic Griffith is, in his private moments, a creature of pure ambition. Although his troops love him, Griffith considers them in far starker, utilitarian, terms. The first in a three part series, Kubooka's film forgoes bigger and bigger plate armoured battles - staged earlier in the piece using jerky computer animation that reads like crude and unattractive puppetry - to narrow in on a personal moment for its denouement. An earwigged exchange between royalty and a would-be nobleman strikes at Guts in a way that this expert brute is completely unable to surmount. He is a tool, perceiving revelation in the unguarded boasts of another man who sees Guts' life in purely transactional terms.