Netflix’s Bright is back, this time as a period-set anime with Simu Liu
David Ayer's Bright lives on as an anime set in Meiji-era Japan
Film News Netflix
Remember Bright? The 2017 Netflix movie directed by Suicide Squad’s David Ayer that starred Will Smith as a human cop in an alternate-universe Los Angeles full of fantasy creatures likes orcs and fairies? It was the biggest movie in the world for a time, back when streaming was seen as a refuge for the common man against “highbrow” critics (as star Joel Edgerton argued), and it’s a franchise-waiting-to-happen that Netflix has periodically promised will happen eventually. Well, the company finally made good on those threats: Next month, a new Bright spin-off movie called Bright: Samurai Soul will premiere on Netflix. Unlike the original, though, this one is an anime that “fuses the characteristics of Japanese woodblock art print with 3D CG technology” and takes place in Meiji-era Japan. That means no Will Smith, no LA, and not cops. Instead, it has a one-eyed ronin named Izou (played by Simu Liu from Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings in the English dub), an Orc thief named Raiden (played by Fred Mancuso), and an elf girl named Sonya (Yuzu Harada). The plot involves the three of them trying to keep a magic wand out of the hands of some bad guys who want to resurrect their Dark Lord. It seems like you probably could’ve told a story like this without attaching it to Bright, but that thing’s clearly not going to become a major film franchise on its own.
This trailer for the anime special shows off its intermittently interesting art style, which sometimes looks kind of rotoscope-y in a cool way and other times looks like every other anime-type thing on Netflix. Will highbrow critics hate it while real fans love it as much as the original Bright movie? We’ll know when it premieres on Netflix on October 12.
37 Comments
Fairy lives don’t matter today.
Hey, that line was fairy for its day.
Precisely as one does when the a film is the “biggest hit” in a studio’s history.
And millions of voices suddenly cried out “we demand more poorly-written rascist Orc fan fiction”
No people mocked it because the worldbuilding was lazy and relied entirely on poorly thought and lazy racial coding.Like, a world with dragons, orcs, elves, magic, etc. set in the modern day would look radically different than just our world but orcs are black people now.Take the Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik as an example, which is an alt-history series set during the Napoleonic War except dragons exist on nearly every continent. The Incan Empire still exists, albeit ravaged by plague, because their Incan dragons allowed them to force out the Spanish. China is still considered a major superpower in the early 18th Century since they breed unique dragons that can harness “divine wind”.
Yeah… you’d think they’d have gone with the fantasy races having their own actual cultures and even stereotypes but they just copied the usual real life ones and added makeup.
Even this one has me wondering why they went with Orcs and Elves again for Meiji-era Japan when you’d have the same story using culturally relevant mythological creatures. Make Raiden an oni and Sonya a random yokai type and you’d at least have gone for something beyond a time/culture-swapped repeat of a poor man’s Shadowrun.
Actually now I’m wondering if Ayer just wanted to do a Shadowrun movie and kept getting turned down.
I feel like I’m the only person who liked Bright. Or, at least I liked the potential for what Bright could be. The ethnic stereotypes are lazy and the “Fairy lives” line is HORRIBLE (both things that are hopefully weeded out with Landis being gone), but I actually like the world-building. You’re absolutely right in your criticisms that a world with all these fantasy beings would have developed very differently, but the conceit of “our modern world, but with orcs, elves, etc” is actually a really interesting premise to me, if only because I haven’t seen it done like this and opens up for a lot of interesting storytelling. I always thought of Bright as a shaky but promising pilot episode of a fantasy series that got wrongly developed as a standalone movie.
I didn’t think it was great by any means, and I felt the allegory was even more heavy-handed than Avatar’s (and that’s saying something), but it was fine (a nice way to kill an afternoon while I was procrastinating something I didn’t want to do), and competently acted and directed (unlike those Spy Kids movies my kids love). I could sort of see it as a start to a Dresden Files-ish series, but with Will Smith, that wasn’t going to happen. I definitely don’t get the outright hate for it.
Actually now I’m wondering if Ayer just wanted to do a Shadowrun movie and kept getting turned down.Having interacting with past and current FASA/Catalyst Game Labs staff and a few freelancers who have written for the game, this is very plausible.
It’s frankly a similar issue X-Men faces despite it handling prejudice better than pure horseshit like Bright. Like, yes, it’s a metaphor, but if any actual minority group had the ability to blow people up by looking at them then uh yeah maybe there should be means to keep that shit in check.Institutional racism and sexism and homophobia and such cause constant harm to people who aren’t hurting a soul, but a registry of folks who can disintegrate your skin by bumping into you sounds like a pretty good idea.
Yeah but than you run into putting people like Beak, who’s power is that he is a chicken man, on registry where he can be easily targeted by bigots…Hell, mutants like Jean Grey or Rogue in the Marvel Universe are kind of the exception to the rule. Most of them are like Beak or his family. Maybe a 20 or 30% of them have above average strength or flight powers but that’s pretty much it. And that leaves out the fact that there are hundreds of other non-mutant individuals in the Marvel Universe who got powers just as on par with the X-Men. If a mutant just wants to fly around or have a hamster head they shouldn’t be on some registry. They should be registered only if they decide to use their powers in a law enforcement capacity.
My point is that that’s still way different from how real-life discrimination works. We don’t live in a world where a certain percentage of Jewish people can manipulate the weather at whim, so comparing the discrimination of a group that does contain individuals with those abilities dilutes the notion that anti-Semitism is inherently abhorrent; distrusting mutants because you don’t know what their powers can do makes actual sense, unlike distrusting regular human beings.Take Nightcrawler; he’s discriminated against largely for his appearance, and that sucks, but he also happens to be able to go wherever he wants and only uses those powers for good by choice. If you see our boy Barnell on the street with a beak, sure, that might be the only mutation, but how do you know he can’t spit acid out of that beak?
Again, X-Men can speak on discrimination in broad strokes, and does so well with good writers. But it sorta falls apart as allegory when examined too closely, in the same way Bright falls apart as allegory when examined for like two seconds.
If you see our boy Barnell on the street with a beak, sure, that might be the only mutation, but how do you know he can’t spit acid out of that beak?uh, replace beak with “brown skin” and acid with “gun” and you’ve got every cop whose “feared for their lives”
The problem is that NO black person nor black people as a whole poses an existential threat to a white person like Magneto does to humanity, except in the fevered conspiratorial minds of Q-following shitheels. Which is the problem: the comparison. Like, Malcolm X had NOTHING on Magneto or Apocalypse or Scarlet Witch, in either power or intent. Fucking HITLER didn’t, even if you counted the entire Third Reich as being under his control. To some extent, that Earth or the universe even still EXISTS in either the Marvel and DC universes is because every single superpowered being somehow exerts a modicum of narratively convenient self-control that regular humans do not exhibit in the real world. In reality humans would (and perhaps should in that case) have no real say in what happens in the world, even if every superperson was a superhero: at the end of the day, our continued existence would be by their grace and discipline, and we would know it.
That doesn’t mean that, as Jhelter notes, that good stories about oppression can’t be or haven’t been told in this milieu. Far from it. I think the best depiction of it I’ve read (and to be fair, my comics experience is FAR more limited than yours) is from the X-Men issue of Kurt Busiek’s Marvels. There, it’s a story about how fear, hypocrisy and bigotry can infect even the seemingly most neutral and level-headed of us, and that our expression of it can cause irrevocable damage that will shame us now and perhaps for the rest of our lives, and potentially even after.
Otherwise, it’s fair to realize how often X-Men strays from its original themes to just depict standard superheroics and family melodrama, especially on the cosmic side (“JEAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!”-Every X-person and half the Avengers at least once in comics history, including Jean). Possibly because even the writers of X-Men knew how much the power fantasy of X-Men created narrative dissonance with its oppression discourse.
So I’ve actually thought a LOT about this topic (I may write about it formally one day), and I think it’s a good metaphor, in large part because of the things you point out. Xavier always has that line about the X-Men protecting a world that hates and fears them, and those two descriptions, “hate” and “fear” are the key. Racism/bigotry more or less boil down to those two things, and the key point is that they are both based on perception. In the US, anti-Black racism has used fear as a motivation/justification for hatred: Black men are criminals, predators, etc; the Black Panthers are the greatest domestic threat to national security (as J. Edgar Hoover said); BLM is a terrorist organization; CRT is brainwashing, etc. Racism/prejudice also takes the bad actions of a few and projects them onto the group as a whole to further justify targeting that group.
The X-Men/mutant story illustrates these things well. Yes, there are some mutants who can or even do threaten the world, but the Marvel Universe has a ton of beings or phenomena that are existentially dangerous, but only mutants are targeted as a group, even though the large majority of mutants are no more dangerous than the average person and many non-mutants are more powerful. Additionally, giving Magneto the power to destroy the world is an interesting experiment in “what if [insert marginalized group] was actually as dangerous as people say they are}? And as noted above, Magneto’s powers don’t justify forcing Beak to go on a registry that would put his life in danger, but that’s the result of (anti-mutant) prejudice. Sorry for the long reply, it’s nice to have a venue for these thoughts.
The one true chicken-human hybrid…
The thing about X-men is that they both existed in their own little bubble and participated in major crossover events. Like the whole registry thing should probably apply to all people with superpowers in the combined universe but people only outright hated and persecuted mutants. It was like a majority of the people in the setting treat mutants the same way J. Jonah Jameson treated Spider-Man. Even when mutants were depopulated down to 198, and put into a single location guarded by law enforcement agents in Sentinel-suits, mutants still had religious terrorists attacking with future-Sentinel tech. After all this time, it really doesn’t make sense. Hell, the entire multiverse was erased and the Fantastic Four had to rebuild the multiverse one reality at a time and the mutant hate is still a thing.
As I just said upthread, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I think the X-Men’s general “bubble” within the Marvel Universe fits the racism/bias metaphor well. Like, crazy or horrible things happen to mutants and in their communities but they go unnoticed by the larger society until it impacts them in some way (e.g. some mutant-centric crossover). And mutants are hated bc of their identity, and not their powers, as noted by the existence of non-mutants with equal power levels who are lauded as heroes.
Incidentally, I’ve always thought it was telling and appropriate that the heroes who are actively celebrated by the public in the Marvel Universe (like Cap and many of the Avengers or the Fantastic Four) are those whose origins are publicly known and who are publicly not mutants, whereas many of the non-mutant heroes who are feared or have more mixed public reaction (particularly Spider-Man, and Hulk during the early days) are those whose identities and origins are not public knowledge. My head-canon has been that the public doesn’t know whether or not these characters are mutants, and thus they are wary of them.
It’s one of the most mediocre movies of the late 90s.Seriously, had that whole Underworld/Blade urban fantasy schtick that was big in the late 90s, and the whole feel of it felt just like that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were just a script that’d been kicking around the studios since 1996, but th-SUDDENLY NINJA ELVES, MOTHERFUCKERS.
When I first saw the trailer for the original, I thought it was like Alien Nation or District 9: orca and elves magically showed up in our world and had been around for like a decade or so. Once I saw the movie and it revealed that orcs and elves had been around for as long as humans, the whole thing fell apart.
Bright was TERRIBLE.
It was also written by Max Landis, who did quite an impressive job of pissing away every bit of goodwill he got from Chronicle even before he got Me Too’d, just by being an all-around jackass. So not many people were in the mood to cut the movie any slack, and it turned out to really not deserve it.
Ugh, another asshole in the Landis family, I see. Screw them.
i used to have mutual friends with him on facebook and he used to go on (what i assume were drunken) tears late at night and then in the morning would have deleted everything he said.
On one hand I applaud Netflix’s willingess to take a gamble on weird, nerdy shit like this.
On the the hand please no not this specifically.
I actually liked Bright… just felt rushed. However the animation in this seems off and it’s not quite what I wanted for the franchise, so I’ll be skipping this.
no thanks
Anyone know if Landis gets any payout from this for being the original writer? If so I’m not touching it with a ten foot pole even for Simu Liu.
Man if I had made Bright, I would’ve made it so that every 15 minutes or so a character would shout “Change Races!”And then the plot would pick up from where it left off, but each character would be coded to some different race instantly.
I feel like that would’ve been worth $100 million.
You, uh, you work with a lotta mercury in your line of work?
I’ve heard the future is bright, but this is ridiculous…
*honk*
Raiden?Sonya? MORTAL KOMBAT!!!
Zima Blue? Oh, Sima Liu, nevermind.
Wait so a cop, an orc, and a little elf girl with a wand have to keep the wand from the bad guys? Does Bright only have the one storyline? Are we next going to get one about how a cop, an orc, and a little elf girl with a wand have to keep the wand from the bad guys but it’s Regency England?
A cop, and orc, and a little elf girl with a wand have to keep the wand from the bad guys… and it’s caveman times!
Every five years there is a movie everybody saw and nobody liked that gets a sequel nobody sees. We are nearing the end of just such a five year cycle. Thank you, Bright, for helping us all mark the passage of time.