A Film Directed by Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji

Due to the critical and commercial successes of animated films produced by Studio Ghibli, you better believe that there’s going to be a lot of copycats out there. This isn’t a new thing either – films like 2006’s Origin: Spirits of the Past and 1986’s Elfie of the Blue Sea stick out to me, but there have even been films by prominent directors such Makoto Shinkai that revel in the sort of tropes one finds from the House Takahata and Miyazaki built. Don’t get me wrong, some truly good stuff can come out of this, but sadly you end up with movies like 2021’s The Deer King, a movie that could have been a modern classic if it wasn’t too busy attempting to be a weird semi-sequel or remake of Princess Mononoke.

“Following a brutal war, former soldier Van toils in a mine controlled by the ruling empire. One day, his solitary existence is upended when a pack of wild dogs carrying a deadly and incurable disease attack, leaving only Van and a young girl named Yuna as survivors. Finally free, the pair seek out a simple existence in the countryside but are pursued by nefarious forces. Intent on protecting Yuna at all costs, Van must uncover the true cause of the plague ravaging the kingdom—and its possible cure. The Deer King is a sweeping fantasy epic that marks the directing debut of Masashi Ando, whose work on such landmark films as Spirited Away, Paprika, and Your Name. helped shape the world of modern animation.”

I didn’t hate The Deer King, honestly, I was just somewhat disappointed by it at the end of the day. Curled up on my couch during a particularly bad bout of some sort of bug that was going around, it was the perfect time to dive in. I had been eyeballing the trailer for a while due to my recent GKIDS Films addiction, and was ready to be blown away. Maybe that was my problem – I think I accidentally overhyped myself before watching this. The Deer King is a competently made, very average anime with little sparks of greatness that peek through occasionally, but it never really quite “gets there”.

The Deer King is based on a 2014 fantasy novel series by Nahoko Uehashi and concerns the aftermath of a catastrophic almost-paranormal wolf-spread disease (Black Wolf Fever) sweeping across the known world. Two prisoners held in a slave camp, a warrior named Van and a young child named Yuna, are two of the only survivors of a massive attack as these diseased wolves swept into the city they were being held in and ravaged the mines the slaves were working in. Van realizes that his wolf bites do not actually hurt him, rather, he appears to have been granted some sort of mysterious power from them. With Yuna’s family dead, Van takes it upon himself to protect Yuna at all costs, ostensibly becoming her father. As with a handful of other things that came out in 2020-2, The Deer King somewhat accidentally capitalized on the Global Covid-19 Pandemic simply by virtue of releasing when it did.

You may have noticed that, upon reading the previous paragraph, it may have sounded vaguely similar to the award winning Hayao Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke. A main character tainted by some sort of disease that grants him immense power, one that rides on a deer as his chief form of transportation, supernatural wolves as an antagonist, and two warring armies fighting for control of the Kingdom everything is set in. Yup, most of these story beats are there.

While The Deer King isn’t entirely what I would consider a ripoff of the other film, it’s weird to me how similar they are, especially when you take into account that one of the film’s directors is none other than Masashi Ando, who worked in the Ghibli animation department on Princess Mononoke, and When Marnie Was There, while the other director, Masayuki Miyaji, was credited as assistant director on Spirited Away. This tidbit makes me pretty cynical about the intentions of this film, as it was almost like somebody wanted to finance a Ghibli clone. With that said, I did mention that this film is based on the plot of a novel series, and while I have not read these novels, they appear to not be dissimilar to the movie according to a Wikipedia synopsis.

I honestly feel that The Deer King should have either dropped a lot of the exposition, or been produced as a series rather than a film. I fully assume the books are way more detailed and a lot of that is lost here making parts of the film somewhat boring and making others zip quickly into scenes that are never fully fleshed out.

It’s not all doom and gloom with me regarding this film, as there was a lot that I loved about it. First and foremost, the animation is very well done, and character designs by Ando are great. Not only was Ando the co-director of the film, but he served as the film’s Chief Animation Director, Character Designer and Storyboarder. I’m a sucker for things that don’t look like “the norm” when it comes to animation, simply because it goes to show there was some sort of artistic vision in play. Every anime generation seems to have a homogenous style template that everything quickly snaps into, and we are still in the middle of one where character designs have become far more simplistic than in previous generations, almost reverting back to tropes from 1960’s and 70’s anime.

This trend is sort of like how every popular western cartoon seems to have a so-called “CalArts style”, a term coined to refer to a school most US animators come from, and describing the somewhat simplistic animation style plaguing 2010s cartoons, including Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, ThunderCats Roar, The Amazing World of Gumball, and more. With both trends, fans are starting to push back on what they see as lazy and childish artwork cynically trying to tap into success by riding the coattails of something else. While I have reservations on why The Deer King has the plot that it has, it definitely looks different than other anime, which is great.

Another strong point in the film is the relationship between Van and Yuna being a very compelling plot point and a core of wholesomeness you don’t see often in anime. Sure, it follows a trend of strong male protagonists taking care of adopted children made popular by productions such as The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, and even Logan, but I’m a sucker for that trope and it is well done here. Van is undoubtedly a badass character, fully capable of demolishing anyone he come across, but he feels bad for the plight that has been inflicted on Yuna and goes as far as basically becoming her father. She even refers to him as “Da-Da’ In the English dub. When folks get mad about the portrayal of “toxic masculinity” in the media, we need to be championing stories like this more often because you really can’t get much more manly than somebody willing to put his life on the line for a child he doesn’t even know.

I will say that the ending is not wholly satisfying and somewhat leaves a LOT of room for interpretation as to what actually happened to the characters. This is an issue with the film as a whole, as the second half of the film is where the film starts to really “speed up” causing the aforementioned issues that could have been alleviated with a longer runtime.

Overall, The Deer King is a decent film that could have been great. There are glimmers of awesomeness that are somewhat buried under things that don’t stick very well, and the whole thing would have likely made a better series than film. Without adding the background information and really setting the scene for what can be a somewhat political film, one is left with what I can best describe as a “Diet Ghibli” film that doesn’t hold up well, nor really have a spirit of its own. I loved things like the character designs and music, and want to see what Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji have up their sleeves next time. It looks he is working on the Hayao Miyazaki film, The Boy and the Heron, but he deserves another shot at directing for sure.

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