Oh deer
"[This thing] is like [this other thing]" is tawdry, cheap criticism, and when the things are both from a foreign culture to the critic writing the comparison, it is tawdry, cheap, and risks revealing a profound ignorance and limited frame of reference. Granting that, The Deer King is very much like Princess Mononoke. To pretend otherwise would be like trying to write a review of The Wizard of Oz that scrupulously avoids mentioning Technicolor or Harold Arlen's music - it is so obviously like Princess Mononoke that to avoid making the comparison out of some dull instinct that one mustn't say the self-evident thing would make it next to impossible to actually describe the impact of the film. And The Deer King comes by it honestly, anyways: one of the film's two directors, Ando Masashi, was a character designer on that 1997 Studio Ghibli film (and he is the character designer here), and served some role as animator, animation director, or character designer on virtually every single Studio Ghibli film between 1991 and 2014 besides that.* The other director, Miyaji Masayuki, didn't work on Princess Mononoke on account of still being in art school when it was being produced, but he did go to Studio Ghibli directly after graduating, and served as Miyazaki Hayao's assistant director on the 2001 feature Spirited Away.
Now, this extreme familiarity is, to a certain extent, only surface-level; that is to say, the resemblance between the films is overwhelmingly due a visual style that has been ported over almost perfectly intact, and a stately, elegiac tone of grave disappointment in humanity's propensity for war and living apart from nature. The actual story of The Deer Hunter is actually taken from a pair of prose novels by Uehashi Nahoko, both initially published in 2014, and as adapted into a screenplay by Kishimoto Taku feels less particularly indebted to any one thing in particular. This is for the not-entirely-great reason that what it mostly resembles is a generic template for a high fantasy novel, with only a few specific details that feel like they veer even a tiny bit from the path of least resistance. So we're in some region of forests and mountains, where two nations have been at war. The victorious nation is the Empire of Zol, which has completely subjugated the Aquafa people, except for a small territory controlled by the Fire Horse people. This territory is also the source of packs of ossam, wild dogs carrying Black Wolf Fever or mittsual, a deadly plague that mysteriously only affects the Zolians, but not the Aquafaese. And with that all provided in a big chunk of onscreen text at the start, we can dig into the smaller-scale plot of Van Lone Antler (Tsutsumi Shinichi), an Aquafaese slave working in a Zol mine. During an attack on the mine by the wild dogs, he manages to escape with the only other survivor: a baby girl. He also suffers a bit from one dog, and this proves to imbue him with a strange magic power that allows him to manipulate all kinds of stuff.
Flash forward a bit, and Van and the baby, now grown into a young girl named Yuna (Kimura Hisui), live in the countryside herding the wild deer, pyuika, which are the source of the milk that's a key part of the Aquafaese diet. His powers make him supernaturally good at this, good enough to be "the deer king" if you will. And there are people who absolutely will, because "The Deer King" is also the name of the ruler of the Fire Horse Territory, and thus the controller of the ossam, and if Van can take control of those animals, he could either end the mittsual plague, or use it to completely obliterate the Zolians, depending on which side gets to him first. But he just wants to live alone peacefully with Yuna, forming a quiet little ad hoc family to replace the ones that both he and the girl lost violently in the wars.
The first half of The Deer King, which runs to 113 minutes, mostly focus just on Van's pastoral retreat from the world, and for the most part it's pretty damn good. The upshot to stealing blatantly from one of Studio Ghibli's most polished and handsome films is that this is all incredibly gorgeous. More so in the backgrounds and lighting effects than in the character design and animation; indeed, given Ando's legendary career in character design, it's more than slightly disappointing how largely generic these characters look. They're "distinct", but in an unmistakably generic way, like Van's square face makes him stand out from the rest of the cast while also making him look somewhat unimaginatively like The Taciturn Hero, and so on. They also move rather stiffly - there's an old-school feeling to it all, a return to the days when Japanese animation was extremely limited and damn proud of that fact. And this is charming in its way, but there's just so little expression involved; these are stock figures enacting stock situations, not vivid characters with nuanced emotions, and that very much manifests in the simple, direct ways they're animated.
But "bland characters, incredible backgrounds" is one of the founding aesthetics of Japanese animation, and good God does The Deer King have some incredible backgrounds. Much like the rest of the film's design, there's a distinctly old-fashioned feeling to them: there's very overt use of 3-D computer models to give everything depth and volume (maybe none whatsoever, even), as has become somewhat more common in anime in the last decade or so. Instead, everything is painted flat, and even when there are multiplanar effects, it's very clearly these flat drawings moving against each other, with no sense of actual depth. It contributes mightily to the classic Studio Ghibli mood that the whole film puts off, and it allows for environments that are rich and painterly in their luxurious details of natural features and lighting. Especially lighting. Much of the pleasure of The Deer King's visuals is entirely a matter of well-placed streamers of light emerging between trees and around the edges of mountains.
And so, as I was saying, the first hour just allows us to soak all of this in, dwelling in the film's immaculately lovely aesthetic while watching Van inhabit space comfortably and casually. It's unforced and easy, relaxing with just enough sense of melancholy and loss that we never forget that this is all meant to be sad, and while that's the film's mood, it's quite good - certainly good enough for any other grousing to feel just a bit nitpicky and small-minded. But then the second hour comes along, and the filmmakers apparently realise that they haven't actually put too much narrative into their epic war fantasy, and had best start cramming it in as fast as possible.
The result is a rushed, messy, and at times confusing compression of what feels like an entire book's worth of story into about 30 minutes. The Zolian politicking that has murmured along in a subplot suddenly becomes urgent; an entirely new subplot involving the Fire Horse people is dropped in and accelerated up to speed much too quickly, so that it's almost impossible to figure out what the hell is motivating a brand new character who seems to serve from ally to antagonist multiple times, based solely on what will shove the plot forward fastest. The last third of The Deer King is, frankly, terrible as a story: still very lovely to look at, and it benefits in that respect from having more of the hazy effects animation of Van's magic powers and the purple smoke of the mittsual. But damn near impenetrable at the level of "what is happening and why do I care?" In this regard, Ando and Miyaji's attempt to minutely replicate the look of Princess Mononoke ends up feeling even worse, since it becomes clear at this point that they're only interested in the look of things, and seem to have absolutely no handle on storytelling at all. And so we get a film that's too beautiful to dismiss, but perhaps not actually watchable. The technique is so handsome that I'm still inclined to say that it's worth it for fans of Japanese animation, but God knows, not for anybody else.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*He also worked three times with the great Kon Satoshi, and served as animation director on such crucially important films as 2006's Tekkonkinkreet and 2016's Your Name. - I should probably just cut to the chase and say that he's an honest-to-God legend in the industry, and that still feels like it's underselling the imposing quality of his CV.
Now, this extreme familiarity is, to a certain extent, only surface-level; that is to say, the resemblance between the films is overwhelmingly due a visual style that has been ported over almost perfectly intact, and a stately, elegiac tone of grave disappointment in humanity's propensity for war and living apart from nature. The actual story of The Deer Hunter is actually taken from a pair of prose novels by Uehashi Nahoko, both initially published in 2014, and as adapted into a screenplay by Kishimoto Taku feels less particularly indebted to any one thing in particular. This is for the not-entirely-great reason that what it mostly resembles is a generic template for a high fantasy novel, with only a few specific details that feel like they veer even a tiny bit from the path of least resistance. So we're in some region of forests and mountains, where two nations have been at war. The victorious nation is the Empire of Zol, which has completely subjugated the Aquafa people, except for a small territory controlled by the Fire Horse people. This territory is also the source of packs of ossam, wild dogs carrying Black Wolf Fever or mittsual, a deadly plague that mysteriously only affects the Zolians, but not the Aquafaese. And with that all provided in a big chunk of onscreen text at the start, we can dig into the smaller-scale plot of Van Lone Antler (Tsutsumi Shinichi), an Aquafaese slave working in a Zol mine. During an attack on the mine by the wild dogs, he manages to escape with the only other survivor: a baby girl. He also suffers a bit from one dog, and this proves to imbue him with a strange magic power that allows him to manipulate all kinds of stuff.
Flash forward a bit, and Van and the baby, now grown into a young girl named Yuna (Kimura Hisui), live in the countryside herding the wild deer, pyuika, which are the source of the milk that's a key part of the Aquafaese diet. His powers make him supernaturally good at this, good enough to be "the deer king" if you will. And there are people who absolutely will, because "The Deer King" is also the name of the ruler of the Fire Horse Territory, and thus the controller of the ossam, and if Van can take control of those animals, he could either end the mittsual plague, or use it to completely obliterate the Zolians, depending on which side gets to him first. But he just wants to live alone peacefully with Yuna, forming a quiet little ad hoc family to replace the ones that both he and the girl lost violently in the wars.
The first half of The Deer King, which runs to 113 minutes, mostly focus just on Van's pastoral retreat from the world, and for the most part it's pretty damn good. The upshot to stealing blatantly from one of Studio Ghibli's most polished and handsome films is that this is all incredibly gorgeous. More so in the backgrounds and lighting effects than in the character design and animation; indeed, given Ando's legendary career in character design, it's more than slightly disappointing how largely generic these characters look. They're "distinct", but in an unmistakably generic way, like Van's square face makes him stand out from the rest of the cast while also making him look somewhat unimaginatively like The Taciturn Hero, and so on. They also move rather stiffly - there's an old-school feeling to it all, a return to the days when Japanese animation was extremely limited and damn proud of that fact. And this is charming in its way, but there's just so little expression involved; these are stock figures enacting stock situations, not vivid characters with nuanced emotions, and that very much manifests in the simple, direct ways they're animated.
But "bland characters, incredible backgrounds" is one of the founding aesthetics of Japanese animation, and good God does The Deer King have some incredible backgrounds. Much like the rest of the film's design, there's a distinctly old-fashioned feeling to them: there's very overt use of 3-D computer models to give everything depth and volume (maybe none whatsoever, even), as has become somewhat more common in anime in the last decade or so. Instead, everything is painted flat, and even when there are multiplanar effects, it's very clearly these flat drawings moving against each other, with no sense of actual depth. It contributes mightily to the classic Studio Ghibli mood that the whole film puts off, and it allows for environments that are rich and painterly in their luxurious details of natural features and lighting. Especially lighting. Much of the pleasure of The Deer King's visuals is entirely a matter of well-placed streamers of light emerging between trees and around the edges of mountains.
And so, as I was saying, the first hour just allows us to soak all of this in, dwelling in the film's immaculately lovely aesthetic while watching Van inhabit space comfortably and casually. It's unforced and easy, relaxing with just enough sense of melancholy and loss that we never forget that this is all meant to be sad, and while that's the film's mood, it's quite good - certainly good enough for any other grousing to feel just a bit nitpicky and small-minded. But then the second hour comes along, and the filmmakers apparently realise that they haven't actually put too much narrative into their epic war fantasy, and had best start cramming it in as fast as possible.
The result is a rushed, messy, and at times confusing compression of what feels like an entire book's worth of story into about 30 minutes. The Zolian politicking that has murmured along in a subplot suddenly becomes urgent; an entirely new subplot involving the Fire Horse people is dropped in and accelerated up to speed much too quickly, so that it's almost impossible to figure out what the hell is motivating a brand new character who seems to serve from ally to antagonist multiple times, based solely on what will shove the plot forward fastest. The last third of The Deer King is, frankly, terrible as a story: still very lovely to look at, and it benefits in that respect from having more of the hazy effects animation of Van's magic powers and the purple smoke of the mittsual. But damn near impenetrable at the level of "what is happening and why do I care?" In this regard, Ando and Miyaji's attempt to minutely replicate the look of Princess Mononoke ends up feeling even worse, since it becomes clear at this point that they're only interested in the look of things, and seem to have absolutely no handle on storytelling at all. And so we get a film that's too beautiful to dismiss, but perhaps not actually watchable. The technique is so handsome that I'm still inclined to say that it's worth it for fans of Japanese animation, but God knows, not for anybody else.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*He also worked three times with the great Kon Satoshi, and served as animation director on such crucially important films as 2006's Tekkonkinkreet and 2016's Your Name. - I should probably just cut to the chase and say that he's an honest-to-God legend in the industry, and that still feels like it's underselling the imposing quality of his CV.
Categories: action, adventure, animation, fantasy, japanese cinema
