Mark Reviews Movies: THE DEER KING

The Deer King, GKIDS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 13, 2022

The world of The Deer King, with its vast but conflicted empire and some scheming political intrigue, gives us a hint at how vague and generic Taku Kishimoto's screenplay will become. This is an animated adaptation of Nahoko Uehashi's series of fantasy novels. Either there isn't much meat on those bones, or something—or a lot—has been lost in Kishimoto's translation.

The plot features a variety of some potentially intriguing ideas—from those politics, to assorted elements of the supernatural, to a deadly epidemic that appears to be targeting only one group of people. In its ambitions to do so much, though, the story's shortcomings become far too apparent. It's difficult to do a lot when there's so little with which to work.

Directors Masashi Ando (a longtime animator in the world of anime, making his directorial debut) and Masayuki Miyaji (with a similar background as his colleague, although this is his sophomore feature) do try to add some depth here, if only in terms of the sights they and their team of artists present. There are some fine ones here. A tall, round castle rises amidst a barren valley of mountains and a rocky pass. The forests and fields surrounding this kingdom are rich in green and brown hues, and speaking of trees, one contains the body of an elderly man, who can communicate with wolves and whose eyes glow red within the bark of the tall, twisted tree.

There's something missing to the visuals of this movie, too, though. It's a flatness of sorts, which is hard to describe but is noticeable, regardless. The colors, which are all of natural origin, bleed together, and that means it often feels as we're only seeing a single plane of depth on screen. The backgrounds, in other words, seem to exist in a single dimension of space, so layers of trees and trees in the foreground of mountains and that castle against the sky seem to be the same distance as their own backdrops.

Perhaps that's a consequence of the movie's almost Impressionistic approach to those background details, since they stand in stark contrast to the thick, sharp lines that detail the characters in the foreground. Maybe some of the flashier elements required for the story, such as the thick and flowing mist of purple sickness that accompanies the wolves who carry the fatal plague, took up more of the filmmakers' attention. Whatever the reason may be, the movie's style comes across as shallow as its storytelling.

That story takes place a decade after a truce between two kingdoms, following a long war. The Empire of Zol now rules over the former kingdom of Aquafa, and the best way to communicate the simplicity of the history and politics of the movie's world is to point out that the Zolians wear blue, while the Aquafeese wear red.

One man of Aquafa is Van (voice of Shinichi Tsutsumi), who works in a salt mine with other prisoners of the conquering or righteous Zol (Again, the politics here are shaky at best). When a pack of wolves attack the mine, leaving behind lots of dead bodies from the canines' jaws or the deadly disease they carry, Van survives and escapes with a now twice-orphaned little girl named Yuna (voice of Hisui Kimura).

The two set off to find a peaceful life, and along the way, we discover that Van was a fearsome warrior—a member of the deer-riding Lone Antlers—and has lost his wife and son. It's strange how all of this, as well as his apparent immunity to the wolf-borne plague, turns our hero into a passive MacGuffin of sorts. The bite of one of those wolves does give him superpowers, but that's no real substitute for characterization.

A lot of people want Van out of the picture or just dead. Remnants of the Aquafeese power structure see him an obstacle to their plan to use the wolves to kill of the Zolians, since it historically had no effect on the Aquafeese people—except that it occasionally does now, which either makes their scheme worthless or renders everyone's hunt for Van unnecessary.

Some others want him alive and for their own purposes. A celebrated doctor named Hohsalle (voice of Ryoma Takeuchi) learns about Van's survival and resistance to the plague, so he sets out to find the escaped prisoner, hoping to make a cure from Van's blood. Meanwhile, the Aquafeese schemers send Sae (voice of Anne Watanabe), a tracker, to find and kill Van before their incompetent plan is wrecked.

There's a lot more plotting—including the goal of Ohma (voice of Hiroshi Naka), who comes from the clan controlling the wolves, to find Van to become the next leader of their tribe—and not much by way of exploring, explaining, or developing the specifics of this world or these characters. The story of The Deer King, then, ends up feeling like a collection of clichés, all-too-familiar plot points, and plenty of half-baked ideas than an actual narrative, and without the support of some memorable or potent visuals, the movie is little more than the sum of its incomplete parts.

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