Geralt of Rivia has walked the many perilous paths of the Continent, and broken through in nearly every medium. Netflix’s new animated movie The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep fully brings him into the realm of animation, where the monster hunter, free of realistic physics, blasts fire from his hands and pummels sea monsters like he’s the Avatar from The Last Airbender.
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Cries of “Not my Geralt!” feel inevitable. Between Andrzej Sapkowski’s many novels, CD Projekt Red’s expansive video games, and Netflix’s mainstream (or as its critics would say, flattened) take on the material, every fan of the Witcher franchise comes to a screen adaptation with entirely different expectations. But Sirens of the Deep feels like the Witcher team cribbing from the right playbook, one that could bring everyone together: DC’s animated movie output. Like so many of Batman and Superman’s small-screen adventures over the last two decades, Sirens of the Deep is an excuse to do more with Geralt without the demands of four-quadrant expectations. Seeing him in action is a satisfying experience.
For Sirens of the Deep, writers Mike Ostrowski and Rae Benjamin (vets of the Netflix live-action series) draw from Sapkowski’s short story “A Little Sacrifice,” a riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” (That story can be found in Sapkowski’s collection Sword of Destiny.) The writing duo remain relatively faithful to Sapkowski’s story: While on the hunt for a monster, Geralt stumbles into rising political tension between the land-dwellers of Bremervoord and the merfolk of, uh, the ocean.
At the center of the conflict is the cross-species romance between Duke Agloval and the royal mermaid Sh’eenaz, a union both sides see as unholy. Geralt, along with Bremervoord native Jaskier (Joey Batey) and his old pal Essi the minstrel (Christina Wren), become de facto interpreters and peace brokers. But blood is inevitably spilled, as neither side wants to hear the argument for species coexistence, let alone a species-mixed marriage.
Even more than in their first Witcher prequel movie, Nightmare of the Wolf, director Kang Hei Chul and Studio Mir (The Legend of Korra, Young Justice, Harley Quinn) seize the animation medium as a chance to make The Witcher their own. The colors of the Continent pop beyond the blue hues of the live-action series, but feel more painterly than the AAA sheen of CDPR’s games. The sets, from seaside villages to underwater kingdoms, feel unrestrained by practical considerations — IRL builds or in-game physics. And Ostrowski and Benjamin are constantly veering from the grand to the intimate, threading Geralt’s relationship woes through battles with armored reptiles and a full-blown mer-war.
Nine-tenths of what makes a DC animated movie superior to other IP exercises with the same characters is the casting, from new voices to nostalgia plays. Sirens of the Deep excels on its voice performances. Doug Cockle, the Geralt of the Witcher games, returns to the role, though this movie never feels like an unplayable side quest, in part thanks to the delicate animation surrounding his talky down moments. Cockle has Geralt’s gravelly mumble down to a science; it’s like hearing Mark Hamill go back into Joker mode.
Sirens of the Deep finds connective tissue to the live-action series in Batey as Jaskier and a brief appearance from Anya Chalotra as Yennefer, but the newcomers get the most to chew on. Camrus Johnson as the smitten Duke Agloval and Emily Carey as Sh’eenaz, the no-BS mermaid princess, are delightfully insufferable as the Romeo and Juliet of the warring human and merfolk nations. Christina Wren (Will Trent) imbues Essi with some much-needed agency; she eventually falls for Geralt, in an arc lifted straight from the story, but she’s consistently commanding the room — a skilled bard who can spit fire. She wants to bed Geralt because she wants to bed Geralt, his mopiness notwithstanding.
Ostrowski and Benjamin make a few key changes to Sapkowski’s story, mostly for the better. The stakes feel higher, the scope feels fit for the medium, and the twists feel right for the times. The ending will likely be debated, and joining in on that conversation is a great excuse to read Sapkowski’s original story. But all in all, Sirens of the Deep is more Witcher — good Witcher! — and a story we’d likely never see on screen without this direct-to-video-brained experiment. Let this be an argument to keep making and building on Geralt’s animated adventures, and not just the project where they peak.
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is now on Netflix.
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