Here we have the second instalment in the long undertaking of transposing the whole of Miura's manga in animation. This movie covers fewer events than the first one, but this is forced by the pacing of the manga: you cannot just stop telling a story at arbitrary points, you have to get to a local conclusion, or to a cliffhanger. This movie chooses the second option, reaching chapter 39 (if you've read it, you can easily check what I mean; if you haven't, I won't spoil it for you!). From the short preview we get at the end, they plan to cover about 40 or 50 chapters in the next movie; these first two covered about 20 chapters each, so I'm not sure how they can squeeze twice the story in the same length. We'll see in a few months: the third movie was release last February in Japan, and the delay for translation seems to be about a year.
As usual, we get our fair share of fighting: a full-scale cavalry engagement, an ambush, a duel. We see the effects and repercussions of Griffith's political machinations, reflected in the way Midlands' nobles treat the Band of the Hawk. And we also see a few sex and nudity scenes, but they're not gratuitous (thanks Miura!), they are all defining events for the characters involved, and crucial to the plot.
The main disappointment, again, is the quality of the computer-generated animation. Now, I understand that not everyone can get their hands on Weta-quality software, but if you are generating a battleground with thousand of people fighting on horseback, you should at least check that, in a long panning shot from above, you don't leave most of them immobile. Another offender: a ballroom full of dancing people, where you can see they're dancing only because the skirts expand and contract… On the whole it is a bit less jarring than the first movie, but it's still noticeably bad.
All in all, a solid middle-of-trilogy movie that confirms the ability of the studio to deliver a good adaptation.
