Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Guts, an immensely strong sword-for-hire, has little direction in his life, simply fighting one battle after the next. However, this all changes suddenly when he meets and is bested by Griffith, a beautiful and charismatic young man who leads the Band of the Hawk mercenary army. After Guts joins the Band and the relationship between the two men begins to blossom, Casca, the tough, lone swordswoman in the Band of the Hawk, struggles to accept Guts and the influence he has on the world around her. While the two men begin to fight together, Griffith continues to rise to power, all seemingly in order to reach his mysterious, prophesied goals. What lengths will Guts and Griffith go to in order to reach these goals, and where will fate take the two men?
The first Golden Age Arc film adapts a beloved manga arc with reasonable faithfulness, but as a film it suffers from being an obvious chapter-one setup rather than a complete story. The plot is competent but compressed, losing some of the manga's character-building depth. The animation blends 2D and CG in a way that divides audiences — the CG action scenes are fluid but occasionally clash with the hand-drawn aesthetic, making the cinematography inconsistent rather than exceptional. Acting (voice work) is solid across the board without being remarkable. Novelty gets a middling score: the dark fantasy setting and Guts/Griffith dynamic are distinctive within anime, but this is an adaptation of existing material and the film format doesn't add much new to fans of the 1997 TV series. The ending is the weakest point — it simply stops mid-arc, functioning more as a prologue than a satisfying conclusion, leaving newcomers and veterans alike wanting more in an unsatisfying rather than tantalizing way.