Is ignorance bliss? I’m loving Richard Armitage in Castlevania

Trevor Belmont in Castlevania 1.2.

 

I did NOT predict this.

I wasn’t going to stay up all night, I was going to wait till tomorrow, but then I resubscribed to Netflix and screwed around for a while and one thing led to another and I was only going to watch one episode but then I watched two.

Take it for what it’s worth, because I don’t like vampire or Dracula stories — I don’t think I’ve ever read or watched one all the way through* — and my relationship with anime is extremely limited, cursory, sparse. So I’ve no clue about whether this is good or bad. I can’t venture to say what actual Castlevania fans will say about this.

However: it is fun to watch. Even though I do not like vampire or Dracula stories. I’m going to have to think about why that is — my best guess at this point is because it’s an odd combination of serious, ironic and silly. Yes, there are clichés, but they also make fun of the clichés (like a character asks Vlad Tepec if it was rude to eat garlic for dinner before she met up with him). The animation is, hmm, how do you describe animation? It’s dark and striking and you know it’s animation but it’s neither kitschy nor avant-garde. The story is very spare; not a lot of extra detail, so it concentrates on the essentials. But there are lots of amusing vignettes, like the bar scene in episode one.

And the character of Trevor Belmont? This is what I was not anticipating. He’s world-weary, sarcastic, and: funny. He’s like an ironic mélange of an aristocrat from a Georgette Heyer book and a hungover modern undergraduate and a superhero. I was not expecting a funny vampire-hunter. He swears a lot (a little too much for my taste, but I’m old). And he’s violent but after two episodes, not inordinately so. He has a constant, mildly annoyed, internal dialogue that we get to hear. And he’s a badass and I felt a certain humorous glee at watching him wield his whip.

I bet Richard Armitage enjoyed the hell out of voicing this project. He’s never gotten to be this sarcastic in his entire acting career.

Graham McTavish was good, too.

OK, now I am going to bed before I watch the other two episodes. So there’s something left to enjoy tomorrow.

Going to bed with a smile on my face.

 

***

[with the exception of the first Twilight film and the first two Twilight novels, because I was trying to find a common cultural language with my students about a decade ago.]

~ by Servetus on July 7, 2017.