This animated feature is part of the larger Witcher fantasy franchise which started with short stories by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski and has evolved to survive on all manner of platforms, from video games and comics to live-action TV series and films. Thanks to the wealth of wiki knowledge out there, you can get the gist pretty quickly. There’s a dude with magical powers, fearsome pectorals (and the platinum hair of a Finnish metal band lead singer) named the Witcher, AKA Geralt (voiced here by Doug Cockle); he wanders around a medieval-ish countryside battling monsters, partly for hire and partly out of the goodness of his own gruff heart. He’s like a ronin or a knight or TV-show amateur detective of the Lovejoy vintage, but with a sword. Geralt’s wisecracking sidekick Jaskier (Joey Batey) is cowardly and comical, and plays a lute-like instrument on which he performs ballads celebrating Geralt’s heroics. We also meet (mostly in flashback) Geralt’s on-off romantic partner Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) who can visit his dreams in order to flirt with him, but she’s less of a big deal here than in other Witcher products.
Instead, Geralt and Jaskier wash up in a seaside kingdom where merpeople and regular humans are at loggerheads because the humans keep decimating the oyster beds in search of pearls. Shockingly, they don’t make use of the oysters as food, which depletes food sources for the various fantasy animals the merpeople feel are their buddies because they all live in the sea together. It’s the equivalent of a post-colonial western where the merfolk are the Native Americans and the humans are rapacious land-grabbing whites. But the script also threads in a star-crossed lovers’ story involving a mer-princess and a dopey human prince which plays out like a blend of Romeo and Juliet and The Little Mermaid. Plus, because no gen-Z skewed animation would be complete without a trans subtext, there’s a bit of that too at the end.
That said, all the biology and gender stuff is quite confusing here because at one point the mer-girl and human-boy fall out and she says she liked him better when they only “fucked and didn’t talk” – but then a big fuss is made about how they can’t marry because they couldn’t consummate their union, given the genital incompatibilities of fishy mer-bodies and human ones. Clearly, it’s best not to overthink any of this.
Like The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, an earlier feature animation also on Netflix, this was made at a Korean animation outfit called Studio Mir who do a pretty bang-up job of pitching the look between the prevailing animation styles of Europe and Asia, to create something highly exportable to every continent. Movements are very fluid, but expressions limited and there are buckets of cartoon gore, in a deep ruddy red that recalls mass-produced tonalities of fake Persian carpets.
• The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is on Netflix from 11 February.
