Berserk: The Golden Age Arc

• 1. Introduction

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  Berserk: The Golden Age Arc arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 4th of February 2012, promising something the franchise had never attempted before: a feature-film retelling of its most celebrated story. Produced by Studio 4°C and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures Japan, this was not a single film but a planned trilogy adapting the Golden Age arc of Kentaro Miura's manga. Three questions hang over any project this ambitious. Can a sprawling, violent, emotionally complex saga survive compression into theatrical running times? Can new animators serve an existing cast of beloved characters? And when a third film arrives in February 2013 to close the story with scenes that traumatized readers for decades, will audiences be ready for what is coming?

• 2. From Page to Screen

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  The project was announced in September 2010, giving the studio roughly a year and a half before the first film reached theaters. Studio 4°C took on source material that had sustained a long-running television anime in the late 1990s, which meant the new films faced comparison from their very first frame. The Japanese voice cast was almost entirely recast. Hiroaki Iwanaga stepped in to voice Guts, replacing Nobutoshi Canna. Takahiro Sakurai took over Griffith from Toshiyuki Morikawa. Toa Yukinari voiced Casca in place of Yuko Miyamura. The English dub took the opposite approach: Marc Diraison as Guts, Kevin T. Collins as Griffith, and Carrie Keranen as Casca all reprised the exact roles they had played in the original anime, giving English-speaking audiences a thread of continuity the Japanese version deliberately cut.

• 3. The Shape of the Story

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  The first film, The Egg of the King, opens with a soldier named Guts killing an enemy champion during a siege, catching the eye of the mercenary Band of the Hawk and its leader, Griffith. Guts is defeated in single combat by Griffith and pressed into joining. The Band of the Hawk fights for the Kingdom of Midland in its Hundred Year War against the Tudor Empire, and Griffith climbs Midland's hierarchy battle by battle. A demon named Nosferatu Zodd appears during a siege and, noticing the pendant at Griffith's throat, warns Guts that Griffith will be his doom. A nobleman named Julius attempts to assassinate Griffith, and Griffith orders Guts to kill Julius in retaliation; Guts also kills Julius's young son. The second film, The Battle for Doldrey, released on the 23rd of June 2012, pivots around the capture of an impenetrable fortress and the war's end, before Guts defeats Griffith in a duel and walks away. Griffith, undone by the departure, is caught sleeping with the king's daughter, Charlotte, charged with treason, and thrown into a prison called the Tower of Rebirth while the Band of the Hawk is declared outlaw. The third film, The Advent, released on the 1st of February 2013, picks up a year later, when Guts returns to help free Griffith, only to find him tortured, mute, and barely alive. Griffith's pendant opens a portal to another dimension during a solar eclipse, where an assembly of archdemons called the God Hand tells Griffith his suffering has been the price of admission to their ranks. He agrees, sacrificing his former comrades to be reborn as a being named Femto.

• 4. Sound and Music

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  Shiro Sagisu composed and arranged the soundtracks for all three films, while Susumu Hirasawa wrote the trilogy's theme song. Hirasawa also performed the insert song "Aria," which runs through all three films; a live recording from a concert called Phonon 2555 Vision was included on the home video release of the second film. The first film's ending theme took a deliberately different direction: performed by Japanese-American singer-songwriter Ai in what was described as an uncharacteristic epic ballad style, it was composed by Rykeyz and Redd Styiez. The third film closed with "Breakthrough," performed by Kaname Kawabata of the group CHEMISTRY, written by Kawabata alongside Hidenori Tanaka and an artist credited as UTA, and arranged by Sagisu, Miho Hazama, and CHOKKAKU. A special television program summarizing the first two films, narrated by Akio Otsuka, who voiced the Skull Knight, used a Hirasawa track from The Secret of the Flowers of Phenomenon as its closing music.

• 5. Critical Divisions

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  Ko Ransom of Anime News Network awarded The Egg of the King a B+ and called it a concise, well-adapted action tale full of intriguing characters, while acknowledging the decision to rely heavily on computer-generated imagery dragged the production down. Carl Kimlinger of the same publication gave both the Japanese version and the English dub of the first film a B, writing that it was a good, rousing film but a truncated one, falling somewhere between the full version of Guts's saga and a condensed retelling. Hugo Ozman of ScreenAnarchy called it one of the best animated action films of recent years. Richard Eisenbeis took a harsher view, calling The Egg of the King an ugly, poorly-paced wreck of cinematography that succeeded as an adaptation but failed as filmmaking. Dallas Marshall of THEM Anime Reviews gave it 3 out of 5 and argued it could have been great with more care given to the art and character development. Eisenbeis reversed course on the second film, calling The Battle for Doldrey a great improvement over its predecessor in every conceivable way. Darius Washington, reviewing both first and second films together, found they carried a good balance of action and character development but felt the cleanliness of the animation softened the grit that the original television series had. Rebecca Silverman of Anime News Network gave The Battle for Doldrey a C+, citing both the CG animation and what she called pervasive misogyny, while commending the character development and voice acting. Kimlinger dropped to a C for the Japanese version and a C+ for its English dub. On the third film, Eisenbeis made his most striking claim: he labeled The Advent the most graphic mainstream anime film he had ever seen, arguing it delivered an experience surpassing even the original manga in emotional turmoil and violence. Kimlinger, for his part, deemed The Advent an inferior and redundant movie, awarding the Japanese version a C+ and the English dub a B-.

• 6. Box Office and Beyond

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  In Japan, The Egg of the King opened to $594,707 and finished with a gross of $1,348,352. The third film earned less, with an opening weekend of $280,248 and a total gross of $399,445. In North America, Viz Media licensed all three films for home video. The Egg of the King arrived on the 27th of November 2012, The Battle for Doldrey on the 6th of August 2013, and The Advent on the 15th of April 2014. The trilogy also became available for streaming on Netflix. The story did not end with home video. In June 2022, it was announced that the three films would be reworked into a television broadcast version titled Memorial Edition, directed by Yuta Sano. The series was showcased at Aniplex Online Fest 2022 on the 23rd of September 2022 and ran for 13 episodes, incorporating new scenes alongside the original footage. It broadcast on Tokyo MX, Tochigi TV, Gunma TV, BS11, and other networks from the 2nd of October to the 25th of December 2022. Outside Asia it streamed via Crunchyroll. The Memorial Edition episodes were collected on a Blu-ray set released on the 29th of March 2023, featuring an exclusive ending theme by Mika Nakashima titled "Wish," alongside new music contributed by both Sagisu and Hirasawa.