Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King Review [Netflix]

Director: Ayataka Tanemura | Script: Johnny Onda, Ai Orii, Yuuki Tabata| Cast: Gakuto Kajiwara (Scion) (Asta), Chris Niosi (Scion) (Conrad), Ricco Fajardo (Scion) (Nozel Silva), ea | Time to play: 110 minutes | Year: 2023

Netflix has released more and more anime, Japanese animation in recent years. Like the fantasy series. black clover, which now has one hundred and seventy episodes. Because the characters have already been elaborated in the series, there are in the sequel Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King without a doubt, which makes this visual spectacle particularly uninteresting in terms of content.

Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King it has been postponed for a few months and this is clearly visible in the rare beautiful images presented to us. The movie is about a battle between the good wizards and the bad wizards. Battles (especially when there are multiple people with different types of magic in the party) are a feast for the eyes due to the colorful magic and unique design for each character. The ‘camera’ moves around a lot and while that makes for inventive images, it takes a while to get used to this style.

After the first few fights, it soon becomes clear that this is the only interesting thing the movie has to offer. Between the fights there are no fascinating moments that give the characters more depth or explain their relationships with each other. For example, if one of the good magical people loses her magic and the main character gets really mad about it, it’s hard to feel anything about it since the relationship between the two is unclear. As a result, no real tension is ever generated.

Long fights alternate with information dump scenes. These scenes are important to understanding the story, but they contain a lot of repetition and are therefore often boring. Other movies sometimes use visual creativity by telling information to offer something interesting to watch, but in this movie most of the information is conveyed by characters listening to other characters. This is especially unfortunate since the animation medium has much more freedom to do something visually interesting.

The visuals are excellent, although it’s a shame that the characters fight a lot at night, so the backgrounds tend to be dark and uninteresting, but the music could have been better. The music itself isn’t bad and fits the genre well, but there are a few moments where the music fits this particular movie. The best movie score ensures that no other piece of music would fit into a scene, but here almost every scene feels as if the music is the first slightly suitable sequence of notes they could find.

Fans of the series will be used to the battle-explanation-battle narrative structure, and will no longer be bothered by the inconsistency in the main character’s magical powers. But the lack of an interesting story raises the question of whether Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King it’s worth watching for the pretty visuals alone, for those who weren’t fans yet.

Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King can be seen in Netflix.