Golden Kamuy (2024) review: The epic live-action anime with the search for a lost treasure, a prison break, samurai and angry bears

It is not always easy to get it right when marking a live action anime, or simply adapting a manga. Not all stories lend themselves to it and some end up going off the rails, but it doesn’t hurt to say that ‘Golden Kamuy’ has got it right with its live-action film.

Already with its premiere in Japan, ‘Golden Kamuy‘ worked wonders and even dethroned ‘Spy x Family Code: White’ as the queen of the box office. She now she has jumped to Netflixwhere it has already climbed to No. 2 of the most watched thanks to its mix of war films and adventure films.

Soldier searches for treasure

‘Golden Kamuy’ It starts after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and Saichi Sugimoto He is a surviving soldier now seeking his fortune in Hokkaido. That’s where he hears about an Ainu treasure that was stolen… And the map to find it is divided into 24 parts and tattooed on the bodies of 24 criminals who escaped from prison.

After being saved by Asirpa, an Ainu girl, the two agree to search for the treasure together. But many other factions are also after the gold, including several of the escaped prisoners and the seventh division of the imperial army.

‘Golden Kamuy’ starts directly in the middle of the job with its most warlike facet: in the middle of the trench and showing the brutality of Sugimoto’s past during the war. The movie of Shigeaki Kubo He knows how to balance these sequences very well, and although he takes certain liberties, he manages to stay on the realistic side, with the lore of Satoru Noda’s manga and its more adventuresome aspect.

Live action manages to balance all these facets very well, including the more histrionic touches of humor (and a little over the top) that seem taken directly from the manga with the calmer moments in which we meet Ainu culture by the hand of Asirpa.

Although where ‘Golden Kamuy’ shines most is in its moments of Unbridled action, including shootouts and chases with a certain Western flair and bare-knuckle fights on a moving sleigh and at full speed. And fights against bears, knowing ‘Golden Kamuy’ you can’t miss the bears looking for a fight.

Close to the manga, but without going too far

Although it’s not a multi-million dollar Hollywood movie,’Golden Kamuy’ gets the CGI surprisingly right. And on many occasions you can see the seams when using filters and environmental effects, but it especially achieves a good finish with creatures like the bears and Asirpa’s giant wolf.

The same goes for the costumes and characterization, which far from looking like a cosplay event (along the lines of ‘Yu Yu Hakusho’), less so in some notable exception ‘Golden Kamuy’ stays on the realistic side without taking you too much out of the movie with designs that are too grotesque to stay faithful to the manga.

Perhaps where it sins most is in everything it tries to encompass. Because although ‘Golden Kamuy’ focuses mainly on Sugimoto and Asirpa, we have a tremendous festival of characters with their own motivations… And they don’t stop coming. This cast of characters means that sometimes the plot becomes too chaotic and many end up in a mess. without finishing contributing too much. Because they give us plenty of action, but a large part of the characters are forgettable and pass without pain or glory.

Although of course, ‘Golden Kamuy’ is playing the long game and This first installment is just the beginning. The original manga by Satoru Noda has 31 volumes and the film does not at any point try to adapt the entire story, but rather is responsible for planting the seed and putting the players in their place.

‘Golden Kamuy’ It gives us a satisfactory closure, with a good resolution to the first conflict that has been building up throughout the film, but it also leaves us with the perfect hook for the future. And it’s ‘Golden Kamuy’ already has a live action series underway to continue the filma, and it will initially premiere in Japan in fall 2024. And if we can’t wait until then, we have the anime available on Crunchyroll.

Maybe this is one of the big drawbacks of the film, which perhaps would have worked better from the beginning as a series to be able to better dose the number of plots it handles. Although it is the perfect start to get into the plot of ‘Golden Kamuy’, fall deeply in love with its protagonists, and fully enter this frenetic search for treasure.

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