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Netflix’s Witcher Universe Keeps Shrinking
An enjoyable attempt to win back lapsed fans, the new animated movie Sirens of the Deep still feels like a dead end for the once-expansive franchise.
It’s an adaptation of a “A Little Sacrifice,” a well-liked short story from series creator Andrzej Sapkowski’s collection Sword of Destiny, which hews to a durable Witcher formula: Riff on a beloved fairytale — in this case, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” — but throw in Geralt to chop off some monster heads and say “hrm” a half-dozen times. Originally planned as a six-episode series, it was slashed down to four, with reshoots enlisting Minnie Driver as Seanchai, a shapeshifter whose main role was papering over the obvious holes in the story with exposition-laden voiceovers. And a string of reliably entertaining comic books, including one that reimagines Geralt as a ronin in a land of monsters drawn from Japanese folklore, prove that there’s still plenty of room for more experiments with the basic building blocks of the Witcher universe.
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