Starting with the customary lore-hosing and predicated on the usual tumescent brawls and characters declaiming their power moves, Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom is still a bit removed from your average battle anime. The first standalone film adapted from the high-fantasy novel and manga series that kicked off in 2010, it has a quaint courtly dialogue style and, alongside the punch-ups, a penchant for realpolitik intriguing that sets it apart.
Targeted for conquest by sharp-tailored demon Jaldabaoth (voiced by Masayuki Kato), the Sacred Kingdom is in a world of hurt. So its stressy head paladin Remedios Custodio (Hitomi Nabatame), against her instincts, heads for the neighbouring Sorcerer Kingdom to beg its king Ains Ooal Gown (Satoshi Hino) for reinforcements. Distrusting the undead liche wizard – actually an avatar for a player trapped in the online RPG Yggdrasil where all this takes place – she assigns her squire Neia (Yoshino Aoyama) to escort him.
Without this being Game of Thrones, there’s still a pleasing conviction to this roundelay of squabbling factions and unlikely alliances. Ains Ooal Gown turns out to be Skeletor with better politics: as interested in being a benevolent multiculturalist ruler to the demi-humans plaguing the Sacred Kingdom as to his human subjects. But though he strikes up a friendship with the timid Neia, he also has a pragmatic ruthlessness that permits him to sacrifice a single life to save the many. Albeit in garbled anime fashion, there’s a running thread here about leadership and justice to complement the smackdowns.
And when they do come, director Naoyuki Itô isn’t generally fixated on the violence – he rather often cuts away early, as if from a foregone conclusion. At least in this instalment, we never see the real-world frame story outside the game, but there’s a fatalistic sense that all this is being decided elsewhere. Coupled with expansive, heroic visual character-work, the film has a classiness that, with a bit more focus, could in future put it in Princess Mononoke territory.
• Overlord: The Sacred Kingdom is in UK cinemas from 8 November.
