The Deer King looks great (and has a lovely score) but it’s repetitive, predictable, and downright dull three things that can almost never be said about the animation house that so clearly inspired it.
Masashi Andō did not mean to make a movie about the COVID pandemic when he started work on The Deer King. The story, after all, is taken from a fantasy novel series by Nahoko Uehashi that was published back in 2014, and the film was announced in 2018. However, as this animated film premieres in AMC theaters in