Official Trailer

"The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf is an upcoming South Korean-American adult animated dark fantasy film for Netflix.
The film serves as a spin-off of the Netflix live-action series and focuses on the origin story of Geralt's mentor and fellow witcher Vesemir. The film is scheduled to premiere on August 23, 2021."

Because when you have something so inherently European, what you really need is to turn it into an anime >rollsyeys<

It's really quite incredible how quickly and utterly Netflix managed to turn the Witcher into this completely generic fantasy pulp with no discernable look, voice or feel of its own.

Almost made me think it was made by the same people as the Castlevania series, but apparently the film is made by a South Korean studio.

Either way, it doesn't look too shabby.

Looks good and I like the clean animation style.

It looks quite solid, but I see one big problem: I don't like anime. :) It's not my style unfortunately. Those who love it, will enjoy this one as well I presume.

You're in luck. This doesn't fit any of the usual criteria for anime. The characters are fully-formed, the environment is fully formed and dynamic. It seems to be done at a full frame rate. It doesn't seem to reuse frames. Anime is just one subset of animation, and this preview ain't it.

EDIT: I guess there are stop images. But hey, you can't fully-budget everything.

Exactly. I also can't stand anime, and don't really care if this technically qualifies or not... it still looks anime enough for me to find it ugly. Sure, not as bad assome others, but still. I could maybe try to ignore if it didn't look so painfully generic, but as is, I can't be arsed.

I suppose you could theoretically call it Anime since it's made in Korea but I see some heavy "western" influences. Which is only good in my opinion. Not only "westenr" influences in Asian Manga and Anime but as we have seen "eastern" infuences in "western" Graphical Novels, Cartoons and Digital Art in general.

Does it matter much where it was made or by who if it's well made?

It's not a matter of where it was made. Look at Dark Souls for example. It was made in Japan, but the aesthetic is clearly western and I had no problems playing it. The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf didn't get rid of its anime heritage fully and you can feel it. That's where I see problem. Of course people who like this kind of aesthetic will like the animated series as well. It's just not my thing.

I wouldn't call Dark Souls a "western" aestetics since we can't even see the faces for the most part. I'd say it has it's own quite unique look. Something like Warframe. At least I couldn't pin down where either of them would be in the East-West continuum. What makes it even harder is that there isn't just one "eastern" or one "western" look. There are hundreds of styles wether they are "clean" or "messy", "slender" or "bulky". So when you say "this kind of aesthetic" I don't quite get what aestetic you have in mind? Especially since we have had "eastern" influence in our "western" media for at least some couple of decades.

You're missing out on a few classics of modern cinema (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, selected titles from the Ghibli catalogue, etc) if you pass on the genre in general, though.

As for the Nightmare of the Wolf - I'll probably give it a chance.
Going by the trailer this could turn out to be more faithful to the source material (in terms of tone and look & feel at least) than the live action series, which, to me is too much Hollywood and too little Slavic/European.

If the voice actor had a gruffer tone, this would have ended being a Deus Ex crossover. The guy surely is a Adam "I never asked for this" Jensen lookalike.

It's not easy to explain this. What I had in mind was mostly atmosphere and style. I still think that Dark Souls lacks the specific Japanese style which is seen in many games, tv series etc. Maybe the atmosphere isn't clearly western either, but I can see for example medieval European influences in the series. As for the influence on western media, yes, it's there and even I think that it's not always bad.
Yeah, I'm fully aware of that. What more, you can call me faithless, because I actually liked the Ghost in the Shell movie from 2017. ;) Never watched the original anime though, nor read the comic book.