The Witcher will be on hiatus for more than a year by the time Season 2 hits Netflix and not a whole lot of details have dropped about what's in store, but that's fortunately not the case with the upcoming Witcher movie. Called The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, the movie will be an anime production centered on a character who didn't actually appear in The Witcher Season 1. Now, the Nightmare of the Wolf writer has dropped some details about what's in store, and Witcher fans have reasons to get excited.
Speaking with ComicBook.com about the movie, which will center on the witcher Vesemir years before Geralt entered the scene, Nightmare of the Wolf writer Beau DeMayo started out by clarifying its canon status:
The show is... It's funny because it's such a unique property. Because the show is based on the books and not the game. It's been an interesting thing to control that perspective, in terms of, we were looking at the books, always looking at the books. And there's always going to be some similarities because they're all coming from the same mothership, basically. But the anime itself, for as much as I can say about it, because as you know, Netflix, as well. It is definitely something that is in canon with our live action series.
Like the live-action show that took the world by storm (in good ways and bad) when it premiered back in December 2019, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf will be based on the books penned by Andrzej Sapkowski rather than the popular video games. The movie will also be canon to The Witcher, despite its anime status undoubtedly meaning that it’ll look quite different.
Of course, considering that the majority of the characters (if not all of them) will be different from The Witcher Season 1, the visual differences will be impossible to ignore. Vesemir will appear in The Witcher Season 2, but presumably much older than in Nightmare of the Wolf. That said, Beau DeMayo shared a way the anime format opens this Witcher story up to do something that just wouldn’t work in live action.
Beau DeMayo explained the upside of animation for The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf and how Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich approached him about the project:
I was aware when Lauren came and asked me to write it, what we could do in animation that you cannot do in live-action. There is not necessarily always parity between those two mediums. There are things that you can animate in an animated form that will look so amazing, so badass, that if you did it in action, in live-action, it's just going to look goofy or it's just going to register as a little false to the human eye.
Everything from the magical creatures to Geralt’s fighting style from the books had to be tweaked to be at least a little bit believable for Season 1 of the live-action show; viewers are generally willing to suspend their belief further for a project that is animated.
In fact, the anime style may be somewhat more similar to the video games insofar as what it can get away with visually. The story may adhere to the universe established by the books and the canon of The Witcher Season 1, but perhaps the animation will mean action more similar to the video games.
Find out when The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf debuts on Netflix! Unfortunately, the streaming giant hasn’t announced a release date for the anime movie, but my fingers are crossed that it will be available ahead of The Witcher Season 2, which won’t debut until some point in 2021.
For now, Witcher fans can fill the time by rewatching the first season, reading Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher novel saga, and/or checking out some other Netflix options.
