Apr 4, 2026
As far as a strict, true-to-source anime telling of Three Kingdoms, it's hard to see anything topping this any time soon. Toei puts in excellent work on the animation, particularly in the large-scale battle scenes. The horses are all well-drawn. The backgrounds convey a sense of the time and place these events are taking place in well. This first film in the trilogy covers a pretty large amount of the source material, starting with the Yellow Turban rebellion and ending with Lu Bu's death.
To fit the entire first third of this story into 2 hours and 10 minutes, some plot points inevitably had to be
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cut, which in this case are done primarily to center the focus on Liu Bei and Cao Cao as the two main characters, and to show Liu Bei's virtue to the audience. To this end there are some interesting changes from the original Ming dynasty novel.
First, Liu Bei is given a love interest, Lihua, who he cares about deeply and who he risks his life to protect. This is obviously different from the original literary Liu Bei who famously did not really care about his family ("Brothers are like limbs, wives are like clothes"). My guess is that the point of making this change is to make Liu Bei seem more virtuous to a modern audience, although it might just be the writers thought it more entertaining to add this in. The second major change made is that Lu Bu is treated by the writers with extreme hostility. He is humiliated by Diaochan after killing Dong Zhuo and kills her in a fit of impotent rage. He does not make peace with Liu Bei and grant him Xiapi after seizing Xu province. He does not save Liu Bei from Yuan Shao's forces by shooting an arrow through the head of his halberd. He is killed trying to escape confinement, rather than executed on Liu Bei's recommendation. This is done to make Liu Bei seem more virtuous, and presumably to save on the runtime. The final, rather interesting change the story makes is that it includes a few interludes showing us Kongming's childhood and how his family is affected by the conflict, which are a nice touch.
Ultimately, for Three Kingdoms fans, this serves as a nice, relatively short telling of the epic story that hits most of the big memorable moments and is mostly faithful to the characters history and Luo Guanzhong have given us. For anime fans who are not already Three Kingdoms fans, this is a pretty decent entry point, because although it might seem confusing and rather daunting, almost every way to consume Three Kingdoms is, and you just have to toughen up and bear it and pay careful attention to understand who everyone is and what they are doing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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