Netflix's The Liberator offers breathtaking animation, but it too often marginalizes its diverse characters

The Hollywood Reporter

The four-episode Netflix World War II miniseries filmed with a combination of live action and rotoscope animation was originally supposed to encompass eight episodes for History channel. "The process of trimming The Liberator down to four hours has resulted in what I'm almost certain is the exact opposite of what the creators initially intended," says Daniel Fienberg. "Instead of portraying a diverse gamut of men fighting for a country that, back home, put restrictions on their rights, it's the story of a doggedly determined white officer who believes that all soldiers are created equal and stands up to more racist authority figures so that his men can go out and put their lives in jeopardy. It's basically Glory, only in its two-hour running time, Glory was able to focus on Robert Gould Shaw and still give fully dimensional characters to at least a half-dozen of the Black soldiers under his command. The Liberator is Sparks' tale through and through. He gets hints of a backstory, a loving wife back home, countless scenes of noble heroism. Of his men, Samuel Coldfoot (Martin Sensmeier) and Able Gomez (Jose Miguel Vasquez) are probably the only two who make meaningful impressions."

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• The most effective moments of The Liberator take full advantage of the animation’s capabilities: "The animation of the characters is impressively detailed, but as directed by Triscope’s Grzegorz Jonkajtys, the medium’s real value comes forth in the series’ shocking bursts of gunfire, crimson explosions rolling over meadows, sweeping snowy vistas with terrified soldiers dotting the hillside," says Caroline Framke. "Perhaps it’s fitting that the scenes that once made The Liberator seem impossible to produce are the ones that eventually distinguish it from the countless other war stories from which the series draws, in the end, too much."
• The Liberator qualifies as an interesting experiment, but it tells its World War II story in a stiff, uninspired way
• The Liberator is a striking series with a distinctive visual style, a grainy graphic novel-style aesthetic
• The Liberator started out in 2013 as a live-action History channel project that would've cost $100 million to $150 million