Best movie of this year hands down!

Great Film overall

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

I have seen Black Butler's multiple seasons and am a faithful reader of the manga, but I am not the die hard fan that some reviewers on this website are, so I think that I can look at the film more objectively than they can in this brief run-through of the film:Black Butler is based on a manga of the same name by Yana Tsuboso. The original story is set in c. 1880s London revolving around a young earl named Ciel Phantomhive strikes a bargain with a demon so that, in exchange for his soul, the creature will act as his right-hand man as he tries to figure out who murdered his parents and sold him into slavery. The demon's name is Sebastian Michaelis and his capabilities far exceed that of a normal human being, naturally.The film twists all this into something that is half n half of "then and now". Instead of a young man, it is Ayame Goriki playing Shiori Genpou who nonetheless poses as a "young earl" as Kiyoharu Genpou in order to remain the head of her family's company (when it comes to realism, it makes sense she would do that). Her butler is Sebastian Michaelis, played by Hiro Mizushima, who isn't too hard on the eyes. Really, my eyes were drawn to Goriki and her honestly pretty well done acting. I could have been distracted by the fact that she had a really, really cute haircut, though.For all of my fellow Japanophiles, you're well aware of the fascination that Japan's fashion district has with European Victorian-era clothing, and the actors certainly seemed to have walked straight out of Shinjuku during a Lolita meet up. Very fashionable period pieces are featured by the actors, and the mansions and scenery is all very proper and European in nature, so much so that you forget the film is set in the present until you see a car or a cell phone in a new scene. The balance between past and present tips a bit in either's favor, sometimes becoming a bit unbalanced, sometimes just right so that I didn't feel too out of it while watching. The acting is fine and for the spin they put on the story it isn't too bad. The special effects are easy to see through (that fire in the opening scene was a bit laughable), and everyone's attempts to appear very proper and serious sometimes feel a bit over the top, but maybe that's because anime and manga is so dependent on extreme emotion that seeing it in live action just makes it hammy and melodramatic.Info-dumping and chatter is a problem this film has. When action is happening, it's all fun and entertaining. When the characters stop to stare moodily at each other an inform the viewer about what the deal is with everything, not even pretty actors can make the scenes that enjoyable...Don't listen to people who give this less than 5 stars. Simply judge it for yourself how it is. And if you don't feel satisfied with the story, think of the film as an overly long music video. It's certainly pretty and convoluted enough to act like one.

Oh...so many faillures that I don't know where to begin.... Well, I just couldn't even bring myself to watch the whole thing. I wasn't expecting the movie to be the exact representation of the anime version, but I did was expecting it to have the feel and look of it. For starters, the casting of the main characters was quite unfortunate.There is no chemistry between them and the girl doesn't have the fragile image needed to make the butler presence more powerful which is a key element since that goes with the balance of the character's psychology that plays with the irony that, while the Butler is the servant of the Master, the Master is totally dependant on the Butler and somehow slaved to him by contract. In the movie case he looks just a servant. The acting was even more cartoonish than the anime itself. The actor portraying Sebastian, did somewhat nicely but lacked the character's distinction and charm, not to speak the sensuality.This guy looks more like a hairdresser than a butler. He constantly reminded me of one of those old commercials that tries too hard to sell cheap bath soap to illiterate housewives. The girl doing Ciel's "impression" is kind of cute but nothing more, lacking just the same attributes as the guy playing Sebastian, but adding the even less forgivable sin of not looking stylished at all. Not even like a hairdresser. It is obvious that the movie budget couldn't afford much in costumes desing either. That top hat looks horrendous on her, not to mention the terrifiying ugliness of the gigantic, stiff bow she wears in one of the first scenes. I mean, in the anime /manga, Ciel's style is absolutely exquisite and precisely his impeccable style is part of how the character is perceived so, the fact that the costumes didn't match that takes away a lot. As for the soundtrack, it didn't do much for me either. The whole thing is an effing school play.

"Black Butler" is a beloved manga that my daughter and friends liked very much. So when a movie version came out, they were all excited to go see it. I have not read the manga "Kuroshitsuji" yet, so I felt I needed to see the film first myself before she does to see if it is okay for her age group. The local film classification board had rated it R- 13, but they had not been entirely consistent the way they classify films per appropriate age.The beginning narration sets the film in a near future time, when the world was divided into East and West. The West was headed by a Queen who sent her "watchdogs" to keep her enemies at check. In such a world, a "Demon's Curse" killer is going around killing diplomats by some sort of gruesome instant mummification process. Alarmed, the Queen chooses an orphaned aristocrat, Earl Genpo Kiyoharu, as her "watchdog" to get to the bottom of this matter. The young Earl has under his service a butler of many skills, Sebastian, who does whatever his young master wills him to. It turns out that Sebastian's talents are because of his demonic nature, for which the Earl will have to pay for with his soul. I believe that this film deviates much from the book by making Kiyoharu to be actually a girl Shiori pretending to be a boy in order to secretly exact revenge on her parents' killers. This also made it possible for a love angle to develop between master and servant, which of course was not in the original manga. The original setting in the manga was Victorian England, but here we only get the Victorian-looking grand manor and colorful gardens of the Genpo family instead.The opening sequence alone where Sebastian takes on an entire warehouse full of gangsters only with his butter knife sets the incredible whimsical tone for the whole film. There would be violent fight scenes, murder scenes, death scenes, as well as scenes of drug abuse, and the disturbing demonic subplot, which would automatically make this film rated R-16 in my book. In between these violent scenes though, the film's momentum dips a lot with long talky explanatory scenes.The acting department is on the campy side. The lead actors playing Sebastian and Kiyoharu are both androgynous-looking which seems to be the current rage among the younger generation. There was even more campy acting from the actors playing the clumsy maid Lynn and Kiyoharu's guardian, his Auntie Hanae. All the one-dimensional villains they faced also come from the same school of exaggerated campy acting.Overall, this is a confused film with a rather convoluted plot which did not have a clear direction that it wanted to take. If we were to only judge it with this film, it does make me wonder what those fans of the original manga loved in it. This film alone is occasionally entertaining anyway but it most probably could have been done or adapted much better than what came out now.

This movie is pretty much every little white girls dream on the anime and manga series spat into one big mess of a movie. Modern day setting? Check. Female Ciel? Check. Ciel and Sebastian love story? Check. I'm still scratching my head at how somebody sat down and thought that this would be a good addition to such a fantastic series and even worse at the fact that it got approved. It has no redeeming features, even if you try, like I did after the first 15 minutes, as a completely different movie not from the franchise. It is just all around bad. Want to watch a really bad movie that at least tried to keep in check with your favorite anime? go watch the death note movies. I would not recommend this even if you were on a death bed of bordem.