Kurukshetra is most compelling when it turns the Mahabharata’s eighteen-day war into a vivid battle spectacle. In Nandini Ramnath’s Scroll review, published 10 October 2025, the action and the epic’s moral questions stand out, while compressed storytelling and uneven visual characterization keep the series from becoming a consistently coherent character drama.
What is Kurukshetra about?
Netflix presents Kurukshetra: The Great War of Mahabharata as an animated series about the conflict between the Pandavas and Kauravas, told through different perspectives across the eighteen days of battle. It focuses on the war rather than attempting to recount the entire Mahabharata. Netflix lists 18 episodes and a 16+ rating on its official title page. Its 9 September 2025 announcement described a two-part release, with nine episodes in each part.
The production credits differ by source and role: Netflix names Ujaan Ganguly as writer and director, while Scroll credits Kaushik Ganguly as series director. Netflix’s announcement also credits creator Anu Sikka, production company Tipping Point, producers Alok Jain, Anu Sikka and Ajit Andhare, and official lyricist Gulzar. Netflix Series Head Tanya Bami called it “the first mythological anime from Netflix India”; that is her description of the project, not an independently established genre classification.
Does the story make the epic easy to follow?
Ramnath’s main reservation is that the series compresses a vast, layered epic into a concentrated war narrative. As the review describes it, the first season devotes nine episodes to nine characters, alternating battlefield action with flashbacks to events that shaped the conflict. That neat structure gives the story momentum, but the shifts in time and abbreviated memories can leave important motivations and emotional wounds underexplained.
#1 Best Overall
The result may be difficult in different ways for different viewers. Someone unfamiliar with the epic can struggle to connect the flashbacks and understand why characters act as they do. A viewer who knows the story may find that the short version skips over the context that gives familiar decisions their emotional weight. In the review’s assessment, the script sometimes moves ahead before either audience has enough time to absorb what is at stake.
How effective are the animation and battle scenes?
The series’ strongest case, in Ramnath’s view, is spectacle. Its fights bring fantastical imagery and video game-like thrills, and the chakravyuh sequence is singled out as particularly well rendered. The action gives the eighteen-day conflict a forceful visual shape even when the surrounding character drama feels compressed.
The visual design is less consistently successful. The review acknowledges that the animation is an improvement over Mahavatar Narasimha, but finds it less evocative than other detailed shows in the genre. It objects to the color palette, rubbery faces and robotic eyes, and notes that some secondary warriors are hard to distinguish. Those choices matter in a story built around many fighters and shifting points of view: visual scale alone cannot make every character memorable.
Does the series preserve the Mahabharata’s moral complexity?
Despite the simplified storytelling, the ethical tension survives. Netflix’s 30 September 2025 trailer announcement frames the series around clashing moral perspectives and quotes Krishna as saying, “This war has no friends or enemies.” That English wording is Netflix’s translation of a line in the series, not a quotation from the ancient epic.
For Ramnath, the later episodes become more interesting as the dilemmas beneath the fighting come into view. This is important to the review’s standard for an adaptation: the Mahabharata resists neat divisions between good and evil, because its characters are marked by frailty as well as conviction. The show can flatten that ambiguity when it rushes through motivation, but it does not erase it altogether.
Who is likely to enjoy Kurukshetra?
Viewers looking first for large-scale animated combat may find the series’ battlefield imagery the main draw. Those seeking a clear, deeply developed account of every character’s choices may be less satisfied by the rapid timeline shifts and short flashbacks. The review’s central distinction is not that the series lacks ideas, but that its spectacle is more immediately successful than its storytelling; its moral concerns register more fully as the episodes progress.
Rank #4
- Book Format: Hardcover with Jacket
- Publication Date: August 18, 2020
- ISBN Number: 9781683839200
- Page Count: 984
- Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 1.9 inches
For comparison with another Mahabharata adaptation, useful questions are how much of the epic it covers, how clearly it establishes character motivation, whether its visual designs distinguish the cast, and how well it holds on to moral ambiguity. Ramnath’s review offers those points of comparison, not a systematic ranking of adaptations.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Availability and languages
Netflix lists the series on its service and says offline downloads are available. The title page accessed for this review was Netflix Seychelles, where it listed original Hindi and English, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil audio, including Hindi audio description, plus English, French and Hindi subtitles. Catalog availability, languages and plan details can vary by territory, so check the listing for your region.
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Readers who want to explore the source epic can turn to a Mahabharata translation, but the reviewed sources do not establish a preferred edition or show that the series follows any particular translation.
Quick Recap
Sources
- Nandini Ramnath, Scroll review, 10 October 2025
- Netflix official title page
- Netflix announcement, 9 September 2025
- Netflix trailer announcement, 30 September 2025
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