Hellsing

As darkness creeps upon a quiet, unassuming village, the shadows carry a malevolent taint that corrupts everything it touches. Creatures of the night, undead phenoms that stand against God and everything humanity considers sacred, have emerged from the depths of hell to feast upon the living, and spread their ranks throughout the land. No mortal can stand against their demonic influence, not even the forces of man’s law... But luckily for one courageous spirit, there is one hope. For as Seras Victoria’s defiance runs thin, and her will is overcome by the glamour of an undead herald, a far more powerful demon steps in. Clad in red and calling himself Alucard, he offers Seras one final chance at salvation... With a catch. In saving her life, he has also been forced to end it, transforming her into a vampire, and just like her new master, she has been drafted by the Hellsing Organization, to rid the world of every fanged fiend that feasts on finer flesh. Before Seras can adapt to her new lot in life, all hell breaks loose from every possible angle, and along with the last saviors of humanity, she’s standing directly in its path.

While Hellsing Ultimate may have famously been produced by four different studios, the 2001 Hellsing was produced by Studio Gonzo, one of the most consistently inconsistent studios on the market. They have a reputation for issuing either lavish budgets or shoestring budgets on any anime they produce, and Hellsing is very clearly part of the lesser half. It does occasionally feel like the director is trying to use clever framing and cinematography to hide just how cheap they had to work, but that’s the exception, and not the rule. Characters barely move when they’re in motion, simple changes in posture look awkward and unnatural, and unless they’re doing some kind of cool shadowy zoom-out shot, just about every second of this anime looks about as animated as a cheap youtube parody cartoon They could have covered for this pretty easily by exploiting a dark and gothic atmosphere with just enough long, foreboding shots to build suspense between scares, but Hellsing is way more action than horror, and the material it’s based on is anything but subtle and suspenseful. There are anime out there that are able to pull off heart-pounding action with little money... Berserk and Peacemaker Kurogame are good examples... But I honestly don't know if Hellsing really had a fair chance.

The type of high-octane, gory action Hellsing calls for is normally far beyond the kind of budget they were working with, and it shows, not only in the breakneck pace of the editing that’s so sloppy you can’t always tell what’s happening between shots, but in the dull, lifeless backgrounds that never immerse you enough in the space the action is taking place in that you’re ever able to feel the gravity of the combat. A battle in the basement of the Hellsing estate might as well be taking place out on the street for all either location means to us. There’s also the color palette, which... Remember my Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust review, where I said the film came out right near the death of traditional hand-drawn animation, and it felt like watching the flame burn its brightest right before going out? Hellsing is the opposite, as it was produced in the earliest days of digital painting, and motherfucker is it easy to tell they were still figuring this shit out. The colors range from drab and pukey to bright and garish, clashing in all the wrong ways. This does no favors for the characters, who have all the over-the-top designs of their ultraviolent source material, and they all feel out of place with such tilted animation.

The soundtrack is really cool, at least when you’re listening to it on its own, a kind of folksy rock that always has some kind of experimental groove to it. Speaking of groove, the opening theme A World Without Labels is probably one of the grooviest anime openings you’ll ever hear, even if the English language lyrics are so heavily accented and incomprehensible that somebody once told me they were intentionally gibberish and I actually believed her for a few years. The ending theme is a bit more generic, but it’s pretty cool. The reason I say this soundtrack is cool on its own is because with the exception of the opening and closing, very little of it is actually used well in the show, either flying under the radar or clashing with the action onscreen to a highly distracting degree, partially thanks to the volume being cranked up at all the worst times.

The English dub is a mixed bag, but at least THIS element of the series is more mixed-to-positive than anything else. The most obvious note I can give is that Alucard himself sounds fucking amazing in both languages. Crispin Freeman and Joji Nakata each pull off their own legendary performance, basically defining their careers, which is insane given just how many awesome roles both actors have had. Freeman in particular does a lot of heavy lifting, and I honestly don’t think the series would have made the impact stateside that it did without his smooth yet gravely baritone as a sleazy immortal badass. Patrick Seitz does attempt to compete with him, playing one of his more promising enemies halfway through, but let’s just say the comparison ends about as well for him as his character’s final battle did. Aside from those two, however... Well, I'm honestly curious about how much money Pioneer paid to get Crispin Freeman for this project, the majority of Hellsing’s English cast either were at the time, or would always be, no-names and industry outsiders. The most noteworthy of this is Katie "KT" Gray, the iconic voice of Seras Victoria, who plays her with a uniquely pitched and downright adorable sincerity. Hailing from India, Gray had a handful of acting roles back in the day before continuing on as a very successful musician and author. She hits most of the notes for her character, and the only time she falters is in the laughably common moments where Seras has to cry out despairingly for someone who has just died or is in danger. I don’t know why, but she sounds so weirdly childish in those scenes. Other than that, she’s able to make her voice crack whenever she needs to insert some charm into an exchange, and while her accent doesn’t sound genuine, it’s enjoyable enough for it not to matter much.

Another example is Isaac Singleton, who had only done a few roles when his deep, throaty voice became the defining feature of the villain Incognito... And thankfully, unlike Gray, he actually did go on to become a prolific actor, voicing Thanos in a number of Marvel projects. Hell, according to IMDB, he has literally dozens of projects in either pre or post production right now. Steven Brant is a lifelong TV actor with almost no anime titles to his name, except for that one time he had an absolute blast playing the Scottish psychopath catholic Alexander Anderson, and on a similar note, Ralph Lister probably has the best English accent in the entire show, likely because it's the most natural, and he disappears into one of only a handful of anime roles in a long live saction career. Victoria Harwood also started out as a TV actor before the character of Integra(Integral?) Wingates Hellsing became her second AND second to last anime roles, and while the character is a tad inconsistent, she follows it just fine. There are a few bad apples in the bunch... Some really bad accents here and there... But the worst is probably Jan, played by another short-lived actor named Josh Philips. All I’m going to say about him is that I’m pretty sure he’s the only cast member who realized just how ridiculous the material was, and while I’m glad he had fun with it, he did NOT elevate the series.

Vampires have enjoyed a long and prosperous love affair with anime. While the Japanese do have their own stable full of culturally exclusive horror icons... I’m a die-hard fan of Kuchisake myself... They have borrowed classic western monsters before, and none of them have appeared in as many anime, nor as popularly, as vampires. Not even zombies, who went through a small boom a couple years ago. Hellsing is easily the most instantly recognizable vampire anime ever made, and it’s probably the first vampire anime you ever saw. I’d even go a step farther and suggest that quite a few people were introduced to the name Hellsing through its usage in this series, rather than as a part of deeper Dracula lore. Hellsing used to sit comfortably on top of the world in the hearts of otakus, so why has it slipped so far from public memory? Well, starting from the beginning, you’ve probably heard this story before. A new manga takes Japan by storm, and it’s so popular and shows so much financial promise that anime studios can’t wait until it’s finished to pick it up, so they start producing a series early. Then, when they catch up to the manga, they have to make a tough choice... Should they buy time with some anime-exclusive filler material and come back later, or should they veer off in another direction and just commit to telling a different story? For anime that choose the latter option, results are mixed, and the demand for a more faithful reboot become so strong that a second anime winds up getting made down the line, for better or worse.

So where exactly does Hellsing fall in this equation? Well, I should start by saying that personally, I don’t consider accuracy to necessarily be a mark of quality. It is entirely possible for the superior version of a story to be the one that breaks away from the intentions of the creator. In the case of Hellsing, I would very much like to drag this out and be all suspenseful and shit, but I’m sorry, this show is terrible. You may have picked up on that from my description of the visual quality, but hey, I’ve loved anime that looked like shit before. With Hellsing, though, its problems do not just run skin deep, this anime has some serious problems all the way down to its core. This series can only barely, and in the most charitable way, be referred to as a story. Rather than one overarching plot constructed of several smaller subplots that work together to build a strong narrative, Hellsing feels like it was cobbled together into a Frankenstein’s monster of stories and ideas from a longer narrative, all stitched together and compressed into one. It feels like every episode, a new threat appears, linked in some minimal way by the tenuous thread of some unknown force creating artificial vampires, but aside from that one bit of connective tissue, they could be swapped and randomly rearranged and it would make just as much sense. There are a wide range of characters who appear in this 13 episode series, and the only one of them who even KIND OF has an arc is Seras Victoria, and while she does make a decent enough cypher character, the idea of ‘newly turned vampire waging an internal struggle between their humanity and their new identity’ has been done to death, and she really doesn’t add anything to it.

It’s never entirely clear what’s at stake at any given moment outside of the lives of our protagonists, character motivations are inconsistent or in some cases just non-existent, and I can’t count the number of characters who are introduced to dump a load of exposition and then either die or fuck off soon afterwards. It honestly feels like all the villains are trying to do is taunt the Hellsing Organization for having shitty security. The idea that vampires can be created technologically is pretty stupid, but like, it’s not that big of a deal. I can deal with that for the same reason that I don’t get mad about the sparkly vampires in Twilight. Vampires don’t exist, which means if you’re going to use them, you can change them however you want, as long as you follow a consistent in-universe logic. For an example of inconsistent vampire logic would be like in Hotel Transylvania 2, where it’s established that vampires don’t show up on film, but then Mavis appears on a convenience store security camera later on. Now, vampires in Hellsing do show up on film, it’s never stated that they can’t, but sunlight? Oh, they play fast and loose with that shit. Alucard is constantly standing under or near open windows with the rays of the sun gleefully shining through, and Seras goes outside in broad daylight multiple times, with her only protection from the sun being a hat that doesn’t even cast a big enough shadow over her, and a pair of sunglasses. The same could be said for their enemies, too.

My biggest problem with Hellsing, however, is that I just don’t like most of the characters. Some of them have their moments, particularly Walter when he’s allowed to fight, and Integra when she’s being a stone cold badass, but the story arc surrounding Integra's 'sister' makes Walter look like a chump and undermines Integra's strength by forcing her into some creepy, cringey fanservice. Seras Victoria is fine, she’s likeable enough, but she kinda feels like an afterthought most of the time. The villains are all either bland or annoying, with their only distinctive qualities being their designs, and while I know I’m going to get roasted for this, I really don’t like Alucard. I don’t get why so many people despise Saitama for being overpowered as a joke, but they give Alucard a pass for being overpowered and playing it straight. Yeah, Vash is OP, but at least he's challenged by his need to prevent casualties, Alucard just spends the series moaning about how little challenge there is out there. I’ve heard he gets a lot more depth and nuance in the manga, and a lot of that does translate pretty well into Hellsing Ultimate... And hell, the abridged version actually gave him a personality! But in this particular incarnation, he just feels like an edgelord self-insert power fantasy. If you’ve ever played a session of Dungeons and Dragons where the DM had his own uber-powerful DMPC who everyone loved and was terrified of, and the DM would set up impossible challenges for you just to have his avatar swoop in at the last minute and save you, that’s what Alucard feels like to me, albeit without the airship.

It honestly feels like the people making this anime just didn’t give a flying fuck about it. It feels like it was produced specifically to advertise the manga. If that sounds unusual to you, well, it shouldn’t. It happens a lot more often than you’d think, and while most anime are at least subtle about it, there are cases where a ‘read the manga’ ending is entirely intentional. With Hellsing, I don’t know this for sure, but it genuinely feels like it was made on the cheap to push merch sales and drive up readership of the then ongoing manga, which is probably why it feels so stapled together, and why they didn’t even bother to resolve the plot about the V-chips. Yeah, that’s right, we never actually find out who was making the artificial vampires, or why, or even how, and while I know there’s no logical explanation for something like that, it’s a fucking vampire story, and made-up explanation is better than nothing. Instead, they trot out this boring alien-looking dude who’s supposed to be the answer to Alucard’s prayers for a real challenging opponent, and it just ends. With so much unresolved. I’m sorry, but Hellsing(2001) is a bloody mess, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Hellsing is available from Funimation, and while it has gone through many now out o print incarnations, most of them are still relatively easy to find on the cheap. The original manga is available stateside from Dark Horse, most recently in a very attractive omnibus form. Hellsing Ultimate is also available from Funimation.

Look, Hellsing Ultimate isn’t superior because it’s accurate to the source material. It’s superior because it’s fun, and it had the resources to tell the story in the way it deserved, with the right kind of over-the-top ultraviolent tone, and with the budget to not feel restrained. I guess I am glad this first anime exists, because it did get the word out about the franchise. It’s entirely possible that we never would have seen Hellsing Ultimate if the 2001 adaptation hadn’t laid the groundwork for the series, and it brought one scarlet-clad Dracula incarnation into the mainstream consciousness. The English dub is really strong, some of the dialogue is clever and witty, and of course, there are some very cool individual moments throughout, but they’re few and far between, and it is not worth wading through all of the crap to get there. Is there room for Hellsing(2001) in a world where Hellsing Ultimate exists? I mean, I guess so, but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend it.

I give Hellsing a 3/10.