Halloween Party: Hellboy Animated-Sword of Storms
With both Marvel and DC - the “big two” of the comic book world - now in the business of making animated movies based on their properties, it could be easy to forget they aren’t the only two players in this game. The new Hellboy Animated series of films seems to exist somewhere between the Dark Horse comic book and the big-screen live-action film. With two films out already, Sword of Swords and Blood and Iron, and a third (The Phantom Claw) scheduled for release next year, I thought it would be nice to devote some space here - especially during Halloween month - to reviewing the first of them.
Sword of Storms is a pretty good, classic-style Hellboy story. Four hundred years ago, a Japanese warrior imprisoned the spirits of Thunder and Lightning in his sword before being turned into stone himself. Now, a folklore professor has been possessed by the spirits, who can only be freed if the warrior who captured them breaks his sword. Hellboy gets hurled into another dimension full of monsters, demons and even zombies, while his teammates Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien face off against a rather irate sort of dragon.
The movie brings back the main cast of the live-action film to provide the voices, with Ron Perlman playing a flawless Hellboy and Selma Blair doing a good job as Liz Sherman. In a weird sort of move, Doug Jones gives us the voice of Abe Sapien. Jones was the actor in the Abe Sapien makeup in the live-action movie, but the voice in that film was dubbed in by David Hyde-Pierce. You piece together the logic there. And Frasier’s Peri Gilpin rounds out the cast as paranormal professor Kate Corrigan. All of the voices are pretty good, and Perlman, as I said, is perfect.
The story doesn’t flow as smoothly as one might hope - there are a few logical gaps from point A to point C - but the movie makes good use of Japanese folklore and provides a nice insight into the characters, particularly Liz.
The animation isn’t mind-blowing - certainly not theatrical-quality - but it’s certainly as good as anything on television these days. The only really jarring moment was a blatant use of CGI, where a whirlwind of clouds is thrown over the final battle sequence. The CGI there was rather stiff and primitive for the technology, and really stood out against the hand-drawn stuff to a painful degree.
This wasn’t a great start to the Hellboy series, but it was a good one, and as a fan of Hellboy as a character, I fully intend to pick up the next film in the series. When I do, I’ll let you know how much it’s improved.