Hells

Now a lot of people have reviewed this classic and it's both heavily slept on and underrated. Almost every negative review of this gives a lot of credit for the unique art style and wild trigger-like fights and general unhinged storyline. Bottom line is the majority of negative reviews here actually missed primary plot lines (confusion, more like skill issue, try again next time). The show has a certain skill hill for compreshesion and while some people who watch this may hate the idea of, what is now known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the final fight scene being a biblical condensed evangelion scale experience of ... positive self thought and indominable human spirit based on the writings of occult magic study.

This movie is in a way just Gurren Laggan mixed with Evangelion, and like both is great if you're actually able to see the value in the themes and the overall depth of the ironic humor. and terrible if you are watching the show to distract you from your sad life.

What a trip.

It's always interesting to see how Japan takes and adapts Christian folklore into the surreal world of anime. Hell is a concept almost ubiquitous in religions around the world, but nobody seems to be able to agree on it's exact nature. While a strictly Biblical depiction would show it to be a place of only suffering, eastern ideas about the afterlife paint it as being basically a continuation of our society as we have it already here on earth. So of course Hell is going to be a Japanese high school, where they play volleyball and talk about which boys they like.

The philosophies ... aside, what really stands out in this movie is the unique art style and animation. It's the kind of thing you can really only get from anime, and is hard to describe in just words. Even if the plot is utterly nonsensical it ultimately doesn't matter if it still looks cool, and it does. Honestly that's really all it had going for it for me, though. Looking cool isn't really enough to elevate it's score much past a 6/10, so that's what I gave it. Kind of dumb movie otherwise.

The first half is pretty good, but the last half has many issues. They may have been able to pull off what they were going for if this had been a full 26 episode anime. However, the amount of things that happens in this movie, most of which are supposed to be very deep character moments are insane. There is just no room for the proper build up, or to even breath between events.

I enjoyed most of the main cast, but there's just so many of them and we really needed more time with them if the emotional moments were going to have a chance ... at hitting. Also, there is AT LEAST a dozen other characters that we are supposed to care about that have so little screen time, that they could have been removed entirely. We get a nice amount of time with some characters early on, but once the plot picks up, it's just too packed to get to know anyone anyone deeper.