Summing up Hellsing is surprisingly difficult for a series whose appeal is such a simple sell. The Hellsing organization combats supernatural forces in the shadow of the British government. Lead by the family heir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing (seriously), this secretive force fights fire with fire: they command the hundreds of years old vampire Alucard who faces those of his own kind with arrogant, excited obedience. Their rank increases early on as innocent policewoman Seras Victoria undergoes her own vampiric transformation to save her life. The trio are drawn into a new threat as long-forgotten Nazi soldiers return with their own army of vampires and zombies to recreate the evil of five decades ago on an even bigger scale.
I have heard people (even fans) say that the story of Hellsing doesn’t matter, but this is simply not true. Hellsing only reaches the heights of its intense action by an equally intense narrative that magnifies the simple base elements of ultraviolence, gore, and misery into a distinctly artistic vision. At its heart, Hellsing is likable pulp easily digested by many, but when dissecting its craft it's revealed to be cleverly constructed while straightforward in its focus. If you were to think Hellsing Ultimate seems like something that could easily be replicated, you’d be mistaken. It takes no skill to put excessive blood in a work of art to get someone’s attention, but it takes a whole lot skill to make an audience care about violence for the sake of violence precisely because it’s been so overdone and de-sensitized. This is where Hellsing’s narrative and style come in, to make something basic into something fresh, and once again stir up the base appeal of this juicy pulp that’s been lost to oversaturation. Hellsing Ultimate will live on for its quality, while a hundred or so edgy late 80s OVAs will be lost to boredom no matter how hard they try.
That’s not to say the story of Hellsing Ultimate is its greatest appeal – it’s a vehicle to get there. I’m talking about the action, of course. The first few episodes of Hellsing Ultimate are just stage setup. An extremely wide cast is introduced quickly only to break away moments later. One of the cleverest things about Hellsing’s writing is that the setting and characters take major influence from mythology. Religion and supernatural legends mainly, but the clever thing is how it understands the intrigue of mythology itself. Much of the intensity between Hellsing’s large cast isn’t explored in detail but is instead implicit. Backgrounds are only touched upon to the point they need be. The long relationship between the Vatican’s Iscariot forces and Hellsing is loosely elaborated on only to justify the intense hatred seen between their interactions in the present. A character is said to have been a deadly warrior in the past but instead of taking us to the past and showing us, Hellsing only lets us know the roots of the legend and leaves in suspense for the myth to prove itself when that legend comes alive again. Even the show’s own credit sequences always depict never-before-seen fragments of past memories without further elaborating with words. Hellsing turns ancient and newly fictional mythology and peoples’ innate desire for the truth into hype itself. Pure, distilled base mystery and suspense that’s the lifeblood of being invested in an action sequence.
Once this setup finishes laying the seeds of intrigue among its cast of hard-asses with unknown abilities and true character, it shifts into high gear and becomes a 7-episode climax that never lets up until its conclusion. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous something is, Hellsing will do it and possess the cleverness to be able to keep one-upping its absurd scenarios and prevent its high octane energy from becoming the new normal. It takes incredible intelligence to keep what’s effectively a 7-hour action set piece compelling, and this is why Hellsing Ultimate is so marvelous and greater than its simple premise and wide appeal would suggest.
But if at the end of the day, an all-out war between uniquely super-powered warriors and the dark monstrosities of a Nazi army raining down from a squadron of zeppelins that include such members as vampires, werewolves, zombies, a sword-wielding Irish Father and his katana-wielding nun assistant, an old butler who spins steel-cutting string, a limitlessly strong woman that can aim entire cannons with her bare hands, and everyone else I just can’t name – doesn’t sound appealing to you, then yeah you can safely look elsewhere.
Hellsing Ultimate doesn’t just succeed by the rule of whatever’s coolest, though. Its fight scenes are incredibly well-choreographed and planned with every half-major character getting at least one point where they show off (another thing many action anime fail to do), and they’re loaded with surprises. As with any good fight anime the characters possess unique abilities to keep them interesting, and they all only live as long as those abilities are exciting enough to justify screen time. Anything longer and they’re dead, and Hellsing keeps rolling on.
The most surprising thing about Hellsing is how strong its script actually is. For a show that doesn’t value logic over excitement, it can be stunningly well-written at parts and incite fervor using nothing other than the words and monologues of its characters. Part of this has to do with an excellent localization and dub. The series takes place in the United Kingdom and everyone is given an appropriate accent where most everyone in the Japanese voice track is just speaking plain Japanese. This allows each character’s strong personality to shine even further, and those personalities intensely clashing with each other is why every fight is something to look forward to. Unfortunately, I found the weakest casting to be none other than Alucard himself, played by Crispin Freeman. Let me set the record straight: I love Crispin Freeman. He plays his usual voice extremely well here. But he shouldn’t have been casted as Alucard. Despite the insane, twisted expressions Alucard regularly makes, at heart there’s a nobleness to him like Dracula that Freeman just can’t capture. He’s loud and brutish, while Jouji Nakata gives the Lord of Darkness a suitable regality to his deep, soft voice that has a subtler intimidation to how its sinister nature slowly surrounds the screen. At the end of the day, this is a nitpick. The dub is otherwise a massive improvement that cares about things the original production just didn’t, and it’s a clear-cut upgrade. If you want a more faithful localization you can stick to subs, but if you want to experience Hellsing Ultimate in the best hypothetical way it could be offered then the dub’s the way to go. Gildart Jackson in particular deserves a fucking medal for his performance as the Nazi commander Max Montana. This is one of the best dub performances there will ever be. Stark, slithering, and sadistic that give his many monologues about war an incredible gravitas. It’d be too much to get into why his performance is so effective, but episode 4’s “war speech” became infamous for a good reason (and every search for it on YouTube reveals only dub uploads). I can’t think of any other performance that could turn a fat Elton John Nazi into an electrifying presence.
My pleasant surprise at the strong dialogue is accompanied by a negative one: the production values. This is probably going to boggle the minds of some people because Hellsing Ultimate is known for its high production values, but that’s kind of my point: I expected better. Yeah it’s way better than most anime but that’s usually a very low bar to clear. For an OVA that should’ve had a ton of individual attention on each episode divided during over half a decade, it’s not among the best animated anime I’ve seen. It’s at least one notch lower. I’ve seen movies, OVAs, and even some series that are better. Hellsing Ultimate frequently has noticeably jerky movement as the result of a lack of frames detailing each movement. There’s sometimes hideously blurry digital renditions of characters in brief scenes probably drawn by some under-whipped artist. And then there’s the very questionable and gratuitous use of computer generated graphics.
Hellsing Ultimate started when digital animation had really taken off and gives into the vices of its shortcuts and technical grandstanding, often oblivious to how much worse it’s making itself look and how its higher budget should’ve been a tool to prevent these things in the first place. Such shortcuts were probably less seen as a crutch at the time and merely the future of animation, but many of us know by now how out of place it looks when completely flat characters are supposedly holding onto three-dimensional cannons and whatnot. The Gothic/Victorian environments of Hellsing and their post-modern mix between superhero character designs and the modern era is a fantastic aesthetic, but it can be weakened when the environment used to render all of it emphasizes how inherently out of place those elements are with each other. It really isn’t that bad because the stellar character designs dominate almost every frame with glaring intensity and these are always 2D animations, but their surroundings could’ve been done much better.
One benefit I actually like about the CG is the blood. It’s a garishly bright red, sure, but blood should look repulsive in some way. It also emphasizes a thickness of the blood, and the bright red reminds me of the hyper-realistic blood used in older horror movies like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And that’s cool. A popular trick the anime employs is how the character designs are often sharp and jagged with stiff black outlines, but when they move they do so amorphously and their actions are exaggerated to make action scenes more kinetic. Alucard is a great example, as his many form transformation sequences where he shifts and morphs around the screen like torn paper blowing in the wind emphasizes how out of place his monstrous nature is. Hellsing Ultimate ends up being visually accomplished, but it had the resources and production time it needed to be a masterwork there, which is why it’s a shame it’s held back by some shortsighted decisions.
At the very least, the music suffers none. It draws upon all the same sources Hellsing’s setting does. Choral Church music, pulsing electronic dance beats, modern electric guitar, and even traditional German war marches. Every credits sequence has its own theme music (accompanied with unique animation), and occasionally there’s a vocal theme. One example is Marianne Faithfull’s “Broken English” which to my surprise was turned into a good song.
Hellsing Ultimate still isn’t something for everyone. I find its formula between implicit dramatic story and wild action sequences that always outdo themselves to be almost perfectly effective, but it all it takes is the amount of plot and characterization not being enough for some people to completely cripple the weight of the action. Though on the other hand, seeing so many reviews improperly going on about how this OVA is nothing more than “badasses doing badass things!” maybe some people don’t need narrative to just love crazy action. I think some of the fanbase is simply selling it short, however. Hellsing isn’t just great action. Its action is as great as it is precisely because of the ways it succeeds in every other main area and points those areas back inwards at the action. It’s simply stupid, but it’s elaborately smart. Its “violence for the sake of violence” pointless but the most important thing in the world. It’s disgusting pulp, but it’s lavishly extravagant. It’s human, but it’s not human.
