A folklore professor becomes unwittingly possessed by the ancient Japanese demons of Thunder and Lightning. But when The Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense dispatches a team of agents to investigate, a cursed samurai sword sends Hellboy to a supernatural dimension of ghosts, monsters, and feudal mayhem. Now while pyrokinetic Liz Sherman and fishboy Abe Sapien battle one very pissed-off dragon, a lost and cranky Hellboy must find his way home.
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Reviews
Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
Such a frustrating disappointment
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.
With Easter coming up I started looking for an animated title that a pal would enjoy watching over the holiday.Seeing clips of the latest superhero flicks,I remembered hearing about an animated Hellboy movie from a few years ago,which led to me picking up the sword of stone.The plot:Reading an ancient scroll, Professor Sakai unleashes a number of demon spirits.Learning that the demons are after a mythical sword, Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense agents Hellboy, Kate Corrigan and Russell Thorne locate the sword.Shortly after picking up the sword,Hellboy vanishes into another dimension.Finding himself in a new dimension,Hellboy decides that he must untangle the myths entwined round the sword.View on the film:Making his (feature) animation debut,co-writer/(along with Matt Wayne & Mike Mignola) director Tad Stones gives the title a stylish,rough edge,Anima- inspired appearance,with the pulpy colours linking the film to its comic-book roots.For the screenplay,the writers stray into creepy horror,as flying heads and vengeful ghosts splat the screen.Taking a road movie approach,the writers disappointingly make the film feel a slow-paced,due to Hellboy being placed on an obstacle course which lacks any threatening atmosphere.Taking on the voice after playing him in the live action takes, Ron Perlman gives a wonderful performance as Hellboy,thanks to Perlman hitting Hellboy's action roar with a deadpan dry with,as Hellboy discovers a new sword in the stones.
I get the feeling that this "Hellboy Animated" movie only materialised to cash in on the popularity of the live action movie.This seems to be a prequel to the first Hellboy movie, but it lacks the sense of grandeur that the first, or Golden Army, had. It feels like a "just another day on the job" accounting of one of Hellboy's more interesting paranormal cases, which in this case involves a plot by some Japanese demons to enslave the world and the key to stopping them lie in the form of an ancient Samurai Blade. Fair enough. It sounds quite good. I bet it sounded better on paper than the end result we see on screen. The plot weaves in and out, cutting between Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman responding to some anomaly in the ocean, 2 BPRD agents tracking down a possessed Professor and Hellboy lost in the Japanese backwoods with the Samurai Sword. It gets a little hard to follow at times and many scenes just seem unnecessary in advancing the overall plot. The producers tried to throw in some very unique monsters and threats for Hellboy to face, based on many ancient Japanese myths. A noble move, but unless you are already well versed in the old folklore from the land of the Rising Sun, those monsters(that apparently the production team painstakingly researched) would just come across as generic supernatural threats with some quirky designs.In the end, The whole resolution to the story is possibly the weakest aspect; a real let down. There is a romantic subplot involving an ancient samurai and his ghostly lover but it is not like the romance in the live action movie, more closer to Saturday morning cartoon style of romantic relationships. It is cheesy and would easily make one shake his head in disbelief that the script writers would throw in something like that into an otherwise well written script.The animation for the most part is also relatively weak. As a direct-to-DVD animated feature, Hellboy Animated's animation does not stand up well to other animated feature adaptations of comic book superheros It is stiff, with bland camera angles and uninteresting storyboarding. The visuals are painfully simple, along the lines of animated TV series much less a animated feature. One would think that Mike Mignola's streamlined art style, minimalist colouring and dark, grim and quirky visuals form the comic book would be easy to adapt to animation. They were able to capture Mignola's art style perfectly with "The Amazing Screw On Head" that was released a month earlier from Hellboy Animated. Alas, the production company chose not to stick to that look and went with another stylised look that, in my humble opinion, looked absolutely horrible.The character designs looked like a splicing of Kim Possible, Danny Phantom, and some of the worst looking episodes from the 90s Batman animated series and Transformers Animated. Body Proportions are almost laughable and the overall look comes across as cheap and lazy. This show would not have looked out of place when aired on Saturday mornings after Spongebob Squarepants.Thankfully, a highly enjoyable script and excellent character chemistry saves this show from being a utter failure. Dark Humour, witty comebacks and entertaining banter among the characters. The movie captures the quirkiness of the comics very well and the actors from the film reprise their roles, lending to the feel of continuity. This one is really a mixed bag. If you can get pass the overall under-budgeted look and cheap-o feel of the animation then make your way through one mess of a story smelling like cheese, you got a really entertaining animated movie on your hands. Fun to watch, but little else beyond that.
i really liked this movie i felt that it captured the spirit of the both the comics and the movie. The animation in this movie is nearly spot on but is still good in it's own way the story is nice and easy to follow and has some good action sequences that hellboy is famous for. I was pleasantly surpirsed to find out that all the acotrs from the movie did voice work for there characters in this movie i was a little upset to find out that doug jones only did the movement for ape in the first movie as i felt he did a great job doing voice work. The designs for this movie look amazing even tho it's animation i really thought that those were really locations overall this is a good spin off film that really enjoyed watching.
I've been a Hellboy reader from the day the first issue of the comic hit the stands. When the live action movie came out I liked it, but thought it could've been a lot better. This movie, however, gave me the "a lot better" that I was hoping for: really fun and interesting MYTHOLOGICAL story (with interesting little bits of cultural details like the comics always have); interestingly plotted story that cuts backward and forward in time in a smart and engaging way; lots of cool, scary bad guys; and better written dialog than I thought the live action had, including better one-liners from HB.I watched it with my six year old boy - checking in with him and explaining stuff if I felt nervous that he might be scared by anything in it - and he loved it too. I think it a great HB movie for a wide age range - again, like the comics.The animation was sharp and detailed, but I kind of wished that the character designs and background work came closer to Mignola's originals. I guess if that were so, though, it would have probably been a much darker, scarier, and more "experimental" looking movie - all of which would have altered it's demographics a lot, and maybe killed it's financing in the process.All in all I'd really recommend it.