A day or two ago I did a brief piece on the three wonderfully fun Yokai Monster movies from the ’60s. I also mentioned that many of the Japanese folklore beasties featured in those appear in the first of the animated Hellboy movies, Sword of Storms. The results are equally enjoyable.
Although he lurks in the shadows of higher profile superhero series, it’s likely that no comic book hero has been better served in the electronic media than Hellboy. Mike Mignola’s creation is a boy demon brought into this world by the Nazis (!) at the end of WWII, in an effort to destroy the world, as indeed the demon was prophesized to do.
However, Allied forces led by a young Brit researcher in the occult, Prof. Bruttenholm, stop the Nazis before their plan can succeed. In the end, the infant demon is left behind, and Bruttenholm, dubbing him “Hellboy,” adopts him. (I think it says something sad that Bruttenholm and Hellboy’s relationship is by far the most touching father/son relationship I have seen in a film since I can’t remember when.)
Cut to the present day, when the elderly Bruttenholm runs the BRPD, sort of a combination of the CIA and the ex-files. “There are things that go bump in the night. And we are the ones who bump back.” The organization deals with flare ups of the supernatural the world over, and for the rougher gigs, they employed agents with special abilities. The hulking, superpowerful Hellboy is one of these, and he is often joined by the woman he (half-secretly) loves, the barely in control pyrokinetic Liz, and benign, erudite Gill Man Abe Sapien.
Hellboy’s main advantage in the film realm was to be beloved by director Guillermo del Toro. Like director Robert Rodriguez, del Toro seems less interested in trying to play the Hollywood game than in making the films he wants to make. When given the chance the make the first Hellboy movies, but at the price of dumping his preferred leading man, Ron Perlman, del Toro walked away more than once. Finally he got the opportunity to make the film he wanted, and it was successful enough to be given a sequel, due out next year, and to furthermore launch a series of connected animated features. Sword of Storm is the first of these, and the vampire flick Blood & Iron was the second. Another is due out either later this year or early in 2008, and then followed by a fourth picture later in 2008 also.
The main advantage of these films is to carry over the note-perfect actors from del Toro’s live action feature, who all return to voice their characters here.* This is especially important in terms of Ron Perlman’s participation, because as del Toro realized from the start, Perlman is the perfect Hellboy. Even so, having Selma Blair and John Hurt cross over also in the animated movies certainly helps. Meanwhile, newcomer Peri Gilpin (who like Hyde Pierce starred in TV’s Frasier), now a veteran voice artist from cartoons like Superman, Justice League and King of the Hill, proves a valuable addition to the animated films character list.
[*Although on a side note, del Toro’s film featured David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe. When Hyde Pierce proved unable to do the animated movies—although he does a voice opposite Paul Giamatti in the absolutely hilarious Mignola cartoon The Amazing Screw-Top Head, an insane sorta homage to The Wild Wild West TV show—the producers allowed Doug Jones, the actor who physically played Abe for del Toro, to provide Abe’s voice in the animated pictures. Got that?]Anyhoo, back in the Old Days, a samurai defied his master and fought a pair of powerful storm demons threatened the woman the samurai loved. He trapped the demons in his magic sword, but was cursed by his master for his rebellious actions. In the present day, the demons threaten to escape their bondage, and rouse their even more powerful relatives to literally threaten the world. All that stands between them is Hellboy, although Liz and Abe have their own adventures.
I’m not going to go too much into this, because it’s great stuff and I don’t want to ruin it, but enough said that Hellboy ends up journeying through a landscape that contains all of Japan’s highly weird folklore creatures, allowing him to have some terrific adventures. Seriously, this is great stuff. And as mentioned, he does meet a number of the monsters seen in the Yokai movies, so you could do worse on a long, cold winter’s night then fire up the DVD player and watch the Yokai trilogy, followed by this.
The DVD for Sword of Storms comes with a ton of extras sure to be of interest to both the characters’ fans and to animation buffs.
