Hell’s Angels anime movie review:
This movie is about 2 hours long and the translation I had was fan subbed, and it was not perfect, let’s put it that way. I really wanted to see this movie and I had high hopes for it. But that was dashed after I saw it.
I’ll start with the basics…. (There will be spoilers.)
Animation: The animation is the best part of this movie. The animation doesn’t follow the normal rules of anime. The way that it is done is more of a Western style and mixes elements of Tim Burton’s style, most notably from A Nightmare Before Christmas. This type of Gothic style of animation is fairly rare by anime standards. There’s a lot of greys, blacks, whites, and the most prominent color, especially towards the end, is blue. I really enjoyed it. 9/10
Music: The music is good. Really good. As to be expected there is some rock music, but they had also incorporated some other styles. The ending theme song is marvelous and not what you would expect from Japanese animation. The music is has different songs from different genres and it ends up sounding more like a Hollywood movie soundtrack than an anime soundtrack. 8/10
Story: This is where we got complicated. There are many things in this movie that are typical anime tropes. They include the senpai character a lot of the girls at school are in love with. (And maybe the main character?) The first half of the story is a faster paced version of school anime with supernatural characters and some dark secret that the principle is hiding.
The middle starts throwing all those typical anime story twists that were made when you’re building the series slowly. Since this movie is so fast paced, there’s no emotional attachment to the twists rather the audience feels indifferent to them. They aren’t anything special, either. They’re, I wouldn’t say predicable, but I would say they’ve been done a lot before. That’s part of their tropes.
The ending left me uninterested and I found myself yawning, inbetween times. The latter half of the movie is filled with this “believing” crap I felt like I was watching some hippie movie. In fact this was disappointing and so was the ending, which anyone could predict, and was filled with happy, fluffy tripe. It doesn’t help when they switch from a biblical theme to mixing some Eastern traditions in there. I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting such a Gothic looking anime to turn out so light and fluffy, but I was very disappointed by it because I expected more…. bite. (Particularly, since it’s obvious it’s taking a lot from Tim Burton’s movies.)
The story was convoluted because of the fast paced that a casual viewer of anime probably couldn’t follow most of it. If this had been an episodic anime, instead of a 2 hour movie, this would have been a much, much better anime. But instead, cramming all that story and character development in a short time period with no filler doesn’t actually do well as many would think.
The characters.. Well, while some of the characters develop, the only one worth emotionally attaching to is probably the main character. Since the movie is so fast paced you don’t get the good feel of the characters and you don’t get to be emotionally attached to many of them. Rather, you face detachment which will leave you hanging at the end.
There was a lot of characters who deserved more screentime and development. One of them was the main “bad guy” if you will, as depicted above, who goes by the clever name of Helvis. (It really is clever, you have to admit.) Unfortunaley, his character is side stepped for other characters who just aren’t as interesting. (Abel comes to mind.)
Bottom line is this movie and the characters deserved a slower pace and better writing. (Maybe in the form of episodes?) Since they were crammed into a two hour fast paced movie, they suffered in inexplicable ways. They tackle a lot of great philosophy in the movie, but like the characters these philosophical matters lack development and that was an even bigger disappointment to me then some of the characters’ suffering. 6.5/10
Overall: I think this movie is worth watching to see the fantastic animation and a memorable music score which adds nicely to both the animation and atmosphere. But the lack of adequate character and philosophical development and the fast pacing of the story will leave a lot of people hanging. 7/10
Screenshots
