Anime - What. The. Hellsing?

I absolutely support the idea that anime is brilliant... in theory. The blending of Eastern and Western drawing and animation styles produces staggeringly beautiful and expressive artwork, and takes advantage of the limitless nature of a drawn image to do things that would be impossible in real life.

Unless you're Guillermo Del Toro.

Certainly, it's noticeable that all modern comic-books and animation have drawn heavily from anime, which is part of the reason that I'm still willing to pay about £2-3 for sets of 15 coloured pieces of A4 paper every week. And everything I've seen come out of Studio Ghibli has been, if nothing else, staggeringly beautiful.


However, anime writing? It's permanent Deus Ex Machina. I mean, every single character in an anime movie appears to possess an invisible Green Lantern ring, which solves all the outstanding problems the minute they get angry or sad or determined or crazy enough. To be fair, sometimes all they can do is completely change other peoples' opinions on controversial issues, much like Ma-Ti's ring from Captain Planet.

"So wait, you put the power to cast "Fireball" in the hands of the Retarded Ginger Comic Relief from Brooklyn, and I get "Charm Animal"? Well, f**k you GAIA. Seriously, F**K YOU. Wait, what? It also controls human emotions? To the singles bar!" 


Basically, the message of most anime is "It doesn't matter how much work you do, or how smart you are. All you need to succeed are deep-seated emotional problems that would guarantee real people their own wing in a mental hospital."

This is compounded by bad dialogue that seems to be less of a translation issue, more an inevitable consequence of every character with a first name explaining every blasted thought that passes through their heads. And the monologuing. Oh god, the monologuing. I mean, clearly I'm all for long-windedness (clearly), but seriously, if you can't have it make sense, at least try and make it funny... I mean deliberately funny. 

"Sometimes in life we have friends, who pass through our lives like a river passes through a wood. They nuture and feed us with their strength, and then pass on to enrich the life of others. But we retain a part of them within ourselves that we can always draw on in times of need. So that's why I'm forcing my pet rodent to get into a cock-fighting ring with a twenty-foot tall space-dragon."


Little known fact: "Pik-A-CHUUUU!" translates to "Call Animal Welfare, you c***-***king pricks!"

Now, I will admit that I am in no way an anime "expert". I haven't even watched any Miyazaki film all the way through, which many anime fans would consider a reason to ignore everything I say here.
But:

• I own a VHS tape of Battle of the Planets aka (think "Power Rangers in Space" but with one of the rangers weighing 400 pounds and another being a young Harpo Marx)(*)
• I've seen a chunk of Neon Genesis Evangelion (in which people masturbate inside, around and indeed over giant robots, then everything goes WHITE).
• I've watched a big ol' chunk of Pokemon (covered above)
• I've watched about an episode and a half of Read or Die (which would probably be my favouritest thing ever, if I could get past my issues with anime)
• I've watched some Excel Saga (which I quite like, as it parodies everything that I'm raging about here)

So I'd describe my opinion of anime as "watched it, judged it, found it wanting". Frankly, it's always struck me as one of those things that seems really "deep and edgy" when you're 16, and childishly stupid when you grow up.


I believe we are all on the same page.

That said, I never found it that offensive, and it was quite hard to describe why I wasn't into it. But now, thanks to my friend Patrick(**), I have discovered the ne-plus-ultra of "Everything That Is Wrong With Anime". My touchstone for why it's not worth my time.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present...

"Hellsing"

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Okay...
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Let's take what we've just watched in sections, shall we?

• Firstly, we have the gun fetishiest scene I have seen outside of the Matrix, followed immediately by Women in Anime Cliche #1: The silent hooker. This woman's job is to be seedy and yet somehow sexy. Unfortunately, she merely manages seedy.
• This guy is the creepiest British guy in the world. And what's with all the roaches?
• Oh, I swear, if we're about to watch these two have sex... *shudder*
• Oh look, more gun porn to go with the regular variety we seem to be enjoying
• And he shot the hooker. Proud day for feminists everywhere the day this show was born
• Wow, it turns out that she's the vampire, not the creepy dude! That totally wasn't the very first scene in the significantly better "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". No cliche's here, no sir!
• "ORDER:01 The Undead." THAT IS NOT WHERE THE COLON GOES.
• I know the whole Vampire thing's supposed to be important, but I'm being distracted by the priest's massive pointy chin.
• From his accent, the officer appears to have been brought directly from the stage of a Guy Ritchie movie. Which is a shame, because so far the dubbing's been very good.
• My dialogue has a first name, it's E.X.P.O.S.I.T.I.O.N.
  
• And now we meet Women in Anime Cliche #2: The stone-cold bitch who is 100 times more competent than all the men put together, but is still a bitch.
• I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a joke, but I am still going to laugh every single time someone in this reminds me that all of this shit's going down in Cheddar. CHEDDAR.
• HAH! She's even called Sir. SIR.
• And again we see creepy gunfetishist vampire.
• Oh sweet god, he used the phrase "Bite to Drink". As if he thought it was really cool. Without irony.
• Hey! Women in Anime cliche #3 turned up! Something of a staple, this girl. She's supposed to be a police officer despite appearing to be about 10 years old. Well, at least she's not a catgirl. I mean, it seems pretty unlikely that one of... them... will...

For f**k's sake, Wikipedia, WHY?

• Oh no, her partner's been infected! Maybe we'll see him struggle, and actually grow to care about him before he becomes a monster.
• Or maybe he'll deliver a single line of mumbled dialogue and lose consciousness.
• "I'm trying to be strong, I don't want to be nicknamed Kitten for the rest of my life." I refer you to my previous comment about Anime dialogue.
• I'll give the artist credit. I knew it was coming, and I still jumped.
• Hang on... how the hell did she get halfway across the clearing when the monster had hold of her?
• You are a trained gunman, confronted with an attacker. Don't PISTOL WHIP HIM, SHOOT HIM!
• "You're okay." I'd give you "alive", but "okay"? I mean, at the very least, they're looking very pasty.
• Do you not watch Zombie Movies? SHOOT THEM IN THE HEA... You know what, just run.
• Yeah, there you go.
• Look at those cold, dead eyes. Yes, she's clearly a badass who just needs a moment of tenderness.
• GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!
• And now she's been saved by the gun-fetishist villa...
• Holy shit, he's meant to be the hero.
• The hero of this thing is an unrepentant sociopath who just goes around killing people grinning like he's been offered a lifetime of sex and beer.
• I'm just going to go check... 
• Goddammit Anime Fans, why can you never defy my staggeringly low expectations?
• Aaaand we're done. With part 1. Of episode 1.

Well, at least we're managed to avoid stereotype #4 "Heroine who is tortured into madness by demons or killed by end-of-game boss." And you never know, maybe it improves in its depiction of women and its dialogue over time.

*WOOF!*

What's that freakish were-cat-nazi-freak in what appear to be tights? Timmy's trapped down the well? Oh, I see! We've got another video from one of the later sections.

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*blink*
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In my considered opinion, the only thing that could have made that clip more fucked-up would have been the presence of Fozzie Bear.

Wakka wakaaaa.

I mean, I've been told that this is "awesome" by someone whose intelligence and ethics I deeply respect, so I have to try to assume that there is some facet of a "hot librarian" cliche(***) being gun-raped by a monster, that is anything other than mind-bogglingly unacceptable, as long as everyone's hand-drawn and speaking Japanese.

But this is where I make my stand. This is AWFUL. This is so bad it's actually gone past irritating, through funny and back to irritating again. I mean "My Warhead punishes all without distinction?" Maybe something was lost in translation, but frankly, not enough.

I keep looking for some sign of the depth, complexity or self-awareness found in even things as trashy as Twilight, as offensive as Grand Theft Auto or as silly as Doctor Who, but there's nothing there. It's just a bunch of horribly disgusting and silly things happening while an utter monster is shown to be a total bad-ass who encourages people to write fanfiction so bad that even I won't read it. It's the kind of work a seven-year old Warhammer fan creates in his "War Journal".

It's childish without actually being for children. It's stupid masquerading as "surrealist". It's offensive without having a point to make. Its use of British culture, from what appears to be a position of total ignorance, occasionally moves into the sunny lands of hate-crime status. And it gets a higher rating on IMDb than Stardust, which is the best family film ever made.(****)
Basically, it's a perfect example of why I have no time for anime, packaged in several massively over-priced DVDs. It's adolescent, offensive, nonsensical rubbish which gets a free pass because it's made in a foreign country and is drawn pretty. AND I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF HEARING ABOUT HOW I JUST NEED TO GIVE IT A CHANCE.

Good god, I feel so much better now.

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This article was written to the sound of the soundtrack to the film "Eurotrip", another example of something widely derided, but which Hellsing makes look like a collaboration between Shakespeare and Bach.
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*: Apparently, BotP's Japanese name was "Science Ninja Team Gatchaman" and it included "graphic violence, profanity and transgenderism". Could not make this up if I tried.

**: At least Patrick was my friend before he read this. I'll keep you posted.


**: Incidentally, "Hot Librarian" is Women of Anime cliche #5. Thank you, "Read or Die", for providing one more exciting new unhealthy role model for adolescent girls.

***: From IMDb:

23 out of 30 people found the following review useful.

Best Anime serie ever., 16 January 2004

Author: Dirk Dagger from The Netherlands

I just finished watching the complete serie that I ran trough in a couple of days. From the first episode I had to see it ALL. The story is great, the way the story is told and drawn is absolutely superb. Classy all the way and a weird eerie choise of music. I've been an avid anime fan for 13 years now and I wouldn't just say this if it weren't true, this is the best anime series ever. The best anime movie I consider to be Akira, but this is the best serie, as a matter a fact this one topped 3x3 eyes off the first place to me.

I could ramble on about this series forever, but I suggest you just go see it

 A Classy Moment from the "Best Anime Series Ever"