THIS ISN'T THE SHOW FOR THEM.
I can't explain to you how just...gruesome this show gets. It breaks every boundary. It just doesn't stop. It's extremely violent, full of gore and guns, and features one of the greatest characters ever--with my favorite voice actor attached in the English dub, no less--in just how much his sheer awesomeness constantly overwhelms the screen. Not only that, but he's probably the most over-powered character in all anime as he cannot die, even after he's been lit up like the fourth of July in bullets.
It's still a wonder for me how this show got on television, but then I realize that nobody's up at one in the morning to watch this except for die-hard fans, so it makes sense. I would be up watching it every morning if it weren't for early-morning work.
Maybe Toonami airs this at such a late hour to scare kids into going back to sleep. The show itself is a horror-anime, yeah, but I always felt that it was much less horror and more of a mature action series. I mean, I'm very happy they do air it, since I can watch it on Monday mornings and make Mondays awesome. But this is a discussion for another time.
Okay, now that I've sort of set the tone for this anime, let's take a look at it seriously.
I mean, as serious as you can get anyway.
The show is based off of the Hellsing manga series. Actually, there was an original anime based off of the manga known as Hellsing, a thirteen-episode series with the same characters and actors, but the story takes a different path following the fourth episode, dealing more with the growing of Seras Victoria into a vampire and less of the secrets behind Millennium. The original anime deviated away from the original story of the manga, so Hellsing Ultimate was created. It's a ten-episode long OVA series, with each episode running at about an average of forty-five and a half minutes, the biggest exception being the hour-long final OVA.
The story of Hellsing Ultimate, thus, focuses basically on a giant war. Artificial vampires have been springing up around the world giving the Hellsing organization a headache. Thus, Ser Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, the head of the family, sends her servant out to hunt down these vampires, uncovering a huge secret along the way.
Who's her servant?
Well, it's Alucard of course. If you can't figure out that name, then, I apologize, because I'm not going to spell it out for you. Alucard, early on, comes across a dying police woman and she allows him to turn her into a vampire, allowing her to gain super-strength and abilities. And she can only drink blood, which kind of blows but hey, such is life for a vampire.
It is uncovered that the enemy the Hellsing organization faces is none other than Millennium, the Last Battalion of Nazi Germany. Not only that, but the Iscariot organization of the Catholic Church wishes to purge the world of vampires and monsters and assert themselves as the greatest weapon on the Earth, disregarding any holy vows they may have made to become a part of the church.
Basically we've got vampires versus Nazis and psycho heathens. I'm in!
The story itself isn't too shallow but is still interesting enough because of the characters. Despite a pretty typical motivation--destroy the world--the lead antagonist, the Major, divulges into great detail why he wants a war so badly, why he loves it even when his own armies are slaughtered. He's really a sick guy and you come to hate him very quickly. Another antagonist, ish, is Archbishop Maxwell of Iscariot, and his motivations are what fuel Iscariot, and are just what I said before about taking down monsters and Nazis. You would be inclined to root for him if he weren't so freaking crazy and evil about everything he does, uncaring about all of the people he is hurting along the way in the war.
Like the Hellsings, though, Maxwell has a servant of his own, that being Paladin Father Alexander Anderson. He is similar to Maxwell but he is actually a much better person in that he only destroys the heathens and monsters, trying to save as many innocent people as he can, even if they aren't of his faith. He even helps out Integra at one point, a pretty interesting move. That doesn't mean he's not a monster, but he's less of a monster than the rest of his peers.
The Hellsing organization, obviously, gets the brunt of the attention. Integra probably gets the most screen time out of all of them since she is the leader and she really asserts herself all the time, which she has to in order to tame Alucard, the Vampire King. Though he bends his knee to her every whim, she still needs to show the world that she wouldn't need him to have all this power. In terms of development, Seras Victoria, the police girl, gets the most as she evolves from being a woman confused at her vampiric position to coming to grips with all the power and the monster she has become. It's all very tragic, actually, and is some of the best material of the entire show.
Alucard, well, he's just awesome. He doesn't take anything from anyone (except Integra) and everyone who tries to mess with him gets it back double, or more often than not, they're pretty darn dead. He shares many tropes with typical vampires, too, getting crippled in daylight and likes to stay in the darkest pits of the Hellsing headquarters as well as can conjure up dark magic and can turn into a bat, or bats, to get around places. Blessed items work better on him, too, but not as well as they should. It's rather unclear how to kill Alucard, too, throughout the series, though many people certainly think they get close.
To speak on the horror elements of the show, I'd say that they mostly come in the form of the ghouls, which are basically zombified corpses, killed by vampires. They serve just like zombies, biting into people and turning them to ghouls, too. Some of the Nazi vampires can be seen as the horror elements, too. They're probably scarier than the walkers of The Walking Dead, just because of their supernatural abilities. I suppose you could make the argument that some more horror elements arrive the deeper we dig into Alucard's powers as well as some of the material with Lt. Zorin in the assault on the Hellsing mansion, but, I didn't really feel frightened by most of the stuff.
In fact I'd be more inclined to say you'll feel more grossed out than frightened. The people who complain about violence and gore in an anime need look no further than this little OVA series. It's quite a bit, but at the same time, it kind of has to be that way. The emphasis of the show is on the violence and war that these monsters are capable of waging, they won't use petty assaults on each other. No, they always go for the kill-shot. And frankly, in case you've forgotten, the human body does indeed contain blood in it, and when exposed, it comes out. Maybe not to the extent seen here, as it is pretty exaggerated, but it's still there. The gore became less of a factor as the series continued on, given that I got used to it.
On that note, too, the series only got better and better as the episodes wore on. It was great in the first few episodes, the ones similar to the original Hellsing anime (in fact one could make the argument that episodes four onward are nothing more than a continuation of the original anime), but it was awesome after that, with the introduction of Iscariot and the Wild Geese and of course the Major's chilling, and famous, speech at the end of "Hellsing IV" which is renowned as one of the great villain speeches in anime. TeamFourStar did a great job of it in their parody too, though, not gonna lie.
So, overall, Hellsing Ultimate is one of those anime that you can't miss if you're a fan of action and monsters. Definitely a mature series (seriously, like, no kids allowed with this one, it's kind of like Black Lagoon...probably because Geneon produced it too but whatever) but definitely one worth the watch. And, fun fact, the final two episodes were just released today on the Funimation website in English--the wait is over!--for you to check out in it's well-cast English glory! I highly recommend this series.
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