Hellboy: Storm of Swords
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 05/22/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

Since 2004 I’ve been a staunch and vitriolic defender of North American comics and animation against the hordes of cultural lycanthropes who call themselves “otaku” but are more deserving of the designation of japanophiles. This has never been a difficult task where comics are concerned, because manga is mostly produced on an assembly line and designed to appeal to as many people as possible, meaning it’s formulaic and boring.

I mean I can invoke things like classic Looney Tunes, or more contemporary fare like Batman The Animated Series or Invader Zim, but there’s some noticeable elephants in the room, or rather large empty spaces where there ought to be elephants. George Lucas joked on Conan O’Brian that the Clone Wars cartoon wasn’t a South Park like late night adult comedy or a Saturday morning cartoon but a PG-13 drama, so it had no audience or timeslot. It was pretty damn good for what it was, but he had a very good point. There’s a damning lack of mature, dramatic animation of any sort in North America right now.

Japan never had a Watchmen or a Doom Patrol, but we really haven’t had an Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Jin Roh. There’s good animation out there, especially if you aren’t watching The Legion of Superheroes, but LOSH is no Akira.

Neither is the first DVD release of the fledgling Hellboy franchise, but it’s a damn good start towards something new and fresh. As with pretty much everything else over the last year, my first real encounter with Storm of Swords was at last year’s SDCC, where I attended the panel devoted to it and got a free t-shirt for my efforts. They talked a good game and showed us a promising five minute clip of Hellboy fighting a giant bat monster while Liz and Abe fend off hungry Mayan mummy zombies.

What makes Storm of Swords such a triumph isn’t that the masterminds of the comic and movie respectively (Mike Mignola and Guillermo Del Toro) are involved, or even that DeviantART darling Sean “Cheeks” Galloway was wisely chosen as the winner of the contest to define the look of the characters for the franchise, but that everyone involved was engaged in making something new and fresh that pushed the boundaries of contemporary North American animation.

The evidence for this ranges from Mignola writing into the contract that the character designs could not look like his to the animation staff adapting to find Sean a position where his talent was maximized without having to re-train him for a completely new approach to illustration (from comics and concept illustration to animation, it’s more different than you’d think), to the extensive research conducted in crafting the plot of the movie.

Storm of Swords may take place in Japan, but the weaboo radar stays deafeningly silent throughout the entire thing. There is no sloppy misapprehension of anime clichés and tropes here, this is an American cartoon that takes place in Japan, not an American cartoon pretending to be Japanese. This is however balanced by a meticulous and refereshing effort to stay true to all the details of the setting including the mythological backstory.

While there’s no aping of contemporary Japanese animation in Storm of Swords, classical Japanese illustration from the feudal era creeps it’s way into the character designs as well as sequences animated to look like they were taking place on a scroll drawn from that time period, all of which come off as being inventive and genuine rather than cheap or exploitative (like Teen Titans). Even the score reflects the setting by incorporating instruments and pieces of music usually associated with the Japanese style of play known as Kabuki, which itself is weaved into the narrative.

The animation itself is smoother and more enjoyable to watch than anything I’ve seen outside of a Pixar movie since probably The Lion King. The animators actually dared to use multiple color pallets to fit the varying backdrops and approached the lighting by defining the characters based on their shapes and shadows, much like what Mignola does in much higher contrast in his own art.

The plot also wisely shies away from keeping the limelight on Hellboy himself, instead dividing the story almost evenly between the supporting cast, even taking the time to develop new characters besides the trinity of Hellboy, Liz, and Abe. The interplay between the Scully style skeptic and the seemingly fluffy psychic BPRD agents are especially funny, demonstrating that there is in fact more to the BPRD and the cartoon itself than chasing down and beating up monsters trying to initiate the apocalypse.

Hellboy: Storm of Swords isn’t just an excellent chapter in Dark Horse’s darling franchise; it’s also the new standard in production values and innovation for the entire North American animation industry (with the possible exception of the fine folks at Pixar and the guys in Hawaii working for Square Enix if that counts).