Hellboy: Sword of Storms

Have you ever dated an old girlfriend’s sister? Yeah, me neither. But I imagine it’s something like watching this cartoon after loving the live-action movie. She shares the same back story and a familiar wit, she even sounds similar, but while you find her comfortably attractive, she’s just different enough to remind you that she’s not the girl you loved.

Which is just another way of saying this thing isn’t drawn by Mike Mignola. He wrote the script and served as a consulting producer, but farmed out the penwork to a nice enough fellow named Sean “Cheeks” Galloway. (Trivia: “Cheeks” is my Dad's nickname too; so-dubbed because in our family, as with the Clemens', we, how to put it politely? Let's just say we derive our power from our legs.) But I digress. Instead of the wonderfully dirty and detailed look of the Hellboy comics and Screw-On Head...


...we get something more like a Saturday morning episode of Lilo & Stitch.

I know filmmaking's an industry, and I suppose you’ve got to promote the product you’ve got, but there’s a disappointing lowest common denominator moment in one of the mini-docs when an animator concedes that “you don’t want to add too much detail, because a character picks things up and carries them around,” which, presumably, would make animating them that much more tedious and difficult. Okay, so the object is to crank it out and damn the artistry? Got it. But half of Hellboy’s appeal is the look. If I can mix my metaphors, this is is like wrapping a VW Bug around a Panzer chassis. “Beep, beep, kid stuff coming through.”

But there are vestiges of the good old days. All of the lead actors from the movie return to voice their characters. So despite the fact that Ron Perlman conspired with Dan Hedaya to ruin what could have been one of the most beautiful and exciting movies of the 90s, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, he is the one and only Hellboy. He personifies an unflappable, world weary, garbage man, taking out the paranormal trash. And Selma Blair protests too much in the mini-doc when she claims her voice is her weakest instrument. She nails Liz Sherman’s wounded vulnerability. And Doug Jones, well, he’s just from another planet. Morpheus, er, Lawrence Fishburne is capital-t, capital-m, The Man, but they didn't need him to voice the Silver Surfer. Jones could have brought the whole package there too.

So in the end I guess I’d make out with that old flame's sister, but I’d really be hoping we could give it another shot and go see Hellboy 2: The Golden Army together.