Blogging Hellsing Ultimate episode 2

So this dude’s friend is a doc­tor but, like, does the cos­metic shit on the side, right? So then that same crazy fuck with the horn comes back but now he wants a Plexiglas plate for his skull. And the doc­tor fuck­ing does it! He makes a win­dow. You can see the fuck­ers brain and shit. The guy’s got a big mon­ster horn and his head­meat on dis­play. The guy’s a freak. Like, what the fuck!

Ah, so that’s where the pro­fan­ity laden dub had got­ten to. I just had to wait for the more volat­ile of the Valentine broth­ers to come waltz­ing in and his fas­cin­at­ing stor­ies about Plexiglas skulls.

Now this is more like it! While epis­ode 2 still hasn’t quite reached the new mater­ial yet (although I’m pretty cer­tain there were no Nazis in the ori­ginal Hell­sing series), Ulti­mate has finally begun to show far more class. Epis­ode 1 was rushed and, while still enjoy­able, paled in com­par­ison to the way the ori­ginal handled itself. This epis­ode, while still cov­er­ing mater­ial from the first series, man­aged to do it mar­gin­ally bet­ter than the first man­aged to. Part of this is down to simply hav­ing bet­ter anim­a­tion, but the main reason this epis­ode worked so well was it was all self-contained. This was just one epis­ode about the raid of the Hell­sing headquar­ters. Set the scene, intro­duce the vil­lains, begin the battles and gradu­ally work up the ten­sion and the ser­i­ous­ness of the situ­ation from bom­bastic­ally silly to down­right fright­en­ing. This is enter­tain­ment, per­haps not at its finest nor most artistic, but as well executed as you could have gotten.

The epis­ode kicked off with the much maligned Hell­sing Ulti­mate humour. Well, maybe ‘much’ is going too far, but I’ve seen it cited sev­eral times as some­thing people don’t really like about Ulti­mate. Hon­estly I have no prob­lem with it. Hell­sing has a nat­ur­ally silly side to it any­way and the humour keeps out of the times when it’s sup­posed to be ser­i­ous. I per­son­ally think it works well in the set up of the series. Start­ing the epis­ode light-hearted helps the way it gradu­ally spir­als down­wards into more and more ser­i­ous and scrawpy ter­rit­ory as it goes on. Also, I laughed. Which is what comedic scenes are meant to do. So eh, I’m not complaining.

What fol­lowed was and end­less bar­rage of blood, viol­ence, bloody carnage, gore, zombies/ghouls, blood drip­ping from walls and ceil­ings, invent­ive ways to cut people up, guns and even more blood. It was all a bit silly but that’s exactly what it was aim­ing for. I sup­pose you have to have a slightly sad­istic glee in watch­ing end­less viol­ence. After a while the blood did start to lose its effect though. I stopped going ‘woah, did yah see that! His head was sliced right in two!’ and star­ted noti­cing other things. Like how the blood had this strange shini­ness and tex­ture to it. It looked like a tex­ture you might see a Gankut­suou char­ac­ter wear­ing. I sup­pose blood is a bit of a bor­ing thing to look at after a while. It’s just a deep red, adding in some tex­tures spices it up a bit.

Fuck off bitch. I’m sup­posed to be on top

Asides from artistic tex­tures on blood, one other, much bet­ter executed use of slightly dif­fer­ent anim­a­tion tech­niques is the CGI. The only thing Mad­house ever make CGI are the weaponry. As use­ful a tool CGI is, integ­rat­ing it into stand­ard anim­a­tion nor­mally just looks clumsy. Ulti­mate makes it work though. Epis­ode 1 had the slow-mo fir­ing of Alucard’s hand­gun. This time there was the slow-mo reload­ing of Victoria’s massive anti-tank gun. The ejec­tion of the shell and the view down the scope into her eye was fant­astic. Def­in­itely much pre­ferred watch­ing that part to the end­less amounts of blood.

La la la, total slaughter, total slaughter. I won’t leave a single man alive. La dee da dee dide, gen­o­cide. La dee da dee dud, an ocean of blood. Let’s begin the killing time

Vash the Stam­pede — Trigun

But as mind­lessly fun as it is to watch a large breasted vam­pir­ess dressed in police uni­form duke it out along­side an assas­sin but­ler against a horde of zom­bies and a foul-mouthed Amer­ican vam­pire tour­ist, the real high­light of this epis­ode, and of the entire pre­vi­ous series, is the fight between Alu­card and the older of the Valentine broth­ers. For much of the rest of the series, Alu­card is just a well-dressed sad­istic freak, and for the begin­ning of this fight noth­ing changes from that. I did love his fight­ing tech­nique though. As his oppon­ent runs around, dodging every bul­let that comes his way, Alu­card stays on his throne, body slumped back, head arched in a dir­ec­tion that sug­gests a broken neck, fir­ing his gun in an almost lazy man­ner and the whole time with his same manic grin spread across his face.

But it’s this scene that steals the entire epis­ode. As the battle upstairs takes a turn for the worse, the slightly silly atmo­sphere sur­round­ing the whole attack begins to evap­or­ate, we see Alu­card in his altern­ate form. The whole sequence is one of the most fright­en­ing I’ve ever seen and the way it was built up was fant­astic. But what struck me about this whole scene, bey­ond the gore and night­mare fuel and beau­ti­fully tex­tured blood, was the dis­ap­point­ment and loneli­ness of Alu­card. The delight he had at finally receiv­ing an oppon­ent worth get­ting worked up about, only to be crushed when he real­ises what a weak vam­pire he was. As he morphed his hand into a dog and added the episode’s kill-count by one extra, you almost felt sorry for the guy.

Looks like we’re onto the new mater­ial in the next epis­ode, hope­fully with Integra tak­ing centre stage a bit more because I really don’t feel like she’s had the time she deserves yet. I’ve seen Ulti­mate match the ori­ginal with this epis­ode. Now I’m wait­ing to see it top the original.