Anime: Hells

Where to begin? This thing was a mess. I was anticipating it for quite sometime simply due to Kazuto Nakazawa being part of the production staff and it being a feature length film from Madhouse. The visual style is the most striking thing about this film and thats basically the end of it's value. The quality of the animation is all over the place, ranging from very good to very cheap. It seems pretty clear that this thing did not have much of a budget due to the inclusion of many many scenes with little to no animation. The direction is where this thing really suffers. The pacing is awful and scenes jump from one to the other in a jarring way that I assume was a stylistic choice but one that has been executed extremely poorly. The storyline is a convoluted mess and it all seems to take itself way too seriously. It should be a nice balance of zany comedy and over the top action and that is clearly what they are going for, but it doesn't work. The film is overlong and there is really nothing to justify the running time some scenes just really drag. It has the appearance of a film with a very troubled production with loads of unnecessary scenes to fill out the nearly 2 hours of running time. This film is in the vein of something like Dead Leaves, but I found that one much more enjoyable and I think it's mostly due to much better direction. Character designs were again very visually interesting and quite varied and unique but the characters themselves are pretty boring and typical anime stereotypes. I honestly have to wonder how this got made because it's really hard to imagine that their is much of an audience for it in Japan. It seems like another one of those "let's just do crazy stuff for the sake of it" things thats meant to appeal to western audiences and it just falls flat. To be fair part of the problem is the extremely poor subtitles included on the Japanese release which seems to be full of errors and makes the story that much more confusing. So in the end great visual style but combined with poor direction and a story that doesn't know how to focus and characters that lack interest adds up to a very messy film.