Name(s): Hells / Hells Angels / Hell’s Angels / ヘルズ, (ヘルズエンジェルス)
Format: Movie
Studio(s): Madhouse

Review

Rinne Amagame is an average schoolgirl ready to start the new year, but on her way to her first class is struck by a semi-truck while trying to save a cat. Naturally, she goes straight to Hell and is enrolled at an academy for demonic delinquents whose goal is graduation and ascension to Heaven. But Rinne quickly learns her death is a mistake, and looks for a way to return to the real world and her mother. Rinne and the rest of Hell will even be dragged into a plot that goes as far back as the story of Adam and Eve.

It’s surprising to see anime with such distinctive art and stunning animation be such a well-kept secret, and a modern anime at that. This one could have gone under my radar for a long time but I fortunately learned about it, and a look at some screenshots instantly convinced me it’d be a worthwhile watch. Whenever people encounter such a work so heavily focused on its stylization, they assume the plot and characters will fail to have some kind of “maturity.” I don’t like to use the word “substance” because it’s so loaded. But when it comes to storyline standards, plots with heavy dialogue, complex relationships, and emotional grace tends to be considered linearly better.

I’ve gone on and on about how visuals play just as much of a part of getting across a strong story as any choice of words, so I won’t go off on another one of those tangents here. My point is that Redline often suffers the same criticisms, and yet I love its story and characters that are delivered in such a refreshing blow that they overcome a variety of dramatic pretensions for emotional impact. Besides, after a certain point, both the simplest save-the-day stories and complex character dramas have been equally done to death. So, style is often the distinguishing factor.

Basically, what I’m trying to say here is that if there’s a target audience for Hells, I’d figure I’m part of it. Hells’s underworld is designed in a darkly comic manner most people will be able to draw a comparison with somewhere. The likely candidate is the stop-motion characters Tim Burton has designed, with Hells’s art being at once colorful and childishly simple but rendered in abrasive ways, with harsh jagged lines that accentuate their inhuman features. Even Rinne, a human, looks lanky and doll-like.

Similarly, when this nightmarish distortion is applied to even the most basic of scenery and curved buildings it begins to look like a German expressionist work. Combining the innocent with the disgusting may be a worn-out trend, but anime unusually touches influences such as these which makes Hells feel exciting in context.

But all of that is how Hells looks when it’s static. As for how it moves, another comfortable point of comparison is the works of studio Trigger. The movement in Hells is every bit as breakneck and attention-deficit as the pacing of its storyline, bouncing and bolting from scene to scene with a fittingly childish enthusiasm. It’s fluid, colorful, and even unpredictable with short and sudden style shifts.

The result feels light and juvenile, but in a way that’s rebelliously punky. Hells’s base simplicity and simple sense of wonder truly pays off in a final act about challenging reality with conviction and making the impossible possible with a loud, straightforward optimism reminiscent of Gurren Lagann’s messages. Unsurprisingly, that series was composed by current members of studio Trigger.

The sheer speed at which Hells moves isn’t very beneficial to deep character development. The movie is clearly trying to capture a story larger than its runtime, but style is once again the great compromiser here, making characters likable and understandable simply through their boundless expressions. You don’t fully understand the logic of, say, Rinne and Steeler’s relationship because it feels like they barely interact, but what’s important is that whenever that relationship is relevant it’s so exuberantly captured that you can simply feel its significance to the characters. The emotions in Hells all feel genuine despite their lack of set-up, and takes little explanation to cheer for a cast that’s so innately enjoyable and fun.

Hells doesn’t offer deep moral introspection, but those kinds of conversations have been handled by other media so much already. Instead of beating around the same old concepts in your head, movies like Hells come along and aren’t discouraged to try their hardest to make the ride something you’d have to remember rather than something you feel like you should remember.