In the last days of World War Deux, Hitler was trying anything and everything he could to get himself a check in the "Wins" column, including black magic. One of these Nazi rituals yielded a gateway to Hell, through which an infant with a big stone fist came through. The magic show was brought to an abrupt halt, the gateway was closed, the Krauts were soured (yuck yuck) and the little red devil child was adopted by the US Military's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (the BPRD). Named Hellboy for obvious reasons, the kid grew up at a stunted rate, making him somewhere in his early-to-mid 20s by the time we meet him. He's about 7' tall, strong as an ox, red as a blood clot and beats the snot out of shit out of the holy hell of anything that gives him good reason to. And so, Hellboy now saves mankind from the supernatural threats of the world alongside the agents of the BPRD, including but not limited to a 100+ year-old fish man named Abe Sapien and Hellboy's pyrokinetic love interest Liz Sherman.

Following the popularity (and boo-coo box office buckaroos across the dollar sign dimension) of Hellboy, not only was a sequel immediately tossed into the planning stages, but several animated features were green lighted as well, bringing on creator Mike Mignola and the movie's director Guillermo Del Toro as the creative producers and the movie's stars (Ron Perlman, Selma Blair and Doug Jones) to reprise the vocal roles of their live-action counterparts. Can this animated feature live up to it's cinematic counterpart, or will it fall burning and screaming into the mouth of Hell like the Morning Star on a bad day? Let's find out.

Like the beginning of a cartoon show, the opening scene is a fairly pointless intro to the characters for any noobs in the audience. HB, Liz and Abe search a Mayan burial tomb for a BPRD agent that's gone MIA, only to get a giant fruit bat and a room full of ghouls for their trouble. Liz scorches them all to the bones with her Firestarter powers (which just lends to her ever-present issues with control and self-esteem. As for Hellboy, he just gets covered in monster snot and needs his trenchcoat mended. Meanwhile, our real story starts up over in Japan, as noted historian and BPRD agent Professor Mitsuyasa Sakai uncovers a scroll detailing an ancient Japanese legend about a samurai who takes up his enchanted blade and battles the demon brothers Thunder (who creates his namesake with a big mallet ala Thor) and Lightning (who creates his namesake with a spear of lightning) in order to save his would-be wife (who was to be used as a human sacrifice by her father), only to be turned into a stone statue afterwards. In case you're not the type to pick up on hints (subtle or blatant), Hellboy's about to become the modern day stand-in for the samurai of that story… and he's going to have to fight Lightning and Thunder at some point. Did I ruin it for you? Don't worry, there's still plenty of stuff still to go!

No sooner does he finish up reading his new find than the prof is immediately possessed by the spirits of Thunder and Lightning (no doubt now fighting constantly over who gets the top spot on this spiritual bunk bed, like any brother duo) and when he blows up the home of a highfalutin sword collector, Hellboy and BPRD agent Kate Corrigan are called in for the investigation. At the scene, while their department issue psychic babbles something about an umbrella and their "bag and tag" boys take every inanimate object in the room, Kate interviews the collector and El Muchacho del Infierno does the impetuous guy thing and wanders off, picking up a certain rune covered katana and immediately being teleported to an other-dimensional forest where an English speaking fox becomes his guide... which is inside of the scroll that Professor Sakai was last reading... and which the possessed Sakai is now manipulating with magic figurines and what not to give Big Red a hard time. While inside this otherworldly dimension (seriously, it looks like rural Japan, so I guess it's not really all that "otherworldly" with the exception of it technically being another world...), Ol' Granite Fist will clash with a number of traditional Japanese spooks, including playing wiffle ball with some disembodied demon heads, playing the Orkin Man to a spider witch and her nest of "children", making jerky out of a cucumber hungry not-so-ninja turtle mutant, getting pushed around by giggling geisha girl ghouls that would make a giraffe jealous, being mobbed by a cemetery of fallen warriors and the decayed remains of the Jolly Green Giant and matching pig-stickers with a big sword swinging ogre! For fuck's sake, Hellboy better be putting in for double overtime and quadruple hazard pay for all of this... and I don't mean “Dukes of Hazzard” pay neither, cuz Tom Wopat never made shit doing that shtick! Why else would he have to resort to doing "Annie Get Your Gun!", to better himself as an “artist”?

Of course we can't leave the rest of the Bureau sitting on their oddly shaped thumbs while HB saves the world, so Abe and Liz are called in to back up their crew in the land of the rising sun. On the way, their plane is gunned down by a directed 50000 degree (Fahrenheit not Celsius) ejection of charged particles from a storm cloud (i.e. a lightning bolt) and they're downed, conveniently enough, just a short swim away from a cay. Both pilots die of course, but Liz and Abe (following a semi-awkward moment between the two where Abe gives Liz air, complete with a lingering embrace that almost trips into "sub aquatic soap opera" territory...) make it to the island and end up fighting a sea serpent. A sea serpent?! Yeah, it turns out that the closer Thunder and Lightning get to returning to our realm (which will happen when, not if, but when Hellboy breaks the Sword of Storms), the weaker the barrier between our dimensions get, allowing the bros' demon drinking buddies and dragon chums from their netherworld frat days to push and shove their way to flavor country, i.e. Earth. Hence, Abe and Liz are fighting a sea serpent for the rest of the movie... and never quite making much progress beyond pissing it off and not getting eaten. As for Kate and the psychic queef guy, they get hassled with some household yokai, fending off a pair of possessed sandals, an umbrella (yeah, you knew that was going to mean something eventually) and a unfriendly scarf... oooh, I'm scared.

Back to the main event, Hellboy winds up breaking the Sword and getting transported back to the real world ("truuuuue stooooryyyyyyy!") along with the big boys, T & L, who relinquish their hold on Professor Sakai. Will they succeed in their whole "Armageddon via dragons" plan? They need to get past one very large, very hard, very pissed off stone fist first... But, how can HB defeat the meteorological siblings with a busted butter knife? What part do the souls of the dead samurai and his girlfriend have to do with the ending? What happened to Hellboy's fox spirit guide? Is it any relation to Space Coyote?! Will there be a cameo by Ricardo Montalbon?! Who keeps drinking my homemade toilet wine when I'm at the post office?!?! The answers to (some of) these questions and more in Hellboy: Sword of Storms, same Hellboy time, same Hellboy channel, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyotch!

....... Sorry 'bout that. When it's all said and done, what can you say about this little animated pit stop in the Hellboy mythos? Well, on the one hand, whether you're a fan of Japanese folklore or you've just been exposed to it a few times before this (The Great Yokai War should take care of that for you), it's always fun to see something other than the typical horror show American audiences are so used to: zombies, vampires, aliens, slashers, etcetera. I wasn't all that thrilled with the Abe and Liz exchange though to be honest. Why bother using them at all if they're just going to sit on an island somewhere and fend off a water snake for their entire half of the movie? If they were going to kill the damn thing and somehow make it to Japan for at least the big battlin' climax I would've been perfectly happy, but they couldn't even give us that?! Meh. Despite the fact that it was equally as pointless, I did however enjoy the short appearance of the house yokai as they menaced Kate and the second rate Criswell. I never get tired of see those wacky umbrellas hopping around and licking people, heh heh.

Now, I know you're thinking, "Hey Anubis, now that we know what you thought about the story, what did you think of Hellboy's transition into animation? Also, can I borrow $10? I wanna leave your mom something nice on the nightstand tonight." To answer your last question first, my mom's busy tonight. But, I hear yours still has a few spots open for the "Dirty Whore Dick Train Invitational" tonight, so why don't you see if she can hook you up with the same family discount she gives your grandma. Word is that she's also giving out “backdoor” tokens for every 100th "customer", so I'll keep my fingers crossed for you. Good luck! Uhm, what was the other thing? Oh yeah, Hellboy. Hmmmm, I was hoping that for once we'd get an animated style that was a perfect recreation of the original source material. If someone could give us an animated incarnation of Mike Mignola's art style, I'd buy that shit up in Special Edition Platinum Waste-of-Money Director's Cut Unrated format toot-fucking-sweet! As far as what I saw here today... well... yeah, I liked it. If you can't recreate what you start out with, it's good to go with a style that’s still reminiscent enough not to alienate long time fans. I was much happier with this style than I was with what I saw in the Ultimate Avengers features... the voice acting's 17.3 times better too. I counted.

All in all, it's a really good effort. It's not perfect (yet), but it's not far off. I wouldn't mind seeing it evolve into an ongoing series, but given that the Hellboy comics only show up every 2 or 3 years, we're probably better off sticking with a 90 minute DVD every year or so instead... Talons up.