Hellsing – review

Director: Kohta Hirano

First aired: 2001-2002

Contains spoilers

This is a review of the first Hellsing Anime series – the series of OVAs that followed/rebooted the story would come under Hellsing Ultimate. First a little background. Although I am posting this review in 2024 (and, as I'll explain in a forthcoming review, wrote the review some time ago), I actually first watched (and had the DVD set) of Hellsing before I started Taliesin Meets the Vampires. I never re-watched the series, after the blog started, for review and therefore didn’t review it.

Alucard

Following the series, OVAs were released and I had the first four on DVD but wanted to review the run of OVAs when they came to an end – in all there were 10 OVAs produced. Eventually I found a Malaysian set containing the original series and all the OVAs. For completeness for the blog I decided to re-watch Hellsing (reviewed here) and then the OVAs (reviewed separately).

Alucard and Sir Integra

All that background leaves me in a place where I am sad to report that had I reviewed Hellsing when I first watched it, I think it would have got a much higher score than I am giving in this retrospective review (or maybe I just have rose tinted glasses). Main character Alucard (Jôji Nakata) is all kinds of cool but the show itself is lacking. Set in the UK, the Hellsing organisation is a secret, private agency run by the Hellsing family – currently headed by Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing (Yoshiko Sakakibara), the fact that she should be Dame Integra, not Sir, is idiosyncratically cool.

Father Alexander Anderson

The Agency has its own private army and its sole purpose is to hunt down freaks – or vampires. The family have a secret weapon in that the powerful vampire Alucard is a sworn servant of the head of the family. In some of the episodes we see the protestant organisation at odds with vampire hunters from the Vatican – the Vatican make it very clear that they do not use vampires as Hellsing do.

Serras Victoria

In the first episode there is an infestation in Cheddar village and the police sent in have all been turned into mindless ghouls (the victim of a vampire can be fully turned into a vampire or left as a zombie-like servant of the vampire who killed them) bar the young female police woman Serras Victoria (Fumiko Orikasa) – I assume, with Serras, the writers used the Japanese standard of placing the familial name first. At the end she is held hostage by the vampire priest who faces off against Alucard.

Incognito

Alucard gives Serras a choice – dying as he shoots through her to kill the vampire (his guns use silver bullets smelted from a church cross) or living on as a vampire. She choses the latter and the series primarily looks through her lens at the events that then unfold. The story meanders somewhat, starting with artificially created vampires (turned using freak chips – bio-engineering chips implanted into the host), through traitors in the ranks (low and high level) to a powerful ancient vampire, Incognito (Takumi Yamazaki), trying to summon a demon to destroy England.

black arts

In the last paragraph we have the two main issues I have with the anime – story and characters. Alucard is, as I say, all kinds of cool and we do get a conflation of him with Vlad Ţepeş at the very end of the show. We know (because the reversed name is almost clichéd) that he is Dracula. What we do not know is the extent of his powers (he has restraints on his power that he releases in levels dependent on the power of his foe) or why he is sworn to the Hellsing organisation. We get zero background.

Walter

We do get some backstory for Sir Integra – though it fails to round the character and just about every other character is so two dimensional as to be entirely without character. The retainer Walter (Motomu Kiyokawa) is another who needed expansion desperately (and was cool despite lack of characterisation). As for Serras she is simpering at best, more often than not looking dumbfounded and whispering “Master” than actually doing anything. The catholic vampire hunter Alexander Anderson (Nachi Nozawa) again is cool but we never find out why he is a human regenerator (healing rapidly from terrible wounds) and he vanishes from the story almost without a trace.

Ghoul army

The stories all kind of peter out. The freak chip – is the big main thrust, a lab is found in Hong Kong and then they just kind of vanish out of story. The storyline is addressed in an intertitle at the end, but only to say that there is no conclusion. The fact that Incognito also has a human master is not addressed (so we know he has one, but not who and why they have sent the vampire to destroy London. The whole anime also has quite an outdated feel to it also, it just doesn’t feel like it has stood the test of time.

All kinds of cool

Despite the negatives, perhaps born out of age and when compared to newer anime, one cannot take away the cool factor. Alucard is all kind of cool and, whilst we might not know the full extent or source of his dark powers the effects are great in their graphic rendering. There is a nice layer of gore through the animation, it just could have been so much more (and did seem so a couple of decades ago). 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK