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anime: Hell Girl: Season 1
Aug. 4th, 2010 06:56 pmI read the first several volumes of the manga adaptation of this series when they were first put out by Del Rey, but decided after a few volumes that I’d probably prefer the anime. This ended up being true, though not as much so as I’d hoped.
The concept is that if you visit a website at exactly midnight and enter the name of a person you hold a grudge against, Hell Girl will take that person to hell for you, but in return, you have to go to hell when you die, too. Hell Girl is actually Ai-chan, a young girl who died several centuries earlier, and who has three assistants. The manga lost me because it was almost entirely episodic with almost no focus on what were ostensibly the main characters, and I often had a hard time believing that some of the clients were so desperate that they felt they had no other choice. I still have the latter problem with the anime, but not as much so.
The anime did shift to an ongoing plotline about midway through, but instead of focusing on Ai-chan and her assistants, it focuses on a reporter, Hajime, who tries to stop people from making bargains with Ai-chan, and his daughter, Tsugumi, who shares dreams with Ai-chan. I think that made the series stronger, but I spent a lot of that going “I like you, but I don’t want you to be the one with the ongoing storyline focus!” and it felt like all the best parts were crammed into the last few episodes, with some good horror and character bits sprinkled through the first half, and then more about midway through.
The concept is that if you visit a website at exactly midnight and enter the name of a person you hold a grudge against, Hell Girl will take that person to hell for you, but in return, you have to go to hell when you die, too. Hell Girl is actually Ai-chan, a young girl who died several centuries earlier, and who has three assistants. The manga lost me because it was almost entirely episodic with almost no focus on what were ostensibly the main characters, and I often had a hard time believing that some of the clients were so desperate that they felt they had no other choice. I still have the latter problem with the anime, but not as much so.
The anime did shift to an ongoing plotline about midway through, but instead of focusing on Ai-chan and her assistants, it focuses on a reporter, Hajime, who tries to stop people from making bargains with Ai-chan, and his daughter, Tsugumi, who shares dreams with Ai-chan. I think that made the series stronger, but I spent a lot of that going “I like you, but I don’t want you to be the one with the ongoing storyline focus!” and it felt like all the best parts were crammed into the last few episodes, with some good horror and character bits sprinkled through the first half, and then more about midway through.