Hellsing Ultimate Vol. 5: London Calling

On Friday, we watched the Japanese DVD of HELLSING ULTIMATE VOL. V. This will eventually be released in the US in a dual-language edition by Funimation; but since we wanted to see it ASAP, we watched it in pure, unsubtitled Japanese.

If you haven't seen it, or the stories on which it is based, here's a SPOILER WARNING for you.

As reported in previous posts, this is a slavishly-faithful adaptation of Kouta Hirano's manga series. To up the stakes for the series, Hirano stranded his protagonist, the vampire-killing-vampire Alucard, on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic, while incredibly nasty Nazi vampires (yes, Nazi vampires) invaded England in a massive zeppelin and, well, ate London. Since the manga was published on a monthly basis, that meant Alucard was missing from the action for about two years of manga stories (which occupied just a few hours of story time). That means that Alucard just appears in a couple of framing sequences in this volume of the DVD series; the balance is made up of beautifully animated yet nightmarishly horrific scenes of the Nazi vampires wreaking apocalyptic revenge upon London for the Allies' triumph in WWII.

(Plus, as Hirano has stated in US convention appearances, he once visited London and had a lousy time. So he decided to destroy it in his story.)

It's not all doom-and-gloom. As adventure fiction demands, the secondary players step up to the plate in the star's absence, and battle on. The truly spectacular battles will be on the volumes to come.