Ask John: Hellsing Ultimate or Death Note?

Question:
I’m anticipating 2 shows this year: Hellsing OVA and Death Note. Which of the 2 do you think is better, from what you’ve seen. Hellsing’s story seems to flow well this time around and the action is superb, but Death Note is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

Answer:
The choice between the Hellsing OVA series and Death Note television series, I think, is ultimately decided by the individual viewer’s choice for action or drama. Both shows fall into the supernatural horror genre; both are high profile productions; both are very good; and both have some flaws.

The Hellsing OVA series, to the delight of its fans, is a relatively faithful adaptation of Kouta Hirano’s original manga. The OVA series takes some liberties from its original manga source, but it is more faithful to the manga story than the earlier Hellsing television series. However, adherence to the original manga results in the OVA series also suffering from the weakness of the original manga – primarily some lacking atmosphere and heavy handed, artificial dialogue. Unlike the Hellsing TV series that emphasized mood, atmosphere, and character development, the OVA series concentrates on action. The OVA series is visually more graphic than the TV series was, but I think that many of the action scenes in the original TV series had more dramatic weight and impact because there was more character and narrative investment behind them. The Hellsing manga is creator Kouta Hirano’s first major work, and his inexperience as a writer is evident in dialogue that’s sometimes pretentious because it attempts to create atmosphere, but ends up sounding highly artificial and unnatural. Dialogue in Hellsing has a tendency to be redundant and over-long in an attempt to emphasize extremes, when more natural and concise dialogue could have achieved the same effect more transparently. Furthermore, despite being a high profile OVA production, the animation quality of especially the first episode is not particularly good. Movements still have the subconsciously noticeable jerkiness typical of anime produced with a limited number of frames of animation, and CG is not integrated very well in the first episode.

The first third of the Death Note television series is utterly engrossing. Its writing, characterizations, and story twists are far superior to the dramatic and literary quality of Hellsing. The Death Note anime also does an excellent job of effectively applying its animation quality. Since much of the series consists of talking heads, fluid animation quality is employed on scenes where it will be most evident and striking while the remainder of the series gets along just fine with average quality animation. However, roughly a third of the way through the series, the show’s point of view perspective changes and the show’s pace drastically slows. Although the story continues to develop, its tone of tension and urgency is almost entirely eliminated.

At this point in time, only three episodes of the Hellsing OVA series have been released and the Death Note anime has not yet finished, so making conclusive criticisms of either is impossible. Both titles are appealing, exciting, and enjoyable, and both have flaws that weigh down their aggressive momentum. So if both series are roughly equal in technical merit, the only way to decide between them is by choosing either the Hellsing OVA’s concentration on action or Death Note’s focus on drama.