Phil LaMarr – Tripping Through Gateways

This time, along with Perlman, Blair and Jones, John Hurt reprises his role as Professor Trevor ‘Broom’ Bruttenholm. Borrowing from the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, Blood and Iron is a tale that spans two times. The early life of Broom dealing with a vampire queen and the present with the BPRD investigating a haunted castle in the same town.

As usual, there is a demonic goddess who is driving things, and she tries to tempt Hellboy to turn his back on humanity, while the vampire queen seeks revenge on Broom for a confrontation that had occurred decades earlier.

Unlike Sword of Storms, the team gets to interact more throughout the movie, which is an improvement. We also get action hero Abe Sapien, jumping around and firing guns. While vampires and werewolves are not quite as inspired of monsters as the Japanese folklore of Sword of Storms, but the story makes up with this, including a snake goddess and two odd witches.

The animation of both films look better than the initial stills I had seen. And the character designs seem even a bit stronger in this film.

I am not sure exactly where these films are supposed to fall. Are they outside of Del Toro’s films? Are they part of that universe? The fun notion of using the live action actors has a lot to do with the uncertainty I have. But wither way, the Hellboy Animated films are pretty fun.

After the theatrical Hellboy saw moderate success, the studio greenlit a series of animated film. The first was Sword of Storms.

A professor finds an ancient scroll that tells the story of a samurai who defeated two storm demons and traps them in a sword. The professor becomes possessed from reading the scroll and goes missing.

While investigating the the missing professor, the Bureau finds the sword. Upon touching it, Hellboy is transported to another world, a mystical version of Japan.

Basically, the film completely separates Hellboy from the rest of the cast. While this could have worked, nobody else gets much to really do, they are just searching for Hellboy. However, Hellboy is constantly dealing with fun monsters inspired by Japanese folklore.

The big draw for the film was the live action film’s voice cast appearing. And we get some of the chemistry, but by separating the cast for much of the movie, it never feels like they get to gel…and granted, part of that may be due to the process of recording for animation, as actors are often not interacting with each other. I feel this is especially true with Jones’ performance…which feels a lot more aggressive than his vocal performance in the Golden Army.

The character design Sean “Cheeks” Galloway is pretty slick and stylish, with its own distinct look. It turned out that one of the conditions of the animated films was that the animation style could not look like the art of Mike Mignola, which had been the directors’ original plan. While that might have been cool, Galloway’s angular and cartoony style is quite good.

While not quite as fun as the live action Del Toro films, there is some really fun sequences in this animated take on Hellboy.

Right before the film starts, the cast and crew pop up on screen to tell us the fourteen year wait for the sequel will totally be worth it. Not exactly needed of course. Hey, my butt is already in the seat.

The original Incredibles film was a fun comic book film that was doing that Marvel type of action four years before we got Iron Man. Probably of all the Pixar films, the Incredibles was one of the few that readily seemed to be set for sequels. But when asked, Pixar tended to defer to the availability of Brad Bird.

After the collapse of the highly anticipated Tomorrowland…Pixar got their chance.

Set shortly after the end of the first film, we discover things did not go so well. People still feel that the heroes do more damage than good. Enter brother and sister Winston and Evelyn Deavor. They want to convince the world that super-heroes are necessary, and so they convince Helen Parr to resume life as Elastigirl (noting she had a much lower history of property damage). Bob, on the other hand, becomes a stay at home dad. Bob really wants to be fighting as Mr. Incredible, but he is trying to step back and be a supportive husband ad father.

A lot of the moments I enjoyed most were with Bob and the kids. While the first film revealed baby Jack Jack to have a variety of powers, the Parr family never actually witnessed it. While Bob is initially excited, he finds it taxing, one more problem along with trying to help Dash with schoolwork and Violet come to terms with a frustrating love life. There is a genuinely sweet moment when Bob is exhausted and apologizes for not being the father he wants to be…Violet has a look of kindness as she reaches out to reassure him. It is a really sweet moment.

Flipping the situation for Helen and Bob works very well in the film. The Elastigirl scenes are fun and exciting. There is a great fight scene where she is in the position of having to keep her eyes closed to avoid being hypnotized. Bird and company make this quite exciting.

The film also gives us something new, which is other Supers beyond the Parr family and Frozone. This leads to an action packed finale where saving everybody actually falls onto the Parr kids.

The Brad Bird voiced Edna Mode returns for a fun sequence that explores Jack Jack’s abilities.

I feel Pixar has created a pretty successful sequel here that compliments the original film quite well.

Tag: Phil LaMarr

Birth of the Demon Part 3 (Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron, 2007)

Birth of the Demon Part 2 (Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms, 2006)

Back In Action (The Incredibles 2, 2018)