Hellsing (anime)

"In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished in eternal damnation. Amen."

Hellsing (ヘルシング) refers to the made-for-television anime based upon a manga by the same name by Kohta Hirano.

It was first broadcast in Japan on Fuji Television from October 10, 2001, to January 16, 2002, and ran in the United States from October 4, 2003, to December 27, 2003, on Starz's Encore Action cable channel. It finished at thirteen episodes long. The series was directed by Yasunori Urata under the chief direction of Umanosuke Iida from a screenplay by Chiaki J. Konaka and animated by Studio Gonzo.

The anime follows a different storyline, especially towards the end, but with the same protagonists and main characters.

Summary
Hellsing, an organisation specializing in dealing with supernatural threats, is called in to eliminate a vampire that is turning the villagers of Cheddar into ghouls. To put an end to this, the leader of the organisation, Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, dispatches her most formidable asset: a powerful vampire known as Alucard.

Armed with only a single handgun, Alucard wreaks havoc on the monsters plaguing Cheddar. However, a young police officer, Seras Victoria, gets caught up in the chaos and becomes mortally wounded as a result. Taking pity on the girl, Alucard gives her a choice: die as a human or live on as a vampire. Seras accepts his offer and begins a new life as a member of Hellsing. Though it was her decision, Seras struggles with the fact that she is no longer human. Nevertheless, she must embrace being a creature of the night soon if she wants to survive on the front lines in the fight between humans and the supernatural.

Music

 * Opening Theme - "A World Without Logos"
 * Ending Theme - "Shine"

Production
An adaptation of the manga series Hellsing was in talks around 1997 (before Volume 1 was released), and Hirano's involvement in the series itself was very little as he himself doesn't know anything about anime making. The cast of the main characters were decided even before the release of Volume 1. Pioneer LDC (Geneon), the producer of the anime, brought in many staffs who had worked with each other before to work on this project. Talented staffs with the likes of Umanosuke Iida (known for Devilman) and Yasunori Urata served as the series' director. A commentary on the site Gonzo released for the Hellsing anime stated that this is a suitable work for Gonzo's first "terrestrial" broadcasting work, and it was also one of their biggest projects yet.

In 2001, the official site for Hellsing launched, with several official companies with the likes of Shonen Gahosha themselves having a link to the site, so in response, a page specifically created for links to other official companies was made in the official Hellsing site. In 2003, Pioneer launched its own Hellsing website that announces releases of DVDs, with character profiles, episode summaries, ect.

In 2000, a trailer promoting the Hellsing anime by Gonzo released, featuring casts from the original manga with spotlighting lighting on Alucard, Walter, Seras, Integra and even Anderson. The main villain of the series, or rather, the manga, The Major was also featured. The trailer was later given to dubbing companies to let them know what type of show they're buying the rights to. The trailer however, was produced even before the episodes were animated, therefore, original shots in which belonging to the trailer are mainly left unused, however some were eventually used in the main episodes. A replica of Alucard's gloves was made by an anime goods maker in Japan, so Gonzo used their inscriptions for reference as Alucard's gloves inscriptions on the manga was only a bunch of gibberish written by Hirano to mimmick English words.

The studio however was put into trouble as the manga hadn't even finished yet, so in response, Hirano let them do whatever they want with the show; creating an original ending, ect. Even so, the first three episodes of Hellsing was based upon the manga however featured many differences to lower the budget. In a staff interview on one of the DVDs, a staff stated that if they were to faithfully adapted the fight between Alucard and Anderson, then the studio would go bankrupt.

Due to the restrictions because it was aired on television, changes has to be made; violence were reduced, most of the blood coming out of ghouls and vampires were turned into piles of dust rather than blood and fight scenes were shortened. Other censorships includes some shadow over a character's wound and colors getting inverted. So to contrast, the general tone of the anime was made much darker compared to the manga itself, reducing the amount of "light-hearted" scenes.

Hirano openly stated that he prefers the OVA over the anime, despite feeling that the anime did well for "its purpose," he was disappointed by it. His disappointment in the TV series, in which, openly disliking it led Geneon (Pioneer back then) adopted the policy of "respecting the original work as much as possible," thus the new Hellsing adaptation begun to be in production.

English Dub
For the English Dub casting of Hellsing, Jonathan Klein, the English Dub producer of the show, set out to get an all-British cast, to make it look more "convincing", rather than casting American Actors for the role and make them do a British accent; expressing that he wasn't sure that it'd convince the viewers. In addition, he stated that the biggest challenge of this was finding an actor that was right for the voices - and while there were some in Los Angeles, there really weren't a huge number of voice actors to choose from. He also mentioned how most of the Voice Actors cast were from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, which is a very prestigious school in England.

Finding Steven Brand for the role of Alexander Anderson, he struggled to find someone to play Sir Integra that had the same kind of "gravitas" present in the original Japanese version.

Taliesin Jaffe, the voice director for Hellsing, shared his experience of working with the English Dub crew of Hellsing, and describing Hellsing as the "Great Demonic Learning Experience", expressing that he had learned many things when working on Hellsing's English dub. He also stated that there's a variety of reasons why Crispin Freeman was chosen as Alucard. Jeffe stated that for a show like "Hellsing", the hero sets the tone, and the villains set the energy level. "Everyone had to fit well with Alucard, both reflecting and opposing him in all the right places", Jeffe added. Most of the voice actors cast for Hellsing were previously singers, including Seras' voice actress, K.T. Gray; his reasons why he had cast singers were because they have good voice control and that they know how to work with a mic.

Rescript
These five DVD sets of re-released Hellsing titles titled "Hellsing Rescript" was made to fix the problems made during the original production of the series. To sum it up, the said DVD mentioned before was the Rescript DVDs which was released back in 2002 by the same distributor for the original DVDs, Pioneer. It serves as the "Blu-Ray" version of Hellsing, and now, is mainly the "common" version to watch Hellsing in. Because of this, the original TV Broadcasted/DVD release of Hellsing became sort of a lost media and is never used in any of the official sites to watch Hellsing in, legally; like Netflix for example.

Comparison between the Manga and the Anime
Despite this, the canon episodes were not really adapted straight out of the original manga either, like the incident in Cheddar for example; the Cheddar Priest's backstory is omitted, and the final battle took place in the Priest's church, the manga however, took place in the Cheddar's forest. Due to budget issues, considering that Gonzo was a fairly new studio at the time, the Alexander and Alucard fight was shortened in episode 3. However, in episode 7, Alucard and Anderson fought again; this time however, there were some scenes that were from the manga, notably, Alucard's regeneration and Anderson cutting off his head. The final minutes of the fight is also similar to the final battle between Alucard and human Anderson from the manga, like how Alexander's arms are badly damaged and Alucard standing in front of him while Anderson was hopeless. Furthermore, Alexander bit his bayonet to rush forward against Alucard, however, in the original anime, Alucard didn't have any familiars guarding him; therefore, Alucard shot Anderson's bayonet, sparing him which would let to future fights that unfortunately didn't happen. In addition, the plot greatly diverges from the manga after the seventh episode; which is roughly the third volume of the manga.

Trivia

 * Incognito does not appear in the manga and his name comes from the literal definition of the word "incognito." In episode nine, Alucard responds to Incognito's introduction by saying his name's "quite an enigma as well."
 * Because of the exclusion of the Millennium Organization, Walter C. Dornez never betrayed Integra and the Hellsing Organisation.
 * In addition to the digital format, anime also uses 16 or 35 millimeter films (for now, the film gauge is unknown). Examples are episodes 2, 3, and 6.