Nitsujcember Part 29: Hell Girl

Boy was this an anime I was nervous going into. Like I said in my review Hell Girl is one of my favorite animes out there. It’s not in my top 10 or top 11 but it’s definitely on the list of animes that I consider one of my favorites. So as you can imagine when I decided to review this anime I was a little worried I wouldn’t be able to do this anime justice and would just come across as just a fanboy telling everybody to like this anime and screw everyone who hated it. On top of that there wasn’t a lot to go on for a full review but enough to write a blog about so I decided to do it in my Animation Bang format.

So the Hell Girl focuses on a girl named Ai Enma who is known throughout the world as Hell Girl. In the world there’s site called the Hell Correspondence which can only be accessed at midnight and only by those who have a strong hatred for someone and desire revenge. Once you access the site and form a deal with Ai she’ll give you a straw doll which is one of her servants with a red string and if you pull the red string the object of your hatred will be sent to Hell however once you die you too will go to Hell as well. Throughout all 3 seasons of the anime we see people access the site and form a deal with Ai where at first it seems like they might have second thoughts and won’t pull the strong but something always pushes them over the edge and they pull the string condemning the person they hate to Hell as well as themselves. The series just has this dark beauty around it. It’s a series that takes us into the human mind where we see just how dark and wicked we as human beings can be. When the show got started it was originally meant to shed light on the amount of bullying happening within Japan’s schools but it started to address other stuff such as an employee getting abused at work, family issues, life issues, marriage issues and other dark stuff that we may or may not have known about. This anime pulled no punches when it came to showing the dark side of humanity and that’s what made it so good and beautiful in my eyes. There’s no BS, just like humans are capable of great good we are capable of great evil and that’s what this series show us. It makes you question that if something like the Hell Correspondence were to exist would you use it and would you accept the consequences that follow?

Besides this the series does a good job diving into its characters. Ai isn’t just some empty girl performing a task given to her we actually finds out that she’s a victim of humanity’s cruelty. The same can be said for the other characters as well. They’re all victims of humanity’s cruelty but at the same time believe that humans have the potential to do great things. Despite years upon years of seeing how cruel and stupid we as humans can be they all still believe that humanity can do great things. Looking back I probably might have been overhyped this series a bit when I first reviewed. It’s a great and definitely deserves to be checked out but looking back I would give it a 9/10 instead of a 10/10. The stories sometimes can be a bit repetitive and there were some cases where I was hoping we would stick around a little more and see the aftermath of the person who sent someone to Hell. There were a few cases where they did this for some of their major stories but other than that they didn’t really stick around. Hell Girl to me is a cautionary tale of humanity’s stupidity and cruelty and how if things don’t change we’ll kill each other.

Posted in Nitsuj-cember, Specials and tagged , , , .