Lady Death The Motion Picture - CineGeek
- CineGeek
- Stephen Lackey
- 10/12/04
- click here
Lady Death
ADV Films is one of the world's leaders in releasing quality anime titles. Often anime is dropped onto to DVD by lower budget distributors who don't give it the care it deserves as far as remastering the audio and video and giving it an error free transfer. Due to the ever growing popularity of anime domestically this is finally starting to change, and ADV is one of the best.
The Movie
ADV presents the comic to film story of Hope, a young girl in 15th century Sweden who's father, thought to be a great mercenary, is revealed to be Lucifer the Lord of Lies and ruler over Hell. He is taking souls from Earth and adding them to his ever growing army.
Hope is sentenced to a fiery death by the town for being his daughter. In excruciating pain she finally agrees to an offer from Lucifer to spend eternity in Hell. Lucifer has plans to turn his powerful daughter into his greatest ally in taking over Heaven. Lucifer has even taken the souls of the man she loves and her mother hostage to use as bargaining tools to convince Hope to join him.
What Lucifer doesn't realize is that Hope has taken one of his lessons to heart, 'desire is power'. Her greatest desire is to kill Lucifer and revenge herself and the ones she loves. This desire and the help of others in Hell who want to see Lucifer dethroned allow Hope to realize her true inner power. From that point on she is transformed into Lady Death.
Her power and need for revenge becomes all consuming. She wants revenge as badly as her father wants to take over the Heavens. Slowly she begins to deal with the fact that she will spend eternity in Hell, and that makes her want that revenge even more.
I love this type of apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, we've seen it many times in other animes. What I really liked about this story is that there was a little gray area between good and evil. Sure, if Lady Death gets her revenge it would serve the greater good, but she doesn't care about what would follow the death of Lucifer. She is so short sighted that even if she found out that killing him would spawn an even greater evil she'd still go through with it. But deep in her heart there is 'hope', she is still good, and she lives in hell. These classic sort of ironies are a blast to watch.
I really enjoyed Lady Death but it isn't perfect. Expect some terrible voice acting, especially from secondary characters. Also, this film was created by the same studio responsible for some domestic animated series such as Batman. So, character design, especially on Lady Death herself is excellent, but the animation can feel a little generic at times similar to the Batman series.
Anime fans won't be disappointed, and fans of the Heaven versus Hell type of story should have a look as well. Oh and I loved the ending, she thinks she's won, but has she? Hopefully we'll get a whole series of films based on this character.
8/10
The Video
This film was created digitally so there are no artifacts to speak of, it looks great. I will reiterate that the animation can appear a bit generic at times but the character designs of Lady Death and of Lucifer are great.
7/10
The Audio
This isn't the DVD to demo your home theatre with but the mix is quite good nonetheless. Voices are clean and clear with sound effects and score not covering the dialogue. One of the better anime mixes I've heard.
7/10
The Packaging and Bonus Features
The single DVD comes in an amaray keep case with great looking holographic artwork. Nice job.
There is a series of interviews with those responsible for creating Lady Death that offer a great deal of insight into the character and the story as well as how they went about creating the film. There is also an extensive photo gallery of characters and settings.
6/10
I liked the story of Lady Death and hope to see additions to the franchise. As I said earlier if you're into this type of story, or you're an anime fan pick this little gem up.
Overall (Not an Average) 8/10
-Stephen Lackey
Posted on Tuesday, October 12, 2004 (Archive on Friday, November 12, 2004)