Animation fans it's very rare for me to review a film that isn't feature length but here we are i've found something that is worth reviewing and yeah it's pretty freaking bad so here is my review of Van Helsing: The London Assignment don't worry if you havn't heard of it nobody has but chances are you've heared of it's live action counterpart tho.
The plot to this movie finds Van helsing and his mate Friar Carl sent to London to investigate a series of murders and find that they are connected to the mysterious Dr. Henry Jekyll. I'll admit that the plot is kind of interesting since it does have an interesting twist but then again it's set in the world of the 2004 Van Helsing movie and yes this movie is a prequel so you know right away who's going to come out on top.
Returning from the live action film is Hugh Jackman as Gabriel Van Helsing , Robbie Coltrane as Edward Hyde / Jack the Ripper , David Wenham as Friar Carl and Alun Armstrong as Cardinal Jinette. They are joined by Tress MacNeille as Queen Victoria , Tara Strong as Young Victoria and Grey DeLisle as the First Victim. The amount of talent in this film is unbelievable and what's more unbelievable is how bad Hugh Jackman's voice acting is seriously dude just stick to doing musicals and playing Wolverine.
Now even tho the live action film wasn't that good the film did make $300 million against a $160 million dollar budget. So Universal if they wanted could have made an animated sequel but for some reason they chose to make a prequel and they must have known that they didn't have enough of an interesting story because this "film" is around thirty minuets so it's know where close to feature length.
The animation for this "film" was done by Sunwoo Entertainment who have worked on a lot of impressive shows some examples include DarkWing Duck , Rugrats and Talespin. So it might surprise you when I say that the animation in this film is ok at best it's not the worst seen out there but it was quite clearly rushed since alot of the drawings look off.
I mentioned before that this was a prequel to the 2004 film and the main returning characters do look alot like there live action counterparts so the film does have that going in it's favor. However what it doesn't have going in it's favor is the fact that it falls into the same pitfalls as every prequel out there and the fact that this film came out the exact same year as the original film. So I have no idea if the plan was to always release an animated prequel which if that was the case then why not put it on the Van Helsing DVD and if you want to make a prequel don't have the Van Helsing character appear that way we have no idea where the story is going.
Just going back to what I was on about before the original film came out on May 7th 2004 this film was released on May 11th and for some reason it was left of the Van Helsing DVD. I will say that I did find the villains motivations a little of because he's being evil for the sake of trying to win a girl and that's it. If anything that's not a reason to turn to the side of evil that should be the reason why you want tot stay good heck they don't even explain why he's evil.
For the entire running time I was wondering why this film is just so bland and then the end credits rolled up and I saw the very reason why it's bland it was produced by the prince of bad movies Stephen Sommers. That right there explains so much about this movie because while it is well made and the story is interesting it's also trying to explain certain things that appear in the 2004 movie and those are the things that just don't work.
The action can at times be pretty exciting to watch but at the same time there's a lot of just plain boring action scenes as well. When the action is done well it is generally exciting to see there's lots of cool looking flips and visuals but just when it gets exciting it then becomes very generic and boring to look at.
Overall this is a very poor excuse of a "film" and yes i'm putting the word film in quotation marks because it's not even feature length so if anything it's like those half hour Scooby-Doo episodes that you find on the DVD's this "film" tho gets a 5 out of 10 from me.