“Maybe life is 90% suffering and 10% happiness, but you can’t live a life of one without the other.”

Justin’s rating: Once again, a cat is to blame for society’s ills

Justin’s review: Rinne, a perpetually tardy and peppy high school student, sprints to class one morning only to be mowed down by a huge truck (blame the little black cat that she saved right before that). But Rinne is so focused on getting to class that she keeps running there… in hell. And to her surprise, yes, there is high school in the underworld, it’s just populated by demons instead of teenagers.

Wait, there’s a difference? OK, easy joke there, moving on…

When she learns the truth of her predicament, Rinne wants to get back home, but it won’t be that easy. Her school is a nightmare zone, evil Elvis rules the place, hulking gatekeepers watch the only way out, and a giant roiling sea surrounds the place. Oh, and her cellphone doesn’t work. That’s how you really know you’re gone.

Helvis tells her that if she graduates, she’ll be able to leave, so Rinne tries to acclimate and do her best. She starts to make friends with some of the stranger students and befriends a frankenstein dog. There’s this guy she starts crushing on, because that’s anime law, and anime law must be followed.

There’s also a mystery unfolding, because Rinne bleeds when nobody else does, and she learns that someone might have brought her to hell intentionally for some important mission.

The creative concept of Hells drew me into this manga adaptation. High school in a hell that’s more of a demented amusement park than anything else? That’s imagination candy that’s hard to resist. Even so, it’s a difficult watch due to its style.

There’s this frantic, scattered, high-intensity tone to Hells that never relents. Scenes don’t play out calmly and straight-forward. The viewer is instead bombarded with quick cuts, manic movement, and a lot of things happening that aren’t given immediate context. There’s absolutely no time to breathe and process in this film, and that makes it exhausting.

I guess you have to surrender yourself to the weirdness? There is no shortness of wild stuff happening — again, almost always without explanation — and the visual design of the monsters and the underworld is cool enough to make most of the frames here wallpaper-worthy. The setting reminded me a bit of Nightmare Before Christmas’ Halloweentown, actually.

It’s just too bad that the sheer bombardment of these visuals and the rapid plot points mangle the finer points of the story. Instead of focusing on a simple format to go with this outlandish setting, Hells overcomplicates everything with too many relationships and conflicts and backstories and random biblical references.

I also didn’t care about any of the characters, save perhaps for the enigmatic Steela. None of the rest feel like real, nuanced people — not even Rinne, who is determined and cheerful but nothing more.

While it gets points for its creative Invader Zim-like art design, Hells is too scattered, too busy, and too much full of nonsense to be worthwhile.

Intermission!

• “I don’t have time to sit around and stare into your big brown eyes!”
• “That guy, though, total chocolate box.”
• Hell’s teachers have whips
• Evil Elvis, er, Helvis is in the house
• That’s one weird living clock
• Corpse dog and creepy cat
• Helvis likes his spontaneous concerts
• All dreams in hell are nightmares
• Lunch looks awfully gross
• Helvis lives in Heartbreak Hotel, naturally
• Evil panda volleyball team is the one to beat: “But they’re endangered”
• Wait, WHY is tiny God hanging out in hell?