DVD Reviews -- SPOILERS

Okay, so I watched the Invincible Iron Man DVD as well as the Animated Hellboy one so I might as well do the reviews now. Some spoilers will follow.

Animated Hellboy: Sword of Storms -- This movie seemed to be made with a mix of styles. That doesn't really detract from it but I found the story seemed choppy in places and I wasn't sure if it was the "style" or what. But overall, the animation is good and the character designs are pretty cool. The voice talents are impressive. It was a great idea to carry over Ron Perlman, John Hurt and Selma Blair from the movie. I'm not sure why David Hyde Pearce wasn't back as the voice of Abe Sapien but Doug Jones (who played Abe physically in the movie) actually does a pretty good job himself. Peri Gilpin also does a fine job as Kate Corrigen (I hope they bring in Kate for the second Hellboy movie). The story is decent. Although it maybe comes across as a Saturday morning cartoon story, there's enough nods to something more (flashbacks to previous Hellboy adventures, characters that are more complex and have issues, and themes that maybe appeal slightly more to an older audience) that there's more to it than you might think. I wouldn't recommend rushing out to buy it unless you're a huge Hellboy fan but if you see it in a bargain bin of your local shop then you may want to consider picking it up for the 1-hour of Hellboy-fun you'll get from it.

Invincible Iron Man -- To be honest, I was disappointed in this one. First off, I'm not a big fan of mixing regular and computer animation, especially when it becomes noticeable. And here, I found it noticeable and distracting. But I found overall, the animation wasn't that great. Characters seemed wooden and didn't really move all that well. Some clips of a character walking made me cringe and think I'd seen better animation on pretty much any Saturday morning cartoon. And the first time I saw Tony Stark with 3/4 of his body being legs I was worried. Yet he seemed to be the only character I noticed having this problem. Story-wise, it's not a great story. They try to do enough twists and turns that it's not a total loss but it's lacking in several areas. Actually, one of my biggest pet peeves is that Tony's heart damage is pretty much useless here. The Iron Man suits are made before his injury so they aren't a lifeline for him (in the comic, one of the main functions of the suit in the beginning is to keep his heart going) and once he's given a device to fix it (not long after he's hurt) it never comes up again. And taking that connection of his heart and the suit away as well as introducing this heart injury and never touching on it later just seems off. Like they wanted to introduce the injury because it's in the comics but didn't know what to do with it. It was also somewhat disappointing that even though they briefly showed several suit designs (including nods to the Ultimate Iron Man suit, War Machine, and the Hulkbuster suit) he never uses a standard "Iron Man" suit in the movie. It's either his "underwater" suit or "volcano" suit (odd how out of all the suits that are shown he mentions this one earlier in the show and then ends up having to use it) or the make-shift suit he builds early in the movie. And the final "battle" with the "Mandarin" was just so predictable and anti-climactic that when it happens I just felt so let down to watch the movie hoping for a cool finale and getting nothing. So yeah, the story and writing just weren't on par with what I'd hoped for. And the voice talents are just sort of "meh". There just wasn't that much of a connection with them. So overall, I was disappointed with this one and would probably recommend skipping it.