ANI-MOVIES, *Red Hawk

Being one of the first full-length Korean animated movies to get an English release, Red Hawk does like several cartoons from Korea and borrows heavily from anime. Whether it is Johnny Destiny: Space Ninja or Defenders Of Space, quite a number of them are just strait up rip-offs of Japanese properties. Red Hawk is more inspired by Chinese folklore while spilling in elements from anime such as Dragonball. Red Hawk came out of South Korea in 1995 and was given a release by Manga Entertainment in 2002 starring most of the regular 90s English voice actors like Steve Blum, Wendee Lee, and Bridget Hoffman. As far as information that was given, Red Hawk was an original idea, but still appropriates from several sources, including some American pulp fiction and comics with a masked hero.

Set in Chungwon, an evil organization known as Camellian Blossom plan to take over the country with counterfeit coins. Jan Chung teams up with the green-haired warrior woman Lunyung to solve the murder of a friend's father, all while a mysterious stranger in bird-themed outfit called Red Hawk is causing problems for the counterfeiters. Jan Chung fails to conceal his identity as the superhero as he attacks the bad guys' fortress and encounters his missing brother who has been possessed by demonic spirits. Red Hawk defeats all those who stand in his way, all while his hair keeps changing color and shape similar to a certain Super-Saiyan. It all turns out to be for naught as this was just one branch of an even larger shadow conspiracy that only lost one of its ten toes.

Red Hawk does contain some decent chop-socky fights, most of which are directly copying the Street Fighter II anime movie. The film tries to befuddle the watcher with insane amounts of pointless details bringing up lore that doesn't apply to the story at all, as if you were forming your own wiki page for it. It's largely a string of trite anime cliches with the occasional bland attempts at comedy where the title hero tries to cover up his obvious double-identity. You aren't missing out on anything by giving this a miss, especially since it's been out of print for over a decade.