The first of a new little series of my anime impressions, now: I will be taking my brief words on different animations from older diaries and updating them somewhat. The very oldest reference I’ve found, almost as soon as I begun to write a diary, is from May 31, 1999: ‘I got "Vampire Hunter D" – a Manga Film, for a fiver, and it’s okay! I quite like it!’
Simple as that – and by ‘Manga Film’, I of course mean a film from Manga Entertainment, a company name that caused some confusion in its heyday because it made people mix up manga (comics) and anime (animation). While not the first anime of my life – aside from the terrestrial broadcasts of Pokémon et al, by then I’d already been admiring Eva for a year or two – Vampire Hunter D was for me something a little different. A horror anime with blood, guts and even gratuitous nudity, it was very much a product of its time. It was already quite old by the time I saw it in 1999 – it came out in 1985 in Japan, and indeed, the far more mature and impressive sequel Bloodlust was to be released in 2000 (in Japan). Animated by Ashi Productions, before they fell to their current role of mostly doing in-betweening, it exemplifies 80s trends in anime, and indeed as one of the first films to be publicised as anime from Japan, helped establish some of them.
It is juvenile, silly and rather lowbrow. There’s lots of overblown blood and the nudity is totally unnecessary. But it’s targeted squarely at teenage boys, so really that isn’t such a surprise. Anime has thankfully grown up a lot since those days, albeit even now struggles to outgrow its reputation from back then. For all its childishness, though, for some moments here and there, Vampire Hunter D is stylish and brilliant. D himself sets a template for cool, mysterious and pretty-faced protagonists for years to come, most obviously influencing Castlevania and its Alucard character. His wise-cracking sapient hand is weird but genuinely funny. And Magnus Lee despite his posturing and simplistic motivations, manages to look very impressive and admirably formidable.
But too many bits of daft cheesy schlock tear down the overall experience. It’s easy to enjoy Vampire Hunter D as a silly curio, knowing that really it’s not very good, but anyone looking for a genuinely exemplary example of anime is likely to be disappointed, and Bloodlust would be a much better choice. Charming, occasionally great and in some cases very nicely-designed, it is nonetheless a prime example of why anime in the 80s was rather poor.
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