バンパイアハンターD / Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

It wasn’t until 1999 that I saw the original Vampire Hunter D film, but for all its schlocky 80s-ness, I found myself rather enjoying it. So when I found out about Bloodlust through a (pretty awesome) teaser trailer sometime in 2001, I grew quite eager for its release, which as was the way of things here in the UK, didn’t happen until 2004.

What I eventually got my hands on was a slightly mixed product, much like its predecessor. Parts of it look so incredible it takes the breath away, while at other moments you wonder why Madhouse couldn’t have spent just a smidge of the budget making these characters’ heads move a little as they spoke. Thus, while the film contains what is easily one of my favourite pieces of animation in any anime – when Grove’s projection goes up against the Barbarois – it also remains just a little frustrating for not looking quite as good as it clearly could have done, and having somewhat dated designs even for a film released in Japan in 2000.

The plot is both simple and a little convoluted. D, being a vampire hunter, is sent to rescue fair maiden Charlotte from the dastardly vampire Meier Link. Only Link is not a typical vampire, and nor is the abduction quite what it seems on the surface. D also has competition in the rescue attempt, and Link has hired bodyguards to keep away pursuers. In the end, though, the real enemy is not only unexpected but an intriguing version of…double-undead. Somehow or other!

Despite the various ambiguous allegiances and motives, the story is not hard to follow and works well as a conventional horror story, allowing for the unique qualities of the Vampire Hunter D world to shine through. And it’s the quirky details that tend to work the best – hidden powers put on display, pledges made in quiet moments on the road, and of course, that parasite that occupies D’s hand for the sake of both comic relief and simple exposition. He doesn’t steal scenes to the extent he does in the first film, but he remains one of the interesting details that make D somehow more relatable than the similar characters in many franchises.

Bloodlust isn’t the perfect anime horror it’s sometimes made out to be. It’s certainly better than most, but I’ve never been able to shake the conviction that it could have been so much better. Perhaps it’s time for a new D film.

ヴァンパイヤー戦争/ Vanpaiyaa Senzo / Vampire Wars

There’s something a bit upsetting about the fact that while Toei were animating Dragonball Z, they were also making this and the equally awful Psychic Wars. A 50-minute OVA, it layers several strands of bad storytelling on top of one another, none of them complimentary, until it is a garbled mess of uninteresting characters, clichéd setpieces and made-up powers. For the first half-hour there are no vampires and no sign of war. By forty minutes in there are not only vampires but aliens from outer space and we have found out that the war was intergalactic. This vaguely informs a contrived and unsatisfying ending.

A beefy, scarred mercenary type called Kuki gets tangled up in the abduction of a mysterious woman he has pledged to protect. Different factions seem to be after her, with their own reasons, and many of them end up dying very bloody deaths. But in the end, will Kuki be the protector or will he need protecting himself?

Art and animation is dated, and because they went for sober and realistic, it doesn’t have the charm of cutesy Toei – which includes Dragonball. The horror and sci-fi elements are if anything silly additions that get in the way of what could have been a functional crime story, but on the other hand may well be the only reasons this got an audience at all. The characters are hard to like, and the random sex and violence is all the kind of juvenile nonsense that made anime so awkward and puerile before its post-Eva renaissance. There are also some parts that just should have been excised in the planning stage, especially making the vampire character – a typically long-haired and elfin anime vamp – stand after having his neck broken and move about as though he were a cardboard cut-out on a stick. It was never going to look good.

Fans of the genre may find something to enjoy here, but most would be best-off avoiding.

ブラッド・ザ・ラストバンパイヤ / Blood: the Last Vampire

This 45-minute theatrical feature animation managed to gain quite the reputation, but I found it difficult to see why; I can’t recommend it in the least. It has just one thing going for it: some above-average, albeit not stunning, animation sequences.

Released in 2000, Blood: the Last Vampire has spawned its own animation series, Blood+, as well as various video games. The plot is basic – vampires in an American military base situated in Japan must be hunted down by a kickass babe in schoolgirl’s clothes. Cue lots of bloodletting, lots of ugly, cheesy monsters and a fair few clichés that will have you burying your face in your hands. Not bad for three quarters of an hour.

If your idea of anime is stuck in the 80s, that is to say that you pick up a DVD from Manga Entertainment expecting a splatterfest of gore and maybe some idealised girls and explosions, but don’t care about plot, then just maybe this will be for you. If you like any semblance of plot or characterisation, look elsewhere, for our protagonist is a typical ice-maiden that it’s very hard to care about, and the sympathetic character at her side is even duller - although her character design (a dumpy middle-aged lady) is a welcome deviation from the rest of the clichés surrounding it. Much better action adventure anime can be found – just look at Princess Mononoke or Mai-HiME. Fans of vampire anime would do far better with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust or Trinity Blood, which take their subject seriously but with strong characters and interesting storylines. There’s also the classic Hellsing, which is also cheesy in its way, but infinitely cooler than Blood: the Last Vampire because it revels in its schlockiness.

Perhaps the title was marketed heavily towards the English-language market because some half of its dialogue is in English. But this is to the detriment of the title, because the badly-written dialogue is made still worse by some stiff and lifeless English-language acting. And the way some of the black guys are drawn borders on offensive.

The integration of CG and hand-drawn animation is technically impressive, in the opening scene in particular, but that alone does not make Blood: the Last Vampire worth seeing. I also think it a little reprehensible that the running time is not supplied on the DVD case. I’m sure several people have bought this thinking they’re getting a full feature, only to have a piece of animation the length of a single TV special.

(originally written 11.9.07)

クロノ クルセイド and トリニティ・ブラッド / Chrno Crusade and Trinity Blood

Despite both these series being animated by Gonzo, one of the most consistently excellent animation studios in Japan, I had the impression that they would be very different. Perhaps it was because of the artwork I had seen: Chrno Crusade had cute pointy-eared demon boys and gun-toting nuns while Trinity Blood was all hugely elaborate costumes and haughty, imperious expressions. But when I began watching both series together, I was struck by how similar they were, not only in terms of subject matter but also in style, in pacing and characterisation.

One thing that anime tends to do well is make religion, and religious rituals and folklore in particular, look cool. Even stuffy Christianity can be grandiose, epic and exotic, from hidden vampire-hunting religious orders (Hellsing) to achingly cute teenaged girls and their daily lives in a Catholic school (Maria-sama Ga Miteru). More obliquely, the weird and funky stuff in Abrahamic religions have inspired the scenarios of Neon Genesis Evangelion and 666Satan and there are echoes of Catholic images of angels and purgatory in Haibane Renmei – and these examples are only the tip of a sizeable iceberg. The number of Seraphim Blades or Satan Strikes is uncountable.

Chrno Crusade and Trinity Blood have the coolness of Christian myth, as well as more recent ideas like vampires and little girl visionaries, very much to the fore. While both are obviously only loosely inspired by the more thrilling aspects of the faith rather than really interested in an accurate rendition of canon belief (Trinity Blood has Cain, Abel and Seth as major characters – but Seth is a girl, while the influences of Revelations on Chrno Crusade leads to a scene involving the Resurrection of the Dead – but rather than all mankind being judged, this involves some zombies!), they succeed in using tenets of Christianity to make exciting lowbrow entertainment, very much in the same way that Occidental consumers lap up kung-fu movies about warrior monks, or based on Journey to the West.

Chrno Crusade (named that way, apparently, mistakenly, not to avoid confusion with the Chrono Trigger games) is the story of a nun named Rosette Christopher, and is given a very interesting setting – the roaring 20s in America. This means that there are exciting car chases in Model Ts, and impressive period firearms, though the setting is really mostly cosmetic, and gives a nice noir look to some of the scenes. Rosette’s partner is Chrno, a demon who, having lost his horns, is reduced to the form of a cute young boy, but can transform into a powerful, muscular hunk DNAngel-style when given some of Rosette’s life-force. This isn’t often needed, though, because Rosette’s order of nuns are trained sharpshooters, fighting demons with their holy bullets. One day they meet a young prophetess who can miraculously heal ailments with her singing voice, one of the shepherd girls who witnessed the Fatimá prophecies (though she is called Azmaria Hendric and looks less like the peculiar-looking Portuguese girls and more like a pretty Albino), only to find there are dark forces looking for her, dark forces who may just happen to also be involved with Rosette’s long-lost brother.

Trinity Blood is more epic in scale – though perhaps less coherent and intelligent overall. It involves hidden orders within the Vatican in an imagined world where vampires are prolific enough for a fractured society to have come into being. There is an interesting plot involving a young noble ‘Methuselah’, as the vampires call themselves, getting involved in various political conspiracies designed to upset the order of the world – but in the end, the fact that the antagonists, ‘Contra Mundi’, are against the world just because they are, and that our typical Kenshin/Vash-style goofy-until-he-finally-reveals-his-true-powers protagonist Abel’s nemesis and big brother Cain looks cool, but doesn’t really have any motives or real character, makes the overall scenario ring hollow.

Both series are derived from stories in other media, and perhaps as a result, both feel unfinished, unsatisfying. Chrno Crusade less so, for it gives a convincing ending and a bittersweet resolution to its story, even if the manga apparently deals in a more satisfying way with free will – too much of the anime’s story is people destined to be or do something fulfilling their inevitable roles. Trinity Blood is worse still. There’s an interesting, tragic real-life story there, actually – the original concept comes from a series of light novels, but the writer died before they were finished, and thus the true conclusion will never be known, though someone else has been drafted in to milk the cash cow while it’s fertile. A manga was released, providing the cosplay community with some hugely complicated designs to take on (in tandem with art books), the distinctive aesthetic clearly an element in the series’ success. The anime followed. But as with most anime based on continuing stories, there is no true end to the narrative, the characters find no resolution, and the series ends on a cliffhanger. As with Claymore, either there will be more, or the series alone can never satisfy.

On the other hand, both series have some excellent ideas. Chrno Crusade’s setting and the central friendship and co-dependence of its heroes are great stuff, and the vulnerability and willing of Azmaria may be generic, but work very nicely. Trinity Blood has a wealth of gems, from the hero who looks like a demon opposing the personification of evil who looks like an archangel, to the fanciful images of Rome and London and the magnificent costumes, not to mention the idea of the Pope as a weak, submissive boy who you soon realise actually personifies the Christian ideals of being meek and gentle and turning the other cheek when harmed. Then there is the show-stealing Ion, a brash young noble Methuselah who gradually shows his weak side. Unfortunately, with trying to do so many things at once comes a plot that’s too fragmented, has too many elements that don’t effect one another well enough, that don’t cohere as a single narrative, and which need coincidences to tie everything together. Chrno Crusade doesn’t aim for the same heights as Trinity Blood, and never provides the same spectacle, but does its power-hungry-demon-needs-to-be-defeated-even-at-great-cost-to-the-heroes line very well, while Trinity Blood sets up a global battle and political intrigues, but never explores any of its grand ideas in sufficient depth, and becomes a pyrrhic victory of style over substance. In the end, Chrno Crusade does what it sets out to do better than Trinity Blood, but if the latter had been more successful with its ambitions, it would have been by far the better story. Sadly, that was not to be – but having said that, I certainly do not regret watching either of these interesting shows.

(originally written 6.10.07)

ブラック・ブラッド・ブラザーズ/ Black Blood Brothers

When I saw the first episode of Black Blood Brothers, I thought it had potential to be a real gem of a series. While it was released amidst a peculiar proliferation of supernatural shows, its take on vampire lore stood out as somewhat different from the rest. When a modern-day shipping vessel is boarded by armed men, the vampire kicks some serious arse, stopping bullets in mid-air, displaying magnificent skills with a sword and enormous strength, and wearing a natty long coat with a matching Guy Fawkes hat - both in a fetching shade of red. So far, nothing new. But that’s not mentioning how the vampire has a little brother, a sweet little befanged blonde kid, and when this young sibling annoys him, rather than a typical brothers’ scuffle, the vampire uses telekinesis to slam the poor boy onto the deck so hard it dents it. And it’s oddly enough a great moment.

The two of them are going to a safe zone for ‘Black Bloods’, or vampires. However, all is not peaceful in the community. The ‘Kowloon Child’, a kind of vampire who can infect and control a victim just by biting them (as opposed to having to share blood), is causing problems, and our hero has a history with them.

I liked Black Blood Brothers. Most of the characters were well-designed, well-voiced and some of them had some pretty cool fighting skills. The back-story in London was interesting as it unfolded. However, the trouble is that there just isn’t enough of it. I watched twelve episodes, and thought, ‘Oh good, the exposition’s over. Now the real story can begin.’ But that was it. To tell you just how surprised I was, I seriously thought that I had one episode to go even AFTER I’d already watched episode twelve.

So while the characters, the world and the concept all appealed to me, the twelve episodes just didn’t satisfy. Twelve episodes isn’t necessarily insufficient; there are plenty of series that tell a full story and make their mark in twelve eps – that’s still as much screen time as two movies, after all. But Black Blood Brothers just doesn’t pace itself right. It introduces so many factions that you don’t really get to know any of them. You get some flashbacks, and the twist in them gets unveiled, but they really feel like vignettes, and that there’s plenty more story to come. The bad guys appeared too briefly and were ultimately too inconsequential for their defeat to feel like it supported the whole story.

Perhaps there’ll be another series. The source material is after all a series of novels. But this first taster really feels unfinished, and as such is like a bloodsucking session interrupted – no doubt tasty and seemingly rather erotic, judging by this series – but ultimately unsatisfactory.

Try Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust for a partial story that nevertheless stands well alone.

(originally written 18.1.07)

吸血鬼ハンターD / Kyūketsuki hantā D / Vampire Hunter D

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.

ヴァンパイア騎士/ Vampire Knight

A popular young girl in a prestigious school is in love with a powerful and mysterious vampire schoolmate. However, she is also in love with her best friend, who hates vampires and is trained to kill them, restrained only by an uneasy truce. The girl for some reason seems to be special, though, with blood the vampires find irresistible and some strange, latent powers of her own. When she is threatened, will the men she loves be able to put aside differences and work together to protect her?

If this all sounds like Twilight to you, you won’t be the first to make that observation. But while Vampire Knight is indeed also highly derivative, about as lazily misogynistic despite being written by and for girls, and very nearly as downright poorly-conceived, it grows in a very different direction from Twilight (which itself supposedly grows in a challenging direction in the final book) and is a little cleverer. On the other hand, it contains elements to make the audience squirm every bit as much as glittering skin and yet shares a compulsive quality, where despite the overall plots being terrible and the characters being very hard to sympathise with, its screen adaptation is stylish and pretty enough to make it watchable and even compelling - though that's not to say it does not have irritating elements large and small.

I thought that this might just be the worst bit of vampire fiction I had ever come across when I first started to watch it. The academy the action takes place in has a ‘Day Class’ of ordinary students and a ‘Night Class’ of vampires – with the cover story that they are all models and celebrities, and work during the day, so have to study during the evenings. Thus, we’re shown a world where a group of elite students go to school each day with girls screaming at them for attention and getting overexcited about how beautiful they are. If there has ever been an awkward and contrived way to present a group of characters as attractive and superior, it is this. Vampires as teenaged heartthrobs. Vaguely acceptable as a background detail, but not centre-stage.

Later in the series, made up of two thirteen-episode seasons, the plot develops in more interesting directions. Yuki discovers her past is not what she thought it was, her vampire love interest Kaname is revealed to have been quite the puppetmaster, and her childhood friend Zero not only has to wrestle with his changing nature after himself being bitten, but meets his identical twin, presumed dead, for considerably more drama. There’s easily enough to keep the drama going, as well as some rather poor action, some spoilt by over-powered vampires just making lower life forms pop, the rest underwhelming because of the ‘level E’ concept in the world of this story.

True vampires, you see, are born and not made. Only children of vampires are really stable, and purebloods are the most powerful. Those who are bitten and lose their humanity are first puppets, and later feral ‘level E’ monsters, like the zombies of 28 Days Later. While at least offering an explanation why not everybody desperately wants to join the elite bloodsucking club, in practice the mindless zombie-vamps are extremely stupid and drag down the tone.

And Vampire Knight also has many of the worst shoujo tropes. The ‘Ouran High School Host Club with vampires’ opening episodes notwithstanding, most of those initial vampire characters ending up being unimportant, undeveloped peripheral figures, the main drama is replete with the things that mystify me: the strong-willed girl actually ends up constantly powerless in the hands of men, pulling sex faces as she is bitten and restrained. Rape – or symbolic rape, with neck-biting instead of violation – ends up being something titillating, helplessness being erotic. Identical twins are portrayed in annoyingly patronising manner, talking about being incomplete, stealing life from one another in the womb, wanting to be combined as one and suchlike. And the best kind of power is not earned through hard work or devotion, but what is given by birthright: nobility and influence trump earning or proving anything.

Vampire Knight was wildly popular for its run. It is now almost never mentioned. A shallow flash in the pan, I feel.

D.Gray-Man

Yesterday, I reposted my impressions of D.N.Angel from back in 2006, in which I discoursed about shoujo series that in outline seem like shounen, and made mention of some shounen series written by women. Well, since then a few more important series have appeared, and continue to blur the line at the centre of the two. There has been Reborn!, which has all the attributes I gave to battle shoujo, including hapless and childish yet adored main character, homoerotic love interests and cutesy mascots, yet is published in Jump and is popular with a male demographic. There has been also been Kekkaishi, following Fullmetal Alchemist in having a main character who is both vulnerable and yet capable of great power, and who has a very slow-burning but important romance with a female character who is formidable in her own right. And then there is D.Gray-man, which has managed to become one of the biggest series in Jump and full of inventive characters, action and angst.

Its pilot manga chapter was a little more obviously created by a woman than the anime, if we are to follow the tell-tale tropes that I by no means want to claim are absolutely universal, but which are certainly prevalent. The first incarnation of Allen Walker was extremely effeminized, even being made to cross-dress, and Linalee fell into a damsel in distress pigeonhole.

Thankfully, the final product was rather more mature and idiosyncratic. There are a lot of very familiar elements to D.Gray-man, but it offers a very striking and complete world with a cast of quirky but likeable characters and some fascinating adversaries. Set in a Victorian-era world, principally in Europe but also incorporating Asia, it tells the story of an exorcist called Allen Walker, blessed by God with ‘Innocence’, a substance that transforms into a powerful weapon to fight demons, or ‘akuma’. Along with other innocence-users in a Christian organization called The Black Order, Allen fights against the rather mechanical demons sent forth by the grotesque Millennium Earl.

It’s a neat set-up, complex enough not to be dismissed offhand but simple enough that it can be easily understood and the development of its characters become the focus. Initially, I thought it was a terrible idea to give Allen such an underwhelming power – that of having a big sharp arm – but over the course of the series, his anti-akuma weapon is developed in the most intriguing ways, until final designs are extremely impressive. Every one of Allen’s comrades is interesting and possessed of a well-developed power, and the stakes always seem higher than in most shounen. There are some real tragedies in this series, and everything seems a little more mature than most of the titles that come from Jump.

As with so many manga adaptations, though, it ends before its time. Running two full seasons, the first of 51 episodes and the second of 52, it wraps up a huge arc, then spends ten episodes hanging a final mini-arc on the end that despite showcasing the awesome generals, does not give any sense of closure.

But it has been two years now since it ended. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more D.Gray-Man animated. Of course there is still manga to go to, but if I’m honest, of the big Shounen Jump series, I’d honestly rather this was running on and on and on than almost any of the other, far bigger titles.

But perhaps the added layer of complexity was the undoing of this series. A shame, because it has so much to offer.