BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Anime Review: Blood, the Last Vampire
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Anime Review: Blood, the Last Vampire
Blood, the Last Vampire. About the best made, as well as one of the most enjoyable Anime movies I've yet seen. It's a perfect example of what Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatoille says about animation. That it's not a genre, it's a medium. You can tell any sort of story with animation; we just have a skewed view in the US since here, in the last few decades, it's been ghettoized into children's entertainment.
Blood, the Last Vampire is certainly not children's entertainment. It's like a really bloody short by Hitchcock. Very suspenseful and horrific, with a few gory action moments, but only a few. The bulk of the short film is very commonplace scenery and events, that are given a creepy, ominous, suspenseful vibe by the direction, visuals, sound, and other elements. The story is quite simple, but the style with which it's executed elevates it into a little gem of a horror classic. I watched it late one night, marveled at the quality and technique, and immediately watched it a second time, while cursing the brevity of it.
To the scores:
Blood, the Last Vampire, 2000 Script/Story: 6 Characters: 8 Action: 8 Eye Candy: 8 Fun Factor: 7 Replayability: 7 Overall: 9
I think this is the highest score I've ever given any anime. I'm sure it's the highest score I've ever given any horror movie, though Silence of the Lambs and Aliens would be right up there. Not that either of those are straight out suspense/horror films.
I don't have a score for direction, or style, or mood, or intangibles, but this film hits very high on all of those, which is why the overall score is higher than an of the individual ones. I happened to watch this a few hours after struggling to sit through the interminable 90 minutes of Resident Evil: Degeneration, (castigating review to come) and even before the opening credits were through, I knew Blood was going to be a far superior film.
The quality of Blood is almost independent of the great animation and fascinating, engrossing, unexplained world fiction. This is just a really well made movie. Animated or otherwise. Inspired direction, involving camera angles, great presentation of events, instantly interesting and memorable and unique characters... yes, it's a cartoon, but it's got such a sense of character and place and mood and style that it feels perfectly real and grounded.
The direction and editing is really what makes it work, since the events of the story are very sparse, and a lot of the brief run time is taken up by shots of background images, characters milling around, outdoor scenes, sunsets, planes taking off/landing, etc. But it's very film noir in mood and tone, so everything sets the scene and adds to the atmosphere; rather than just feeling like filler. There's tension in almost every frame, and a real force of emotion and character from the hero, and an unearthly, creepy horror from the demons she's hunting.
The animation is great as well. Very sparse of detail, but rich in character. I've included a few stills from the film in this review, just to give some examples. They're not great examples; I wasn't motivated enough to take my own screenshots, so I had to make due with what I found online. And I couldn't find any shots of some of the most memorable images in the movie. I'm not sure they'd translate all that well to still photos anyway; most of them are awesome in how they're presented, with eerie music, often with altered lighting, from odd "camera" angles, seen in slow motion, etc. It's not the still image, it's what leads up to and occurs after it. But the stills do give you some idea of the color scheme, and the strong faces and stylistic appearance of the people in this film.
The faces especially are what works. They're not that detailed in the depiction; but they have strong profiles and are very distinctive, and the eyes are great. The monster hunting female lead is a young woman who wears a school girl outfit the whole time, but she's not cute. She's actually kind of ugly, with her puffy lips and prominent brow. And those intense, dangerous, staring eyes.
The animation is all 2D, with richly-textured backgrounds and great use of color and light. A few of the backgrounds and panoramic shots are 2D, but they're blended nicely and are usually long views of cities, an airbase, etc, so they do enough blending and add sfumato to soften the harsh, too-clear aspect of 3D visuals that often makes them not blend well with 2D.
What really works are the movements and poses and postures. It's reminiscent of Miyazaki's animation, where the actual artistry and image quality is just adequate -- and it's the way the characters move realistically and interact with solid physical presence that makes it shine.
That's what most 3D animation fails at; the bodies are obviously wireframes, and they're fine standing still, but when they move, especially when the fall or crash into things they don't have any weight or impact; they seem to bounce instantly, without any compression or recovery. On the contrary, there's a scene in Blood where one of the demons, still mostly in human form, gets sliced on one shoulder. It looks like a young girl with one arm dangling limpy, as she throws herself sideways into a door, bounces off, grabs the door handle, pulls it open, and hurls herself through into the hallway.
I watched that little three second sequence about 5x in a row, simply to study how realistic the movements and motions were, while trying to figure out why it looked so great in this cartoon, even with the relatively low FPS rate. I don't have an answer and the movie doesn't have any secret tricks. It's just very well drawn, with a lot of attention to detail and study of the human form. People move like real people; when they turn their shoulders move first, then the hips pivot to follow, etc. So the sword fighting and the running and falling are all slightly hypnotic, as they're so real and believable; like watching someone stylized to the point of perfection as they fall down in real life.
The plot, such as it is, involves an (apparently) young girl who is said to be a vampire, the "last of the true bloods." She never does anything vampire-ish, though. She walks around in the daytime, she never drinks any blood or menaces any humans, nor does she do anything supernatural. She just uses a katana to kill demonic monsters, who look like humans until they throw off their disguise and transform, like hairless werewolves, into horrible monsters. She gets assistance from some guys who look like the Agents from the Matrix films, who are part of some government organization that's tracking down the demons and sending the girl in to finish them with the sword. Guns don't hurt them; only a greatly desanguinating traumatic injury can finish them. Hence the katana. Why the girl's a vampire, how she's related to the demons, where they come from, who the organization is, why the agents are white or black Westerners while the girl's Japanese, with everything set in Japan... none of that is explained at all. It's just part of the cool back story, and it makes the world feel very developed and real; the principles aren't the stars of the entire world, video game/bad movie style. They're just doing their own thing amidst the larger reality around them.
As for the demons, they appear to be very strong, and they have massive claws and jaws, and one can fly, but they don't talk or say anything about their goals, and they don't seem to be all that eager to savage humans. They were awesomely designed, I must stress. I'm seldom impressed by monster design, so trust me when I say that the demons in this movie are legitimately unnerving. Weird elongated horse-like jaws over fangs, with great gnarly clawed hands and glowing red pin point eyes. Shuddery. They are palpably evil and lurking, without being especially murderous or destructive. They're more reminiscent of demons in a Clive Barker story than something out of an American slasher film; the body count is negligible in Blood, since the demons aren't especially interested in murder. They are almost like tourists or casual visitors, passing amongst the human herd without any great involvement, and more interested in keeping themselves a secret and not being killed than in wreaking the sort of havoc they're well equipped to wreak.
I was motivated to download and watch this Anime, since I've recently seen promos and the trailer for a live action movie version of the story. The trailer isn't very effective, IMHO. It looks derivative and cartoony; hot school girl with a katana battles demons with the aid of comically-fake wire fu. (Which is ironic, since the actual anime isn't cartoonish at all, and doesn't have any sword duels or wire-fu style movements. ) Here's the trailer, courtesy of YouTube.
The anime film is a one-off. It wasn't taken from an ongoing manga, and it wasn't part of an anime series. It did inspire a 50-episode anime called Blood+, which I'd lke to get into, but haven't found the time to get started on yet. It's not a true sequel, since it takes place more in the modern day (the movie is set in 1966, for no apparent reason.) and doesn’t feature the same characters. It's more of a companion work, set in the same world fiction. They must have done a lot of work to flesh it out, since as I've said, there's lots of interesting tidbits in the film, but just bits and pieces of concept, without any sense of the over-riding world state or mythology. I assume the live action film is based on the anime movie (several scenes in the trailer are exact recreations of scenes from the anime), but incorporates elements from the continuing fiction as well.
I really wish my laptop battery lasted longer; I'm going on a weeks' vacation in Hawaii in mid-May. (Mom and stepdad have a timeshare they had to use or lose, and I'm going to meet them there.) The 5 hour flight over would be a perfect time to blast through some of the huge backlog of quality anime I've got stacked up. Sadly, my laptop battery is only good for about 2 hours of video before it's dry, and planes are lacking in wall sockets. At least back in economy class. I'd look into another battery, but I so seldom use the laptop anywhere without a plug that it's kind of a waste.
I could, I suppose, watch this film version of Blood 2.5 times, before the laptop went to sleep. I doubt I will, but happily for you guys, you can, if you wish. There are numerous places to download all anime online, including this film. Here's a low quality version in one handy, 105m file. A bit better quality comes in an annoying 8 parts, which you have to zip back together. HSBSiztez.com has lots of additional download options for it, and you can find just about any other anime you've ever heard of through their search function.
I highly recommend this one, even if, especially if, you're not an anime fan. And as you know if you've read some of my past movie reviews, I seldom recommend anything. So you know this one is good. Or at least weird, but weird to my personal specifications.
Blood is definitely a classic. The movie's gotta be over 10 years old at this point, and it's still some of the best animation I've seen.
If you like the "bloody Hitchcock" element, you should really check out another anime movie called Perfect Blue. I think it's even by the same studio. It's a real mindfuck psycholigcal thriller, from the eyes of a girl who is having a mental breakdown. I've seen it probably 10 times, and every single time, my opinion on what is actually going on changes, as I notice an element I never noticed before.
It's second only to Grave Of The Fireflies(which, if you haven't seen, you absolutely must; it's one of the most poignant movies I've ever seen, animated or not) as my favorite anime movie.
