Customer Reviews

Essence of Anime: Blood the Last Vampire

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Your basic vampire is perfectly suited to anime -- beautiful, seductive, and opulant.

Well, most of them, anyway. Things are a bit different in "Blood: The Last Vampire," an anime movie that bravely throws out most of the vampire preconceptions, as well as plot exposition. It's not a total success storywise, but it's an effectively dark, moody piece of bloody action.

As the movie opens, we see a mysterious young girl, Saya, on a train. When the lights go out, she savagely attacks a man at the other end of the train with a sword.

It turns out the man was a Chiropteran -- a sort of bat-vampire. When her coworkers arrive to clean up the mess, Saya learns that the Chiropterans have infiltrated the general public -- and she has to go undercover at a girls' high school near an American military base. She isn't happy about it, but goes anyway.

Saya begins snooping around for evidence of Chiropterans, and finds it -- a pair are disguised as ordinary high school girls. But when she corners them, a timid nurse accidentally gets involved in the bloodbath that ensues -- and a deadly cat-and-mouse game between the mysterious Saya and her monstrous prey.

"Blood: The Last Vampire" is one of those movies where the plot isn't the overwhelming force. In fact, the actual story isn't much -- it feels like tuning into an episode of a weekly TV show, without much explanation for who Saya is and what is going on. And after the first third, the movie is pretty much entirely devoted to "Saya hacks and slashes her way through the school while the nurse screams a lot."

But the visual presentation is stunning -- every scenes is saturated with shadows and vague, pale light. And while many scenes are quiet and almost motionless, the action scenes explode with kinetic energy, splashes of gore, and occasionally a raging fire. And when Saya jumps into action, the entire world seems to speed up into a blur of violence and splattered blood.

One thing you have to say -- there are no stereotypically pretty, European vampires here. There's only Saya -- a cold-eyed girl who looks like Angelina Jolie's gothy baby sister -- and a lot of grotesque bat creatures, with huge muzzles and big claws. The most "human" person here is probably the timid nurse, but we never really get to know her until the end.

"Blood: The Last Vampire" isn't too worried about having a plot, but for splattery action and fast-moving vampire battles, it's a dark diversion.

Probably one of the best anime selections for a Halloween party is the original anime motion picture of Blood, The Last Vampire. While there has recently been a British live-action movie based on it, the first one from 2000 is considered a genre-forging classic, which helped begin the new millenium's anime vampire craze.

Taking place in just before the Vietnam War, Saya is a pouty-lipped teenage hunter of chiropterans, a rare race of bat-like monsters that can assume human form. Whether or not the chiropterans are supposed to be genuine vampires is never fully explored. Saya works with a secret orginization with the mission of killing off these bloodsuckers, and disguises herself as a student at a school on a American air base in Japan to look for three chiropterans. Saya sniffs out two of them, and manages to take save a school doctor from them. However, a crossdressing chiropteran shows up for a showdown after Saya finally gets a working katana from her cheapass commander. Saya then stops the monster from escaping by cutting him as apparently the only real way to destroy them is by cutting all the blood out of them.

The original movie though was groundbreaking for its time, mostly because of the graphic nature of it which up until that point was pretty gory for an anime. Another was because it was one of the first anime movies that implemented some serious 3D animation in it. Prior to that, digital effects weren't combined into the overall feature as much as traditional cel animation in most productions. It's still visually superb even by today's technical standards, and probably the best non-Vampire Hunter D anime horror movie ever done.

I saw this movie several years ago, so I don't remember all the details about it, but between this description and the one E.A. wrote (above), they're both pretty accurate. The action was good and it's really gory (whether that's good or bad is for you to decide), but it felt incomplete. The movie makes reference to several different things (Saya being the last true one, etc.) that it doesn't explain, nor does it give enough information for the viewer to put it together. It felt like I'd flipped on the TV and caught half a movie or watched an episode from somewhere near the end of a series instead of being a standalone movie.

Considering that it WAS a movie and not an episode of a series/mini-series, they brought up too many things to not explain any of them. Where do chiropterans come from? Why is Saya the only one who can kill them. Why is it that Saya won't/can't harm humans? Endless questions and too few answers.

This movie is supposed to be the sequel to the anime series Blood +, but you'd do better just watching the anime. It has an actual plot, and in no way depends on you having seen the movie first to fill in the holes. In fact, the series filled in holes for the movie (I've watched the whole series, minus a few missed episodes here and there). The series was excellent and actually makes you interested in the various characters (and the people are prettier, lol), which, to me, is a good indication of it being interesting.

BTW, this item and Blood - The Last Vampire one are the same, just with different packaging (apparently).

I guess you could say I'm pretty picky about my anime. I don't really go for your standard stuff like: Bleach, Death Note, or Naruto. (All very good stuff, but doesn't really keep me hooked.) Vampire Hunter D, Appleseed, Karas is more what seems to keep me intrigued.
Anyway, Blood: The Last Vampire was very cool, very well done-- but too short. Just as it's getting really good, it's over. I think it could have been about an hour longer. The character Saya is cool, tough, and somewhat tortured I imagine. She has only one purpose: kill all the Demons. She doesn't get to laugh, or cry, or live, or love, or anything else. And that's what shows a back story that just isn't there.
This film has some great visuals, and 1 or 2 little scares, but it definitely left me wanting more. Worth owning yes, but that was a quick 20 bucks I spent.

Production I.G., for whatever reason, has created an interesting formula for "feature films": offer the same production and story quality of a big budget animation, but truncate the runtime to about half. Not sure how many other of their films fit this template, but so far I've watched "Blood" and "Kai Doh Maru" in succession of each other and they are almost exactly the same duration.

For the most part these Featurettes work. Especially for "Blood", where the story and animation are so incredible that I found myself wanting more. Not a bad thing, since I didn't feel as if I was left hanging at the end of the story.

Saya is a steel cold demon slayer whose stoic expression is loaded with backstory that we never learn about, with the exception of a tiny photographic hint of just how old she really is. In appearance only, she is deceptively young. She is assisted by two humans, one of whom know more about her history, but doesn't say much about it. This is actually one of the strongest parts of the story: there is virtually no exposition. In fact, the movie begins in near silence; only the backgrounds noise of an underground transit system make up the audio in the first 5 minutes. It sets up an incredibly tense poetic ambiance that is never abandoned - not even during the action scenes.

Like "Kai Doh Maru", the film will feel as if ends somewhere in the middle of what could have been a complete story. But this again is something I find very interesting and a successful departure from the 3 Act story structure in the Western Tradition. Instead, Production I.G. have rightly pinpointed the 2nd Act as being the most interesting. With the "bookends" of the 1st and 3rd acts removed, you'll find yourself asking questions about what came before the characters and after. In the words of Claudia from Interview with the Vampire..."I want some more."