Movies: Blood: The Last Vampire (2001)

Saya’s prey are demonic creatures who feast on human blood and disguise themselves as human to blend in, and the film is peppered with hints as to how far some of them have gone to hide their existence. Her handlers are convinced one of them has taken refuge in a high school, one just off of an American army base and attended by the children of many of the soldiers and officers there. Disguised as a student (much to her disgust), Saya sits in on classes with clenched teeth and waits for her targets to appear. And when they do, they wind up dragging a bystander into the fray — a hapless school nurse who is no fighter, and whom Saya defends only because there really is no one else to do the job. The second half of the film is essentially one long, dazzling fight scene, played as much for the way objects can be lit luridly as they are for the dynamics of the action within.

B:TLV was the brainchild of Production I.G., probably the most cutting-edge and technically sophisticated of all the animation studios working in Japan today. They gained fairly major attention in the West as being the folks who supplied the animated segment for Kill Bill (one of the few original or worthwhile things in that movie), and have lent their talents to a slew of titles that speak for themselves: Jin-roh, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and both Ghost in the Shell movies and TV shows. They’ve also sired a number of lesser-sung but no-less-impressive productions like Otogi-zoshi and Kaidohmaru. (They were also responsible, more or less, for Dead Leaves, but I’m not sure if that’s a mark in their favor or not.)

Production I.G.’s mainstay has been the way they freely integrate conventional animation with CGI — often making one do the work of the other, or vice versa. This does not always work, if only because CGI so stubbornly remains looking like CGI despite the best efforts of the artists to make it seem like anything but. But that hasn’t happened here: the graphics and the animation are integrated so seamlessly and artfully that we’re not conscious of any given shot being one or the other. The two most astonishing moments are, as you might guess, at the beginning and end, and they bookend the movie nicely — the first being the underground train scene, and the last being a three-way chase between Saya, a bomber taxiing down the runway, and a demon in flight.

The art team also makes good use of effects normally limited to live-action filmmaking — not just camera shake or motion blur (which are now being incorporated in animated productions pretty regularly), but things that require an actual artist’s eye, like foreshortening of perspective. And on a more basic level, they do things with color choices and the film’s overall palette that are in themselves striking: many of the night scenes have a lurid, yellowed, sodium-vapor-halo look to them that’s a nice complement to the horrors we see lit by them. The end result is oddly hyper-realistic in the same way the original Final Fantasy movie was hyper-real: not mimicry, but re-imagining.

Most Japanese animated productions — including many of Production I.G.’s works — are made for a local audience. They’re not really intended for export, although that sentiment’s changed enough lately that it could be argued that some series (Ergo Proxy, for instance?) are essentially being designed to be sold overseas with only a token bit of local exposure. Blood’s English-speaking characters and American army-base locale almost make it feel like a “mid-Pacific” production, with enough elements to appeal to an audience on either side without feeling stilted or compromised. The fact that it’s set in the time and place that it is adds another intriguing level of interpretation to the story: the “demons” and “vampires” of Blood are as much intruders and parasites to the whole of our world as the Americans must have seemed to the Japanese at the time.

The most disappointing thing about the movie, again, is its length. It ends right when it feels like it should be opening up and really delving into its story, and the Mamoru Oshii novel that followed it up is so much of a non-starter that it barely feels like this story has been explored at all. Maybe the live-action movie (currently in production in Hong Kong) will have more to say. Then again, what we now have already hints at so much and displays so much in such a small space that maybe expanding on this material would only give us something like the misguided animated version of Seven Samurai: more length, but not necessarily more depth.

Postscript: The expanded-universe version of Blood I was waiting for — Blood+ — has since been released, as a franchise that spans multiple media including novels, comics and TV.