Blood: The Last Vampire (2000 dir. Hiroyuki Kitakubo)

There were plenty of roadblocks for me getting into anime. The first, and most obvious one, was a question of access. I was born in 1987 and Japanese animation was still a rare anomaly in America during my childhood. The first anime I ever saw was Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989), which I rented from our local Southwest Video as a five year old but I didn't understand it to be anime: it was just a cartoon, the way Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Fantasia (1940) or that Tootsie Roll Pop commercial with the owl were cartoons. Children have no context for anything, you don't realize that those Looney Tunes shorts you watch every Sunday morning were made in the 40's, you just know that Daffy Duck is funny. And even once anime broke through to my age group in the form of Funimation's 1996 dub of Dragonball Z, it was syndicated. I went to my friend's house and he was watching this show where giant screaming muscle men were hurling laser-blasts at each other in a desert, bellowing about power levels: the appeal was obvious, but how the hell do I watch it? What channel, what time? The answers didn't seem clear. Blockbuster had a tiny selection of anime films, your Ninja Scroll (1993), your Akira (1988), your Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994), but all of these titles got the dreaded "YOUTH RESTRICTED VIEWING: MUST BE 18 OR OLDER" sticker, regardless of content. It could be Legend of the Overfiend (1989) or it could be Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), if it was animated, Japanese, and not Pokémon Blockbuster painted it all with the same brush. The nightmare of a parent accidentally renting their child Violence Jack: Evil Town (1988) when the Blockbuster was out of copies of The Lion King (1994) hung over anime, giving it a dangerous mystique that was reinforced by ubiquitous ads for mail-order anime home video companies that would advertise "Bloody Violence And Sizzling Sex!" in the back of video game magazines.

By the time I was 13 I finally had cable, and thus Toonami. Toonami was a weekday afternoon programming block on Turner's Cartoon Network and the way a lot of people my age first got into anime. It aired shows like Dragonball Z, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, and Tenchi Muyo!, giving American audiences a taste of a select sliver of the medium and a dependable time-slot to get into their long, elaborate serialized stories. But I was a chaotic and scatterbrained teenager, almost as chaotic and scatterbrained as I am now, and the idea of serialized television was new to me. Faithfully catching new episodes of a show five times a week was an unappealing proposition and catching random episodes without knowing what was going on was even worse. You could try to watch it on home video, but that required going to the mall and spending 35 dollars for a VHS tape that had three episodes of television on it, and often you couldn't even tell where in the series those three episodes were from. So I circled anime cautiously, at times pulled in (my library had all of Evangelion Neon Genesis on DVD, that was a great summer) but just as often pushed away, from the broad humor, the middle-school emotional lives of characters, and from the reams and reams of complicated Proper Noun Lore of so many anime series. The world is protected by The Keepers who draw power from The Emerarudo to fight The Pedra Nation using mecha called Briash that can only be piloted by Ghostchildren who were a product of the Watsica PLC Corp and if Hiroto, a brave boy from the Ghistlian nation, can collect the 6 Water Crystals than blah blah blah blah blah blah. It can be a bit much.

Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) is blessedly light on lore. And plot and characterization too, while we're at it. At 48 minutes (with five of those being the end credits) you couldn't even call it a full story in any traditional sense. The film follows Saya, a vampire who has the body of a young girl but whose true age is unknown. She works as an asset for an unnamed American agency tracking down and killing Chiropterans, vampiric demons who disguise themselves as humans to infiltrate and feed on their blood. The film begins as she successfully concludes one job, disemboweling a target with a katana on the Tokyo subway system one night and immediately meeting her handlers for a dossier on her next assignment. A series of mysterious deaths at the nearby Yokota Air Base indicate that two or more Chiropterans are feeding there. She goes there, does a total of one minute and forty seconds of investigation, figures out where the Chiropterans feed, stakes it out, kills one, breaks her sword trying to kill another, chases it down, gets a new sword, kills two more. That's everything that happens in Blood: The Last Vampire (2000). If you were to try to adapt this into a more traditional story structure you may make a detective thriller, see her enrolling in the Air Base's school to get closer, circling around suspects, asking questions, developing fraught conflicted relationships with people at the school. In that film, most the events of this could comfortably fit into the third act. Instead it stands alone, as a sketch, a suggestion of story.

There's a good reason Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) came out so short. In the west there had been animated films made all-digital since The Rescuers Down Under (1990) but the anime industry was slow to adopt it, with Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) as the very first. The film's origins start with a series of lectures put on by legendary director Mamoru Oshii (Angel's Egg [1985], Patlabor: The Movie [1989], Ghost in the Shell [1995]) to teach and mentor a new generation of animators. When Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, the president of anime studio Production I.G, approached Oshii to produce a new project not based on an existing manga or anime, he came up with idea of getting Oshii's students to submit ideas. The ultimate foundation of Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), a young girl in a schoolgirl outfit battling monsters with a katana, came from two of those students, Kenji Kamiyama (future director of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and Junichi Fujisaku (future director of Blood+) but it was Oshii who decided to use this as a way to jump into digital production. 

Production I.G. touted the miracle advancement of digital production during the promotional cycle, stating that it enabled them to work much faster than they would have via traditional means, but Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) was in production for two years with only 48 minutes in length to show for it, so the truth is a little more complicated. In August of 2000 director Hiroyuki Kitakubo promoted the film in a chatroom on SciFi.com where he was recorded as saying:

Kitakubo-San: I really wanted to make it longer too!

Kitakubo-San: but because of hardware/software issues with the computers we were using it had to be 48 minutes.

Kitakubo-San: It’d rather have a completed 48 minute work than an incomplete 90 minute movie

It's hard to imagine what hardware/software limitations would put a hard-cap of 48 minutes for a film (it's not like future digital productions were limited this way), and this explanation strikes me as a soft way of saying "it took us so long to figure out this new production software that we had to scale our plans way back". But the results speak for themselves, and Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) is a gorgeous, moody affair that leans heavy on the possibilities of digital color correction, bringing out the greens and purples of a sunset, the orange glow of sodium vapor street lights. The work of David Fincher, particularly Seven (1995), was a key influence on Kitakubo and it shows, especially in quieter moments as his camera explores the atmosphere and shadows of the air base grounds. There are a few dodgy shots of environments that look dated, but there are also camera movements like crane shots and dollies that would be much harder in traditional animation and the digital lighting and smoke effects render the climax, which takes place in a flaming airplane hangar utterly gripping. And the most elaborate animated number, a surreal sequence where Saya battles the Chiropteran in the middle of a crowded ballroom Halloween dance, with the many costumed party-goers seemingly unaware of the anime battle happening in front of them, is as beautiful as it is genuinely creepy. You expect horror-action to deliver plenty of bloodspray (which this does) in lieu of actual scares, but the moment when the demon kidnaps the school nurse, wrapping her in a banner advertising the dance (Night of the Living Dead (1968) themed despite the film taking place in 1966) and dragging her out as all her co-workers dance to dreamy vibraphone-driven jazz is genuinely frightening.

In some ways, the truncated runtime is a boon: Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) is blessedly free of lore, with the little glimpses of backstory we catch much more evocative as suggestions, directions for our mind to wander after the fact, the film much too brisk to allow real contemplation. The most provocative details involve the setting, an American air base in the middle of the Vietnam War, and the unspoken way it seems to comment on the relationship between Saya and her handlers. Is she no more than a CIA asset, an instrument of state violence to be wielded against creatures she has more in common with than humans? Some of the territory covered here feels downright Michael Mann, examining actors who function as tools of the state and the toll that service takes them. The final showdown, on the airbase runway, finds her chasing and slashing down the last Chiropteran only to stand above it, maintaining eye contact, allowing her blood to fall on it in some cryptic act of solidarity that calls Heat (1995) to mind. Not bad for an anime about a schoolgirl with a ninja sword. The western influence here is heavy, as the film not only draws on Fincher and Mann but from Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) (Saya has a "come with me if you want to live" moment with the school nurse, the only human witness to the carnage) and Production IG even made the unusual choice to have the dialogue mostly in English, with only a few characters speaking Japanese. You can't really make the argument that Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) is a deep or thorough examination of war or the military industrial complex or American imperialist intervention, but all these things do serve to give the slight whisp of a story more heft. It sometimes feels more like a TV pilot than a film, but I'm not convinced that Maya or her mysterious nature as "the last surviving original" (whatever that means) would actually become more interesting if examined closer.

But that didn't stop Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) from becoming a launching pad for a franchise. As an achievement in animation, the film caused quite a stir, with international critics praising its "stunning animation" and no less than Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)'s James Cameron saying "Digital imaging has entered a new era and the world will come to consider this work as the standard of top quality in digital animation." By 2000 anime had started to make serious in-roads into the western market, and Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) quickly became one of the highest selling DVDs in distributor Manga Entertainment's history, as well as one of the very first films sold on-demand on the internet. It was followed by three light novels, a manga, a PS2 game, two anime series and a highly-derided live action remake produced by The Bride with White Hair (1993) director Ronnie Yu. None of these made the impact that the original did and Blood: The Last Vampire (2000)'s reputation quickly diminished. But the digital techniques it pioneered remained and it even ushered in a huge trend of vampires in anime, inspiring series like Hellsing, Chibi Vampire and Vampire Knight. The film may not go down as a classic, but it was an important milestone in the history of anime and will live eternally.

(I am an anime novice and a lot of the context and production info from this article comes from KaiserBeamz and his video on the film.)

Next on Silver Screams...Anatomy (2000)