SYNOPSIS

October 30, 1966. A youthful Japanese woman named Saya
arrives at Yokota Air Force Base, an American military
base in Japan. She pretends to be a student visiting
the base's high school, but the truth is that she is
hunting vampires that she suspects have infiltrated the
base. Aiding her in her quest are two people that I
assume are military officials: a white man who looks to
be in his 60s named David and a young black man whom I
assume is his partner named Louis.

COMMENTS

It's made clear from the very first scene that this
movie is intended to be a masterwork in digital
animation. On many levels, it succeeds in being just that. The
artwork used in every single scene is absolutely
gorgeous. Every background contains meticulous detail and
is expertly colored and shaded; the hallways and
classrooms of Yokota high school look real enough to touch.
Character designs, especially those for the vampires,
are some of the best I've ever seen. The vampires look
genuinely gruesome and terrifying; I don't think I've
seen a scarier vampire even from Hollywood. The
designs for the human characters appear to me to be sort of
a cross between the ones in Perfect Blue and the ones
in Ghost in the Shell. Character animation on the
other hand is more of a mixed bag. It's silky smooth in
some parts and it's downright choppy in others; it's as
if the animators weren't able to keep the fluidness of
the animation consistent throughout. But that's really
a minor complaint considering what a groundbreaking
work of art this movie is. And that's really all this
movie is about - art. It certainly doesn't have anything
resembling a compelling story.

After watching Blood, I felt like I had just been
dropped into the middle of an R-rated mid-season episode
of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with absolutely no
knowledge of anything that had happened in previous episodes
and I also felt like I had been pulled out of it just
as things were starting to get interesting. I normally
try to be very careful to not include spoilers in my
reviews, but that sense of caution wouldn't even apply
to this movie because for there to be spoilers there
first has to be a plot that can be spoiled. I'm not
exaggerating when I say that Blood has no plot. The only
important plot information I was able to gather from
watching Blood is that Saya is a vampire who hunts
other vampires. She is apparently the last remaining
"original," whatever that means. Saya is nothing like the
vampires she hunts, so does that mean she's a different
kind of vampire? Is that what "original" means? We're
never told. Since Saya is a vampire, why is she on the
side of good? Why can't she kill humans? We're never
told. "Plot? We don't need no stinkin' plot! Why bother
with something like that when all we need is about 45
minutes of gratuitously bloody vampire-slaying
action?" - That's what I figure the creators of this movie
must have said to each other when they were discussing a
plot for it. Of course, that's not to say that all 45
minutes of the movie are filled with gratuitously
bloody vampire-slaying action, but you get the idea. Blood
was made to be little more than a showpiece for
digital animation; it's obvious to me that very little
consideration was ever given to the creation of a plot.

But even though Blood fails to have any kind of a
plot, interesting or otherwise, it does have a very moody
and well-orchestrated musical score. Unlike some
horror movies out there, Blood's score actually adds to the
movie's intensity with its surprisingly subtle
mood-enhancing music instead of detracting from it with a
heavy-handed score and the "violins of horror and
suspense" that's overused so often in Hollywood horror
movies.

PRESENTATION

Something that might surprise a lot of avid anime
watchers who are accustomed to there being a separate
Japanese dub and English dub for each anime movie and
series is that Blood features a combination Japanese and
English dub - Japanese dubbing for Japanese characters
and English dubbing for American characters. Also,
there are two bilingual characters (Saya and the school
nurse) who speak both Japanese and English during the
movie. With English subtitles turned on, subtitles only
appear when Japanese is being spoken.

The DVD transfer of Blood is flawless; the picture is
clean and crisp and the sound is equally impressive.
The main menu screen is animated and very dark and does
a lot to set the tone for the movie. The other menu
screens only have still frames, though. Extras on the
Blood DVD include screencaps from the movie and a
documentary on the making of Blood. But what is perhaps the
best extra is not an extra that's included on the
Blood DVD. It's a mini-DVD packaged in a small cardboard
sleeve that comes inside the Blood DVD case. It
features a music video to a song called Pulse which is
apparently the debut single for a band called The Mad
Capsule Markets. The entire music video is CG animated and
has a group of guys dressed sort of like storm troopers
in a video game-like environment. The DVD cover art is
just a drawing of Saya with a few small screencaps
from the movie at the bottom - nothing special.

CONCLUSION

If you're looking for an action-packed anime movie
with some cutting-edge animation and artwork and you're
not too concerned with it having a plot, Blood is
definitely a movie you should see. But if you're looking
for an anime movie with a deep plot and interesting,
well-developed characters, look elsewhere.
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