Reviewed on May 30th, 2006

Visually

Blood is getting a lot of national and international attention because of Oshii's name and because of the film's unique, three-year production process; it's being billed as the first all-digital anime film. While it wasn't created entirely by computers, its hand-drawn, two-dimensional images were scanned into image-processing programs, colored, composited with three-dimensional backgrounds (both static and rendered in 3-D motion) and subjected to a series of lighting filters in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. (It's a pity the 20-minute "making-of" video included on the Blood DVD doesn't shed much light on this process. Instead, it centers on brief interviews in which the film's creators spout trivia about their jobs and each other, and answer banal questions about whether their work was "fun" or "worth it.") Because the lighting filters were applied uniformly to all levels of the animation to unify the images, light and shadow play a very large part in Blood. From the strobing illumination of police-car lights and subway-tunnel fluorescents to the steady glow of daylight to the flickering light of spreading fire, intense and creative lighting effects dominate the entire film. The result is a visually warm, multilayered, rich movie with generally impressive three-dimensional effects and realistic textures. Blood has the complexity of computer animation without its shiny, artificial patina. The character design is distracting Saya, with her dark, bulging, formless lips, looks particularly odd but the environments look and feel real, and the motion is smooth, fast and beautifully rendered.

Audio

What can I say? The voice actors who worked on Blood: The Last Vampire did a superb job dubbing and I have nothing to complain about anything related to audio.

Storyline

As Blood: The Last Vampire opens, a teen-age girl is sitting by herself on a subway train, watching her car's only other occupant: a sprawled, grubby man. Suddenly, she leaps up, whips out a sword and charges at him. He flees in terror, but she quickly catches up and cleaves him open. At the next station, the conductor and passengers calmly leave the train as two men in suits rush to meet the teenager and present her with information about her next target. One of the men examines the girl's recent victim, and is horrified to see that the corpse hasn't changed shape, and was apparently human. Unable to get the attention of his partner or the young woman, he becomes increasingly shrill, finally shouting, "Jesus!" Immediately, the teen-ager whips around in a fury, grabs him by the face, and lifts him off the ground, one-handed. The second man defuses the situation, but later punches his partner in the face, snarling, "Don't ever piss her off again! As far as we know, she's the only remaining original!" Original what? Blood never explains, though its title certainly seems to be a clue. But Blood never explains a lot of things in its scant length. The teen-ager's name is Saya, and she's inhumanly strong and fast, as well as sullen and vicious. Her shadow employers have her chasing "chiropterans," shape-changing vampires that imitate and live among humans, and can be killed only if they're forced to shed a large percentage of their blood all at once. Hence the sword. But who are the agents Saya's working for? Where did the chiropterans come from, and why have they infiltrated an American Air Force base in Japan? Why is Saya willing to kill them, and to work with humans, whom she clearly despises? Blood never explains any of this, either. Instead, it offers up a series of elaborate, forceful fight scenes, as the glowering Saya stalks and fights maniacally and the chiropterans fight or flee. Conceived by Mamoru Oshii (writer/director of Ghost in the Shell) and directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Blood ties in with an Oshii novel and a video game, but on its own seems like the middle 50 minutes of a two-hour movie, a segment with no clear beginning, end, background or internal continuity.

DVD

Like I mentioned earlier in this review the Blood DVD includes a 20 minute 'making-of' video and that it centers on brief interviews in which the film's creators spout trivia about their jobs and each other, and answer banal questions about whether their work was "fun" or "worth it."

Overall

There's no question that the film looks impressive and is likely to set a new standard in digital animation. But it's still not very satisfying, thanks to its uncharismatic, near-silent star and bewilderingly incomplete story. (A small amount of much-needed background information can be found at the Blood Web site's character page, though virtually none of this information appears in the film.) Animation buffs everywhere will want to see Blood, just to see how the animation of the 21st century will look. But the scriptwriters of the 21st century should certainly be setting their sights higher.

by Aidan