Vampire Hunter D

 Vampire Hunter D is an anime film that has developed a mdoest cult. It suggests a conceptual blend of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (or the lead character in Stephen King’s Gunslinger series) and Marvel Comics’ Blade. The film is based on a Japanese manga, which consists of 22 books since 1983. The film version came out just at the time when the revolution in graphic novels was taking comic-books away from the Comic Book Code and along grimmer and darker paths. The film’s title character would make perfect material for a modern Western graphic novel series – D is the same dark, nihilistic, monosyllabic avenger of the modern graphic novel typified by Batman, Spawn, Judge Dredd, The Crow and The Punisher. He even looks the perfect modern comic-book antihero – roaming the post-holocaust landscape on a white steed, his face never seen, hidden behind a giant-sized fedora and bandana and saying less than a dozen words throughout.

The middle of the film features a wonderfully hallucinatory journey across wasted landscapes into the chief vampire’s labyrinthine castle and through encounters with a menagerie of slugs, giants, mutants that can warp time and space (thus impaling the hero’s sword thrusts inside his own body) and three-headed hydra snake-women. Typically of Japanime, the film is amazingly gory with numerous severed limbs, bifurcated bugs and knives impaled in eyeballs.


On the minus side, the story is slight. After the fabulous journey that takes up the middle of the film, the rest, especially the showdown with the chief vampire, is anticlimactic in comparison. Part of the problem here is that the vampire threat amounts to little – he is merely a stuffed figure in a cape uttering vague threats and never a character of menace. The animation is also limited and the dubbing occasionally flat.

It is not entirely clear if Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is intended as a remake or a sequel – the story follows similar, although not identical, paths to the original – it could be the first film’s plot reworked with more depth and substance. The English language print has been subtitled Bloodlust (which is kept in this review to avoid confusion), although this subtitle does not appear on the print of the film itself and it otherwise has exactly the same title as the original, Vampire Hunter D, which lends some weight to the idea that it might be a remake.


Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is made by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, who also made Lensman (1984), the amazingly perverse Wicked City (1987), Demon City Shinjuku (1988), Ninja Scroll (1993), Highlander: The Search for Vengeance (2007) and an episode of The Animatrix (2003). The original Vampire Hunter D was simplistically animated and stylistically crude. It is immediately apparent from the opening shot in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust – a 3D pullback through a forest of crucifixes that then moves about the town as the vampire’s shadow passes through the streets, causing flowers and crosses to wilt and animals to cower – that this is a new generation Vampire Hunter D. The difference between the two might be the same as that between the simplistic two-dimensional animation of Hanna-Barbera’s tv shows and with the high-art animation of modern Disney.

Yoshiaki Kawajiri enthrallingly leaps into the intensively driven action, mass destruction and changes between small and epic scale that makes anime such cult material. The action here is frequently breathtaking – battles with the likes of a tree woman and flying coffins, a character with a wolf’s head emerging from its stomach, the various hunters engaged in sword battles with the vampires and zombies, horse and cycle flights through a minefield of laser beams and the like. The introduction of D comes in the midst of a full-scale battle between the Marcus Brothers and zombies with D catching a silver arrow fired at him his hand and his cape resplendently opening like bat wings silhouetted against a full moon. The backgrounds are beautifully stylised Gothic renderings – Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is one of the few animes to adopt the essence of the modern graphic novel. Indeed, with its sharply drawn contrasts of light, shadow and emphasized muscular shadings, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust could almost be the work of comic-book artist Jim Steranko brought to life. The characterizations are slim and ... well comic-bookish. D gets slightly more dialogue than in the original, but is still kept appropriately monosyllabic and mysterious.  (Moria)