Now here’s something I would never have expected: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the animated movie version of one of the lesser novels in the Vampire Hunter D series, is not only better than the original book but in some ways better than many of the novels in the series as a whole. The novel in question, Demon Deathchase, was a flashy but fairly thin vehicle for its main character — a half-human, half-vampire hunter of the undead in a vaguely Mad Max-ian far-flung post-collapse future. It was no great shakes as a story, but it wasn’t hard to see how it could lend itself easily to a terrific action film.
That it did. Bloodlust does as expected and for most of its running time uses the book as a springboard for one inspired and eye-popping action sequence after another. Then, at about the three-quarter mark, it surpasses the source material and delivers a surprisingly emotional conclusion — exactly what was missing from the book in the first place. The fact that I didn’t expect them to even try to add such things only made all the more pleasant a surprise; I went in expecting something fairly mindless and got one-upped bigtime.
Bounty hunter Leila Markus and her brothers may be tough customers, but they've got a whole
new challenge coming when they go after a quarry that's also being pursued by the legendary D.
Bloodlust drops the audience into its hero’s universe without too much preamble: vampires, a/k/a the “Nobility”, once ruled the earth but their star has been on the wane for some time. D, the vampire-hunter of the title, wanders the earth ronin-style and takes out what few of them are left — for the right price. He’s summoned to the house of a rich man and paid piles of cash to bring back his daughter, who’s been spirited away by a vampire, Meier Link, now making tracks for another part of the country. Unfortunately he’s not the only one after her. The Markus Brothers, one of the more infamous bounty-hunter gangs around, have also decided to give chase.
The Markus Brothers are rough competition. They roll around in a massive armored car (I was reminded of the cheesy Seventies post-nuke movie Damnation Alley) and throw themselves at both their quarry and D himself while armed with a nasty arsenal of weapons. My favorite was the crossbow that spits out enough bolts with one pull of the trigger to create one of those “arrow cloud” effects that we saw in Hero. Then there’s Leila Markus, the kid sister of the crew who’s nonetheless tough enough to take on D alone if she has to, and Meier Link himself if she must. And then there’s the one of the Markus brothers who is ill and bed-ridden, but nonetheless has powers of his own — the less said about which, the better. D, however, has his own half-vampire nature to drawn on for strength — as well as a weird little symbiotic organism that lives in his hand, works miracles of its own and sounds disturbingly like Milton Berle.
Their mutual target: a young woman kidnapped by the vampire Meier Link,
who's racing to find protection with another of the "Nobility" at the end of the earth.
One of the problems I’ve always had with the D series is D himself: as a character, he’s essentially a placeholder around which the action revolves. He becomes interesting when they delve into his past and what makes him tick, and to my great surprise that’s exactly how the final quarter of the movie is given that much extra weight. After pursuing this girl all this distance, D has to face the possibility that she might not have been kidnapped … and that her new host is someone who is a little too familiar with D’s own past. The ending is as spectacular as it deserves to be (and if it wasn’t, you can bet a lot of anime fans would want their money back) — and there’s even a heartfelt coda that actually works, the sort of thing that you’d expect to fall flat on its face in a movie about a quasi-immortal slayer of the undead.
Bloodlust was directed and written by Yoshiaki Kawajiri — a contributor to The Animatrix and the Neo-Tokyo animated film anthologies, director of the entirely-too-short OVA Birdy the Mighty, and director of the Ninja Scroll film. He’s masterful at combining hand-drawn animation with computer-designed work; there are many scenes in Bloodlust that are clearly a fusion of both, but they’re fused elegantly and not stodgily. This movie is even more visually uninhibited than any of Kawajiri’s other creations: the camera rockets through the blasted landscape, lingers on beautiful and terrible things, and pauses long enough to admire D silhouetted against the moon when he snatches an arrow right out of the air. Kawajiri himself also did the character designs — long bodies with hatchet faces, strongly reminiscent of the art of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure creator Hirohiko Araki. I was actually hoping for something closer to the illustrations Yoshitaka Amano created for the D books, which seemed to be a point of reference for the earlier animated D movie, but Kawajiri’s work is good enough that it puts nitpicks like that clean out of mind.
Bloodlust's staggeringly lush visual design and its rapidfire action sequences are topnotch, but the
final stretch is devoted to a genuine bit of emotion of the sort that's usually skipped in a film like this.
I often get into discussions with other movie buffs about whether certain things work better as live-action or animation. Anytime a heavy degree of suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience is needed, it’s hard to go wrong with animation that’s well-directed and -crafted. If Bloodlust had been live-action, the mere fact that it was live-action might have been too distracting for anything else to work. But what it is works, and works extremely well. With this film I can’t say Kawajiri’s in quite the same stratosphere as Akira or the Studio Ghibli productions, but if he keeps it up, his next one ought to be.
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I really liked this movie when I saw it a while ago, I liked it more than the original D movie. I totally agree on the animation part. Something like this just wouldn't have worked in live action, it could have just turned into another Van Helsing, which was not worth watching.
I actually saw it in japanese, I didn't even know that the english dub was the "official" version. I'm curious to see it in english now..
BTW, is it possible that you got a glitched dvd? Somehow I can't see them adding lots of bonuses, anamorphic stuff and whatnot and yet having terrible compression.
[I think the DVD was authored and compressed back before the introduction of the newer, more intelligent multipass MPEG compression systems. I compared it against some of the newer titles in my library with similar bitrates and they're markedly better. --ed]
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If you can get your hands on it, the R5 Russian 2 disc DTS release of VHD: Bloodlust is excellent. I special ordered mine through alldvd.ca
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The voice for the Left Hand is Mike McShane, a comic actor of apparently marginal talent from my experience. I felt the voice acting for that character was a stark departure from the Hand in the original, but that was largely my only problem with the film.
[Link added. --ed.]
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I haven't seen this yet, but would really like too, also I miss your Birdy the Mighty review, the link doesn't work.
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Thanks for reminding me of it! I'm going to be putting it back online along with some of the other legacy content over time -- it should show up in the DVD section in a week or so. (Knowing that someone wants to see it sooner rather than later is a great motivator!)
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A bit late to the party on this one, but...
I first saw BLOODLUST in 2000, when it was shown for the first time in the US. To say that I was blown away was an understatement. Even though I was a fan of Kawajiri's earlier works (such as WICKED CITY, NINJA SCROLL, and MIDNIGHT EYE GOKU) this film was a quantum leap over his previous films.
After the screening, my friend turned to me and said, "This was better than AKIRA."
(Of course, he was speaking in hyperbole, but you get the idea.)
People that I've shown the film to (and also the original VAMPIRE HUNTER D) are taken aback and end up liking both films because they are, well, different in terms of vampire films. The combination of Mad Max/dark fantasy/gothic horror/science fiction/post apocalypse (man, that's a lot of dashes there...) certainly grabs the attention.
A few years later, after the translation and release of the novels began, I did read the third book. I was surprised by the differences, but I am glad that Kawajiri made the changes. He also gave the film a better ending, one that wasn't as bittersweet as the novel.
When it comes to adapting Kikuchi's novels to animation, Kawajiri seems to have the magic touch--think of Frank Darabont film adaptations of Stephen King's works. He adapted DEMON CITY SHINJUKU, WICKED CITY, and also worked on A WIND NAMED AMNESIA. BLOODLUST was certainly the best adaptation yet, but if he ever chooses to work on another adaptation of Kikuchi's works, then so much the better.
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Funny you should mention "Midnight Eye Goku", as I have been picking up and reading the manga (from Comics One, now out of print, but available cheap on the used-book market). Maybe the renewed interest in "Cobra" and Terasawa generally will allow for a more overall revival of his work.
"... Amnesia" I actually have the novel it was derived from (it was just released in English), but I haven't yet seen the OAV. Now that I remember Kawajiri was behind it, that gives me a little more incentive to dig it back up and watch it. That's another story that you could localize to the live-action market in the U.S. without breaking a sweat -- and come to think of it, the Hughes Brothers could probably have done it perfectly, especially after the pleasant surprise that was "The Book of Eli". (I have zero hope for "Akira" as an American live-action feature, but you knew that already.)
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I read GOKU back when Viz first released the first three stories in six issues (colorized, too!) back in the early 90s. But I was already a fan of Terasawa after reading COBRA which Viz had also released. Still, thank heavens that Comics One released all of GOKU, since it is a darned good series. And they also released KABUTO as well.
Cobra and Terasawa might get a good deal of exposure if Aja's live-action adaptation of COBRA is made and released in theaters. It does make sense in a weird way that a Frenchman would make a COBRA film, since the animated series was aired in France in the 1980s, and Aja watched it back then and became a fan (plus the manga's been translated into French as well).
Terasawa definitely is an artist who deserves wider attention; he certainly blends the Eastern/Western elements well in all of his works, most notably COBRA. The results are stories and characters that are certainly unique, but still have an air of familiarity to them.
The anime for ...AMNESIA was pretty faithful to the book, but I saw that first some years back and only recently read the book. That said, it would work nicely as a live-action film made in the US. As for the live-action AKIRA...well, my thoughts are, "Why bother, when it worked so well in animation?" Having said that, I wish no malice on the Hughes brothers, but even if the film comes out and ends up being a failure, the anime is still here. So I'm not loosing much sleep over it either way.
Now, if only Cameron would to work on that live-action BATTLE ANGEL ALITA....
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A shame Comic One seems to have folded, since they had not only Terasawa's stuff but a few other products I was interested in ("Ginga Densetsu Weed", for instance). The two volumes of "Kabuto" also sit on my shelf, and I read both of them with my jaw dangling somewhere down at lap level. When someone asked me what the deal was, I said something like "SWASTIKA SPACESHIP?" and left it at that. It's the sort of thing that you can only pull off with a completely straight face (that again!), or it falls to pieces and turns into self-parody. I also liked how Terasawa was able to do that "Gimmee some sugar, baby" type of machismo without it veering into the kind of truly tasteless territory that Ryoichi Ikegami slid into head-first in the later volumes of "Crying Freeman" and other such works.
... and yes, I say that even after seeing the half-girl half-motorcycle in "Goku". Eat your heart out, Boris Vallejo!
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