s 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.
Visually inventive, but flawed
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.
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.
