Streaming Availability: I'm done - just watch it illegally on Youtube. Capitalism has failed, stealing is good actually.
Anime loves a vampire and I had the choice of the litter for Spooky Month. There's Alucard from Hellsing, Saya from the Blood franchise, Dio from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and dozens and dozens of other options. That also is not counting many anime franchises that basically operate on vampire rules. Demon Slayer is about monsters that cannot go out in sunlight with fantastic magical powers that must feast on humans and will turn you into them if they bite you - just called "demons" not "vampires". However, when it came time to picking what to cover, most of those things are long TV shows and I got a lot of work to do, so here's a 102 minute movie instead. Enjoy.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is an adaptation of the long-running vampire novel series by Hideyuki Kikuchi. As of this year, he has written forty volumes in this series starting in 1983 and probably has no intention of stopping. I know several of these novels were translated into English in the mid-2000s, but I would not be surprised if most of the series is unavailable outside its native language. There have been many adaptations including a 1985 anime film, a manga, at least one video game, and probably a coloring book or something. Famed artist Yoshitaka Amano (who you probably know as the original Final Fantasy artist) has been the main illustrator since the beginning.
17 million copies sold says Wikipedia. I didn't buy even one of them. So, as usual, I can't speak to the adaptation work.
Since Bloodlust is a two-hour slice of a decades-old franchise, it is obviously not going to cover everything. There's tons of lore and if you want the full story, find a wiki, not a movie. This is not an origin story for its vampire hunter superhero, it assumes you're familiar enough with the tropes of this kind of story that you can be nimble and follow along. You better be flexible with genre too, since Vampire Hunter D is a complex stew flavored mainly with vampires, sure, but also it's an action-packed SciFi post-apocalypse western. For some reason space westerns were very popular in anime at this time with Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star - frankly anime has been worse ever since they stopped having cowboys with ray guns. Also, there's an ancient class of Vampire Nobles with huge gothic medieval castles. Also, our hero's hand talks to him. And there's wacky minibosses with weird magical powers. You just need to accept all these things.
The only thing this movie doesn't have is Bollywood musical numbers, and frankly, it could have used some.
Our protagonist, a vampire hunter only known as D (Hideyuki Tanaka), is to be reductive, the Japanese version of Blade. He's an impossibly cool dhamphir (or "dunpeal" in the bad English dub), a half-vampire with a great big floppy hat, an impossibly cool cape, beautiful hair, and a big-ass sword. If this sounds like the character Alucard from Castlevania, then you're correct, D was a huge influence on him. In Bloodlust, D functions more like a wandering samurai or Man with No Name cowboy figure. He's the impossible to beat badass who rides off into the sunset for another adventure. The big drama of love and death happens around him, D is just too cool for the plot of this movie to really be about him.
The actual dramatic leads are a noble human young woman, Charlotte (Emi Shinohara) and her vampiric kidnapper, Meier Link (Kōichi Yamadera). To rescue the girl before she's transformed, her father hired the best vampire hunting mercenaries money can buy. One of these is D, of course going solo on huge cool horse. The other is a crew called the Marcus Brothers, four dudes with very cool weapons and their gunslinger sister, Leila (Megumi Hayashibara). Leila gets close to D during the movie, but D is just too cool for a relationship right now. She is the only character that gets much of an arc, since frankly most people in this film are more power sets than characters.
In this simple chase of good versus evil, there is a twist. Meier is incredibly handsome, so therefore, he cannot be purely the villain of this tale. In fact, Charlotte and Meier are in love and are trying to elope to the City of the Night, a possibly-abandoned vampire city floating in space. Much like a future Edward Cullen, Meier is holding back his bloodlust out of love. On their way to space they come to the castle of Carmilla (Bibari Maeda), a vampire countless who has one of the last working rocket ships. Only can you trust a woman who has inherited her cathedral-like doom fortress from Elizabeth Báthory? Turns out no.
A lot of the problem with Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is that while a ton happens that's amazing with lush Madhouse visuals and cool action, also nothing is happening. The first hour is a non-stop chase racing after Meier's carriage and fighting off his squad of ghouls. Scene after scene of incredible stuff starts to wear off when basically there's no tension, the only enemy in this movie who could hope to challenge D is Meier, so his flunkies become tedious. Charlotte and Meier are barely in focus until the end, when events start becoming more and more surreal as Carmilla unleashes her evil mind control powers. That's the movie finds a majestic and tragic energy that's more than "this might make a cool segment in a Heavy Metal movie".
I will say that the production is very impressive. Twenty years ago, Madhouse were one of the top of the line anime studios, and so Vampire Hunter D has plenty of gorgeous visuals. Unfortunately, not a lot of the movie looks very Yoshitaka Amano to me. D and Meier both are spindly beautiful men with unique silhouettes, but the rest of the cast feel more generic. The animation is mostly traditional anime, not the watercolor Ukiyo-e meets comic books-style that is so iconic of Amano's work. Also, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is much better enjoyed in its original Japanese, since the early 2000s English dub is quite bad with an awful script, even with a few characters voiced by John DiMaggio.
Really though, I think I'm watching this in the wrong format entirely. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is the kind of adolescent fantasy that you should discover on TV at 2 AM while when you're fifteen. I guess kids today never need to go channel surfing anymore, and that's a shame. There are certain movies that work better when you're juiced up on soda and hormones, this is one of them. So put this in a conversation with stuff like Ninja Scroll, which was also made by Madhouse, basically very well-made exploitation-y trash. Vampire Hunger D: Bloodlust is not worthy of being remembered as fondly as Akira or even Redline, but it is better than X: The Movie at least.
Next Time! Do not worry if you missed Dracula 2 through Dracula 1999. Dracula 2000.
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