This is Japan's first fully digital animated feature film and you can soooo tell. The imagery of this film is fantosstic, it's just a pleasure to watch! The first scene we are presented with is of a phone ringing, and if i hadn't known this was a manga film i was watching i would have sworn that it was a real phone when i first saw this film.
Incidentally the first time i saw this film was in the later half of 2001, during channel 4's 'Hot reels' season, basically in the wee hours of the morning one a week they showed various animations, documentaries etc. around a subjects, for example one week it was British animation, the next Japanese etc.. Anyways so the night they did Japanese animation, as i was hurriedly finishing an essay, they premiered this film, needless to say the essay was hastily forgotten for the next hour and a bit. ;)
So onto the storyline of this film. Based around the time of the Vietnam War, Vampires have turned up in a little town near the Yokota Air Force base in Japan. Saya, a rather mysterious young lass in her 100s, is sent to this town by some sort of secret government organisation to deal with this problem.
It's quite a typical vampire story but it's told in such an effective way, there is very little dialogue, when characters do talk for lengths of time it's in a very concise way and there aren't any great long explanations giving insight into the background and history or prior events to what we see in the film. This adds alot of style to the film and really keeps your interest and involvement, information abour characters backgrounds etc. are given in a subtle way, in which the viewer has the piece it all together.
'Blood' is a very dark film, the lighting, imagery and the fact it's set around Halloween, which is quite a quirky link to vampires in a way. The film has quite a fast pace right from the start and this is really emphasised by the fact that there is quite a lot of action sequences of Saya fighting vampires, which are just brilliant, they're serious holding your breath on the edge of your seat kinda stuff.
Anyways so this is a really good manga film worth a look and if you buy the video you get a little bonus documentary which is most informative. |
