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The story takes place at the Yokota Air Force base in Japan around the time of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Suicides seem to be occurring on base, but only secret agents know that beasts called chiropterans are responsible for the deaths. Anime heroine wields
mighty swordThe agents call in a samurai sword-wielding girl named Saya, who one of the agents says is "the last original," to take up the hunt, and she begins school at the base a few days before Halloween.
The nature of the chiropterans is never fully revealed; all we are told is that they are demons that can transform into human shapes. And, Saya says, they live off human blood.
Naturally, it is the night of the school's Halloween dance when everything happens. The school nurse is dragged into it all when two chiropterans thirsty for blood target her as their next victim.
Saya saves her, and the horrifying events of that one night are ones that no one believes and that the nurse will never understand.
"Blood" is a step away from other anime in several ways. One is its focus on non-Japanese people. Other than Saya, whose ethnicity is unknown, it's the Americans on base that take center stage.
The other students wear everyday clothes, so Saya is conspicuously out of place as the only one dressed in a Japanese school uniform. The character designer must have been hard-pressed to include a bit of Japan in the anime other than the samurai sword and a smattering of Japanese dialogue.
Also rare is the movie's bilingual aspect. Because of the setting, most of the original dialogue is in English, and some characters switch effortlessly from fluent Japanese to fluent English and back again in a heartbeat.
So make a note of that if you're watching the "Blood" DVD and are trying desperately to switch it to a nonexistent Japanese audio track (as this reviewer tried to do). The anime has a dark, fast-paced style of animation with computer graphics, but the mix is choppy; the sequence on the train at the very beginning is perhaps the best blend of the two.
And true to its title, "Blood" has a lot of it, but the violence is more like "Jurassic Park," in which the deeds are implied rather than shown with all their gory details. When Saya stabs one chiropteran, blood splatters all over, but we never actually see the sword mangle the monster.
The anime would probably have been much better if its title or synopsis didn't give everything away. If the nurse's discovery of Saya's nature is meant to be the movie's climax, then it fails miserably due to the fact that, well, we knew about it all along.
But otherwise, "Blood" does very well in the "mystery" department. With her grim demeanor and tendency to stick strictly to business, Saya is one of anime's most enigmatic characters despite our knowledge of her heritage. Like the original "Vampire Hunter D," whose recent sequel "Bloodlust" finally gave insight into the main character's motivations nearly 15 years after the first movie, "Blood" is just begging for a sequel to explain Saya's history.
"Blood" is short for a movie -- less than 45 minutes long -- but that time is packed with almost nonstop suspense and action. After that, its abrupt, tame end is unsatisfying. It might have been better as a miniseries, but now all we can do is hope for another movie.
Wilma Jandoc covers the universe
of video games and anime for the
Star-Bulletin. She can be emailed at
wjandoc@starbulletin.com