![]() ![]() So, I suppose that is the film’s real achievement. It’s a great exemplar of what is possible in anime, and I absolutely understand why fans of Vampire Hunter D exist. There’s plenty of action, and there are creatures here that aren’t going to appear in anything else. The story is pretty good, and has some very interesting twists that run through it. In fact, one of the reasons I tend to like Miyazaki’s films more than I do other anime films is that Miyazaki, aside from being charming, has worlds that are more fully explained in some way.īut here’s the thing: The characters are cool. I want to find this world interesting and worth exploring, but the conventions of anime seem to work against me in this respect. It does make me want to track down the first Vampire Hunter D movie from 1985 if only to see if some of these story elements are more fully explained. And, as I said above, outside of the exposition that doesn’t seem to be here at all, like an explanation of the world and the characters (I discovered the year this is supposed to take place in by looking at the Wikipedia article about the Vampire Hunter D novels), the story itself is very straightforward. We get a series of strange supernatural creatures for our characters to fight. There are lots of fight sequences rife with projectile weapons, lots of death, and plenty of gooey slaughter. There’s a lot of action here that, in generally, is clearly shown. Once you get past the story, anime tends to trade on a couple of things, both of which Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust does very well. Specifically, D is going to spend a good deal of time dealing with Leila (Pamela Adlon), a woman who lost her parents to vampires and pursues them out of a need for vengeance. D and the Marcus group will have a few run-ins as well. Both D and the Marcus brothers pursue the fleeing couple, finding along the way that Charlotte was less kidnapped and more abandoned her family because she actually loves Meier Link. Other than that, though, the story is actually pretty straightforward and easy to follow. All it would take is a line or two that explains what the hell the face that appears in D’s hand actually is to explain that to me, but that never happens. ![]() For instance, D has some sort of supernatural parasite (apparently called Left Hand and voiced here by Mike McShane) that sometimes manifests as a face in the middle of D’s, well, left hand. There’s a little bit of that in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. I’m just supposed to understand that the world works in a particular way without that world being made understandable, like someone forgot to include all of the exposition. There often seems to be a lot of assumptions made about the world in which the story takes place that aren’t explained. One of the problems I frequently have with anime titles is that I feel like I don’t have the cultural background to truly understand what is going on. D sets off to track down Meier and Charlotte, knowing that the Marcus Brothers have a head start on him. Her family naturally wants her alive, but it she’s been turned, they’d prefer her returned dead rather than undead. A gang called the Marcus Brothers, who have a large assault vehicle and each have their own specialties have been hired to bring Charlotte back as well. He’s told that he is not the only hunter on the case. ![]() Charlotte (Wendee Lee) has been kidnapped by a vampire named Meier Link (John Rafter Lee), and D has been hired to retrieve her. So, naturally, that’s going to be the case here. Our title character (again, think Blade) is a vampire hunter who wants to wipe out the remaining vampires, and does so as a mercenary, hired by people who have dealings with the bloodsuckers. These hybrids have many of the traits of their vampire sire, including a weakness for sunlight (although not a complete weakness to it) and effective immortality. There was a time in the past when vampires were much more common, and the child of a human mother and vampire father, the dunpeal/dhampir D (voiced by Andrew Philpot) of the title were a lot more common. The story takes place thousands of years in the future (roughly 12,090 CE) after some sort of cataclysm has great changed the planet. What this means is that every time someone calls our title character a “dunpeal,” the actual word being referenced is “dhampir,” an Albanian word for a half-human, half-vampire. The truth is that Japanese doesn’t have an English r or l it has a sound that is essentially the dead middle between them. There’s a stereotype that Japanese and Mandarin speakers can’t get r’s and l’s correct. Before I get into the details of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (called by the closest equivalent to that possible in Japanese: Banpaia Hanta Di: Buraddorasuto), I need to talk a little bit about the Japanese language.
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