Cover Art

Credits

Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri Starring: Andrew Philpot, John Rafter Lee, Pamela Segall, Wendee Lee, Michael McShane Screenplay: Yoshiaki Kawajiri Country: Japan

Set in a distant future, Bloodlust follows a half-human, half-vampire called D, who is, incase you hadn't already clicked on, a vampire hunter. When a young girl is kidnapped by an unseen force, her father and brother call upon D to bring her back, convinced that a vampire has taken her. D accepts, but is informed that a group of bounty hunters, the Marcus brothers are also searching for her, and they have a day's head start. So D sets out, coming across all many of otherworldly monstrosities along the way, until eventually finding himself presented with a very unexpected and slightly bizarre situation along with a battle against Carmilla, an evil and conniving vampire countess with hair rivaling Gary Oldman's in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Now, to many, this is considered a modern classic, and if you were to look at it solely in terms of it's animation it would be. The animation is fantastic, well and truly on the same level as Ninja Scroll and the Program segment of The Animatrix, particularly in the opening sequences. All the fabrics and character movements flow perfectly, very rarely cutting the corners that anime tends to, which is no meager task considering the amount of detail in just about every single character on screen. The same level of detail is retained in the background art, which is equally as impressive as the animation itself, and often employs 'deep matting', a technique in which particular objects or sections of the background art are actually computer generated objects 'painted' the same way as the actual background, allowing for seamless integration of movements and changes in perspective.

But in spite of all these magnificent artistic techniques, the film itself is a bit of a patchwork monstrosity. Characters are introduced with little to no set up, and there's no real reasoning behind particular courses of action taken, making it seem as though things are just put in for the sake of putting them in. One of the protagonists has no background information given at all, none of her relationships between any characters, good or bad, are ever established aside from the fact that 'she's there now, so is person-x, they should interact'. You don't even get her name until nearly twenty minutes of her moping around. There also is a Werewolf character that could have been really, really good, but instead became a third tier henchman that does one or two cool things and then bites the dust. His screen time as an actual lycanthropic monster clocks in at barely thirty seconds. The only one of these characters with any personality is the shadow jumping assassin. All the background information on D is given in a ludicrously elaborate story/expositional lump in a stable by an old man. There are a few moments like this where the minimal amount of dialogue spoken by particular characters is counterbalanced by random scene-fillers who don't really have any true bearing on the film's progression. It feels as though the whole thing was sort of written on the fly. Especially as things get closer to the end.
Carmilla, sort of the female embodiment of Dracula, is suddenly introduced as this superior antagonist, after the audience has likely already accepted that these three other villains (The shadow-jumper, the werewolf and some sort of catwoman who can change her molecular structure). But it gets worse, almost as quickly as the audience is punched with "Oh! This person is the bad guy now," it quickly follows with a quick left-hander of "She's sending them to the moon in a rocket! Behold!" Oh, and the giant sand-mantas? The purpose of the talking, parasitic face on D's left hand? I really wish I knew.