Blood: The Last Vampire (2001)
[director Hiroyuki Kitakubo]
The people in Mamoru Oshii’s production training project put together this film. It’s the first computer-animated feature from Japan. Essentially, it looks and feels like a hand-drawn project, only with sophisticated lighting and special effects, but it was actually all done on computer.
It’s about a girl who arrives at a high school on a U.S. airforce base in Japan, shortly before the Vietnam war. She’s a sullen young woman, working as a kind of an exterminator for a shady, X-Files-ish government agency. To put things simply, she hunts down these kind of vampirish demons and hacks them into pieces. The idea is that they have to lose enough blood in one stroke in order to put them out of action. So guns are no good, and the girl, named Seiya, totes around an old samurai sword for the dismemberments.
In fact, all this is much less interesting than it sounds. The horror thrills are mostly stuff that we’ve seen a gazillion times before. The Vietnam reference is just a red herring, suggesting or implying nothing about the situation depicted in the film. The story itself ends right where it should take off, as if the writers simply refused to further illuminate the interesting ideas they had suggested in the film’s nominal conclusion. The only interesting part of the movie is Seiya herself, a character so sullen she has maybe eight lines in the entire movie and expresses herself in varying degrees of frowns. She is exquisitely animated, so that her brooding appears to be an actual performance, and an impressive one at that. But the movie, for its visual beauty and good “”lead performance,”” is not developed enough to recommend. It has the feel of a first try; lacking the sophistication of projects that are more comfortable with their filming techniques.
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