Blood the Last Vampire

Director: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Country: Japan
Date: 2000
Runtime: 48 minutes
Format: .avi and with .sfv English subtitles

This was one of the first anime I saw so my opinion is probably a bit biased. This might piss some people off (perhaps purists?) but I really enjoyed watching this short movie. I admit that this has a lot of flaws but I still think it's a nice little messy vampire flick. Probably the biggest problem with this movie (or short, or whatever) is that it looks more like a pilot episode for some anime.

The good thing is that the characters (ESPECIALLY FEMALE) aren't brainless fetish objects that are just there to show you their schoolgirl panties. The usual shit that this type of anime tends to have (you are a special magical girl that has special magical powers and so on) is thrown right out of the window. What you get are gritty characters that are fed up with their lives and where it got them. So basically it's much darker in tone. They do sometimes try overly hard to look edgy but they pull it off for the most part.

In any case the plot revolves around a girl called Saya that's a vampire hunter and she infiltrates some school that's suspicious. That's pretty much it. There's not much plot but and that's okay for the main duration until the end when it gets kinda loose.

Concerning art this actually reminded me the most of Animatrix shorts. In fact there's plenty of western influence here (hence the purist hate) but I think it fits nicely with the tone and theme of the movie.

Parts: 01, 02 and 03.

In case you're interested there are spinoffs (sequels?) to this. There are a few novels/manga (one of them was written by Mamoru Oshii but I can't find it anywhere) and a few shows. I watched Blood+ and it was terrible. Characters are molded into the usual stereotypes (guess what, the protagonist got an amnesia and is now back in high school) and overall I didn't really like it. Another show is Blood C or something like that which I didn't watch.