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.

Pale Cocoon

Director: Yasuhiro Yoshiura
Year of release: 2005
Country: Japan
Format/Subtitles: .avi/hardcoded English subtitles
Runtime: 22 minutes

Here's another animated short from Japan, a bit newer this time. The story is set in a vaguely explained dystopian world where people live underground with a huge archive of various disconnected and broken information left from previous times that several department process and restore.

The theme of this anime, except for "melancholic as fvck", is memories. Memories and histories of us as individuals and us as a whole. The archives in this world are being less and less interesting to people up to a point where everyone just walks away from them. Memories of things that will never be again are much too painful for them to bear. It will never come back and do we really need to depress ourselves with it? Or should we obscure our failures and leave them behind by dealing with the present. Are distant memories really that important? At which point does collecting and archiving becomes meaningless?

As interesting as the idea of this anime is the relative short length of the film itself kinda hampers the story. It almost feels like it's a pilot episode at times. Maybe it was made into something later on? I didn't check. Despite this flaw it's fairly enjoyable to watch and the atmosphere is projected very well upon the viewer. I just think that it could have been developed a bit further.

Art-wise I can't really say that this is something groundbreaking. It might have been great 7 years ago but today it looks fairly standard. Basically it's a blend of 2D/3D graphics. I'm not sure if anything aside from characters were drawn the usual style. I'm not an expert. I don't know.

Check it out sometimes.

Parts: one and two!