You know an anime it’s gonna be special when Mamoru Oshii is directing and his own sales pitch fo r it is “you’ll see what an old man who doesn’t give any fucks can do” XD
Even more when he partners up with FLCL’s creator, for his first TV anime since his early days on working on Urutsei Yatsura and directing the series’ two feature films, meant to come out in 2020, but the project had some delays, and was eventually released during February of 2021 on Crunchyroll… well, half of it was released at once, in order to make a “broken heart” joke.
Actually, it’s more absurd i didn’t actually manage to review it at launch, but now the occasion-climate seem appropriate again, so let’s remedy to this and try to squeeze some “synergy juice” (or what’s left of it, since i was sick and had to delay this review).
I mean, he was clearly willing to get crazy and embrace its legacy in the most absurd – and memey – ways, like deciding to open the episodes with a mock version of the MGM logo sequence, of course replacing the lion with his beloved bassethound. XD He knows, but doesn’t care, love it.
And in a way it’s a throwback situation, harkening – as i have already pointed out – to Oshii first proper work in adapting episodes of Rumihiko Takashi’s Urusei Yatsura, but it’s clearly a different situation, as this one adapts a fairly unknown visual novel, only re-released on smarthphones (and since delisted/unvailable), in Japan only, called Chimaire Mai Love, where Oshii is credited as story creator and writer.
Mitsugu Bamba is a high school girl who is crazy about donating her blood, to the point that she feels compelled to visit a local blood bank despite the unfriendly nurse Chihiro. One day, Mitsugu encounters a beautiful girl there who looks like she has come from overseas. The girl is so pale that she appears ready to faint. Instead, she suddenly starts trashing the blood bank. The girl then loses consciousness and so Mitsugu takes her home…
I’d add “she then finds out she’s a vampire”, but of course she is, she is dressed like she came out of a Castlevania cosplay-off, has fangs and elven ears, and she’s has “TRANSYLVANIA” as a surname.
But she’s a reserved, pacifist-vampire, so Mitsugu decides to basically take her in and protect this inefficient draculina that ran away from home to escape her allegedly authoritarian parents, and alongside her schoolmates “blood freak protag” sets up a blood-donation bank in order to help this Seras Victoria-esque vampire that does not want (nor wishes) to feed on humans.
To be honest, Oshii’s hand is clearly heavy in this, though he isn’t the main director of the episodes, that would be Junji Ishimura (FLCL, Neo Yokio, Nura: Rise Of The Yokai Clans, Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls, Dog Days, You’re Under Arrest: The Movie) while Oshii is chief director, so it’s not all out of his pocket, being more a collaborative effort than his films (live action or animated), not random as Ishimura also worked on Urusei Yatsura and on the Oshii directed Beautiful Dreamer film, but Oshii is also the screenwriter for most episodes, Kenji Kawai is the series composer, and overall it’s undeniable this feels like Oshii exploding 30 years of comedic material he wanted to make, but couldn’t/ didn’t due to his involvement in his more well known and serious projects.
Again, the sales pitch it’s him not giving a shit what people were gonna think, so he basically did a 80s style romantic comedy anime that’s also technically a harem but it’s not, heavy on slapstick humour (including people doing the shocked hand poses like someone stabbed Ranma ½ in the back with a spatula again), a speedy rhythm to the many gags and random building and stuff exploding, with virtually no plot as every episode is an excuse to do every possible theme he desiders, so there’s the beach episode, the kaiju episode, heck, there’s an entire episode that’s an extended Castlevania parody/spoof, to say nothing of the many nods to Oshii’s previous works.
Then it gets weird with an episode about the gang making a student film that it’s hard not to see as the director reflecting on his many woes with his live action movies.
Then it gets even weirder with one being a tribute to surrealist 60s gekiga mangas (specifically to Yoshiharu Tsuge, as the anime itself outright states), so yeah, this is definitely a work were Oshii had a lot of input and control over, one where he was let loose to try basically anything he wanted in terms of comedy anime, uncaring if the audience gets the random Street Fighter 2 references, the Basic Instict ones or the more obscure jokes referencing Oshii’s previous works.
Again, the “shit not giving” is often so extra that you have the cosplay character dressing like random 80s/90s anime like Captain Harlock and Oshii pretty much saying how had to put off playing Fallout 4 to do shit (and no, the game didn’t came out in 2021).
The downside is that this style isn’t for the modern anime audience, it’s not even for those who may have wanted a yuri romance anime, as the characters aren’t deep, there’s no fan service of a Yabuki Kentaro kind (the anime auto-censors itself, sometimes after randomly switching a character to clothed to nude in a transition, so much it doesn’t care for that), there’s no real romance for that matter, there is some character building but as a whole the characters are basically puppets for the wacky ideas Oshii wants to make animated reality, and it’s undeniably how EXTRA the material and execution is, and the fact it clearly doesn’t give a shit if this doesn’t meet any modern taste in anime… makes it pretty clear a good chunk of people will straight up hate it or be weirded out.
Or just don’t know what to even make of it, which is fair, i don’t expect people to immediatly love how he uses the series premise more as a vague canvas to convey a lot of very niche and very weird comedy material that goes from parody-tribute of pop culture icons (regardless if the audience might or might be still aware of it) to a meta-cinematic lamentation about the director’s opinion on his live action output, constantly jumping and trying something new or peculiar, to put it mildly, with a heavy emphasis on the meta-cinematic elements.
Regardless, it “just” a 12 episodes long series helps to have the insanity not feeling long-winded or stretched thin to satisfy networks needs for quantity, and it’s all supported by very solid animation by Drive studio, which worked on Teppen, Demon Prince Of Momochi House, To Your Eternity, and is co-producing the animated Uzumaki TV series with Crunchyroll and Production I.G.
Vlad Love isn’t for everyone, it will never be and was never meant to, so i’m not even sure if to recommend it to anyone aside from the director fans that mostly followed his far more serious work and are not familiar with his early work on Urusei Yatsura, or his comedy pieces as a whole, and people that are ready to see something stylish, peculiar and utterly unhinged, but regardless it still an impressive piece of work that also reassures on the director’s chops with comedic material.
He’s still got it and it’s hard to not at least sympathitize with such a delightfully insane display, especially as Oshii still keeps some of his penchants, like the random Miyazaki diss (some thing never change, do they?), but i gotta admit i was often more amused to see where the hell any scene will actually lead to than genuinely laughing, as at times it’s more admirable than outright funny, and it does test my patience with the constant improptu movie references that morph into micro-reviews/dissertations, i won’t deny it…..but then i’m bamboozled by some absurd gag that catches me off guard and makes me “do a larf” for real, so yeah, i can’t deny the final result it’s something sitting through,and it’s pretty much a given that most fans of the director will enjoy this batshit return to old school comedy anime.
It’s definitely something else worthy of note, even if it almost feels like a lost opportunity because there’s this schism between the intention of a 80s era anime romantic comedy throwback in the vein of Rumiko Takahashi…. and it being not written at all like that, being very modern, meta and willing to throw every idea at the wall, regardless if it sticks. And to some degree, it doesn’t, but on the other hand even at its worst it has some remarkable wit, some funny gags, and it’s hard not to admire the sheer absurdity and willingness to commit to the approach.
Oshii himself definitely liked the overall premise as he also directed the live-action adaptation made in 2022, released under the Chii Tomodachi/Blood Friends title.
Wise Cafe (International) 