Blood: The Last Vampire...

I've rarely met a vampire I didn't like, so, of course I picked up Blood: The Last Vampire...

At the Yokoto Air Force base in Japan, a nervous American military is on the brink of the Vietnam War. But a greater threat exists within the walls of the heavily guarded compound: Vampires. A team of top-secret undercover agents dispatches a mysterious young woman to destroy them... she is the last remaining original. Featuring brilliant character designs, top-notch animation and a stunning musical score, "Blood: The Last Vampire" is a breakthrough in digital filmmaking, taking anime to a whole new level.

According to Wikipedia...

Production I.G's president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa wanted to produce a new project that was an original concept rather than being an adaptation of an existing anime or manga series. He approached Oshii Mamoru, who ran a series of lectures known as the "Oshii Jyuku" for teaching new filmmakers how to create their own projects, about his idea and asked him to have his students submit ideas. The submissions of Kenji Kamiyama and Junichi Fujisaki became the basis for the upcoming film: a girl in a sailor suit wielding a samurai sword. Ishikawa suggested Yokota Air Base for the film's setting, referring to it as the "state of California within Japan". Hiroyuki Kitakubo was selected as the film's director, a position he accepted on the condition he be given artistic license with the material.

After titling the work Blood: The Last Vampire, Kitakubo chose video game designer Katsuya Terada to work on the character designs, and Kazuchika Kise as the animation director. When asked why he chose Terada instead of a regular character designer, Kitakubo stated "I personally felt he had an amazing talent; his characters have a feel to them that is universal and that is probably why he has drawn characters for video games played by people all over the world." He goes on to note that he wanted both Terada and Kise together, and would not have hired Terada had Kise not agreed to work on the project. The resulting film uses completely digital animation. Rather than following the tradition of using animation cels, the entire film was inked, colored, and then animated with computers. It also uses primarily "low light" settings, with much of the film featuring large amounts of grey and brown.

In directing the film, Kitakubo notes that his having read Dracula and watched the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they may have had some influence on the film as the rest of his life experiences have. Production I.G broke new ground in Blood: The Last Vampire by being the first company to film an anime series almost entirely in English, with Japanese subtitles, feeling that it would help the film reach foreign markets more easily.

Blood: The Last Vampire is an interesting mix of traditional and CG animation. It's fast-paced and there's some blood and gore - mostly slicing and dicing of creatures and some munching of humans. It's also, in my humble opinion, a bit short. I've heard rumors that there was supposed to be more, but, nothing has come to my attention thus far. The key scene in Blood occurs early on when we meet our heroine on the train... This release was, like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, produced in English apparently with more than an eye on the international market. I'm so accustomed to reading my anime, that I feel that there's something wrong when the characters are speaking English. I gave Blood: The Last Vampire a 4 out of 5.