I know little of anime, but I am told that schoolgirls are a prevalent theme/imagery. Schoolgirls in cute sailer uniforms and short pleated skirts. One anime buff told me of a series featuring superhero flying schoolgirls who spread their legs and shoot death rays from their vaginas.
Kinda makes the Power Puff Girls look like prudes, but hey, it's a Japanese thing.
Blood — The Last Vampire isn't as salacious as all that, but it falls into anime's superhero schoolgirl subgenre. Its young heroine, Saya, hunts vampires at a US Air Force base in Japan — going undercover as a schoolgirl, sailor uniform and all. Despite being a pre-teen girl vampire hunter, Saya's hard-boiled professionalism is closer to La Femme Nikita or Witchblade's Sara Pezzini than to the chipper Buffy. Saya is Lara Croft without Croft's flippancy or smirky attitude. Saya doesn't enjoy her work, she does what needs to be done.
Although some critics regard Saya as too enigmatic and deadpan to interest audiences, I was intrigued by Saya's silent ruthlessness. Still waters run deep. Of the above femmes, Saya is easily the grimmest, the most fatalistic. Saya doesn't care for small talk — or friends. Unlike Buffy, Saya retorts to a classmate's friendly greeting with a glaring, "Don't talk to me."
Saya is The Girl With No Name in a nihilistic Spaghetti Western (or Noodle Eastern). Imagine a schoolgirl Lara Croft wearing Clint Eastwood's laconic scowl, silent and cool, ever-ready to draw her weapon. That's Saya.
(At the risk of revealing too much, Saya also bears similarities to the child vampire in Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire.)
Like most spaghetti westerns, Blood — The Last Vampire has a simple story. Hunt and destroy vampires. It opens with savagery, and continues bleeding til the end.
An old man is slaughtered on a subway by a sword-wielding hoodlum. We soon learn the hoodlum is a young girl, Saya, the old man a vampire. Saya reports to a pair of government suit types: one white, one black. That's relevant because it's confusing. The subway markings are Japanese, yet these men are clearly not Asian. Are we in Japan or the US? Or maybe in some Blade Runner-type future?
Maybe I missed something. It wasn't until I read some program notes that I learned the film is set in 1966 Japan "during the Vietnam War."
Article comments
1 - Guppusmaximus
Nice Review....Maybe I'm not as hardcore a fan as most but there are quite a few amazing titles that don't deal with "School Girls" like the recent "Karas", "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" and "Steamboy" which was made by the pioneer of this type of film,Katsuhiro Otomo(Akira).
I guess if were talking in sheer numbers as opposed to quality then I could be wrong... But, I will check this movie out because you have intrigued me.