Blood +: Part One with Bonus Disc
by Akiko Honda, Daisuke Takashima, Ei Aoki, Hirotoshi Rissen, Jun Matsumoto
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DVD details
Actor: Ben Diskin, Crispin Freeman, Daisuke Ono, Ikuya Sawaki, Olivia HackDirector: Akiko Honda, Daisuke Takashima, Ei Aoki, Hirotoshi Rissen, Jun Matsumoto
Brand: Son
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Korean (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Japanese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 600 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-03-04
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Blood +: Part One with Bonus Disc
DVD Review: So much promise, but ultimately falls
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm a big fan of the original Blood:The Last Vampire, and had high hopes when I heard about this series. In the very beginning, it looked like my hopes would be realized. The first scene shows a blood-stained maniac Saya in Vietnam, and the movie ended with the implication that she would be heading there. Cool. Flash-forward ahead and now she's a school girl with memory loss and hints of something horrendously bad happening in her past. Ok, could be groovy. Let's see where this leads. Enter some supporting characters, a new facet where Saya uses her actual blood to destroy the baddies (instead of bleeding them dry like the movie), and the hint of a split personality, with a more authentic-Saya alter-ego, and things had a lot of promise. And then....
Suffice to say, as the series progresses, it becomes more apparent that this is NOT the same Saya as the movie. That Saya was about as loveable as a cobra, and just as lethal. She didn't really give a hoot if anyone liked her, and was perfectly fine with being a one-woman killing machine. If anything, she seemed a little frustrated by agencies and directives that got in the way of her killing. The series Saya is utterly weak, seems to topple like a house of cards at the least provocation, and is really only capable of accomplishing anything when she has no alternative. If not for her assistant, Haji (who soaks up a titanic amount of damage for her), she wouldn't have made it through the first episode. Add to all of this an endless amount of character exposition on the importance of family and friendship, kind of like Yu-Gi-Oh with vampires. Typical dialog string: "You don't have to worry about anything, because we're a family" "*gasp* a family?" "That's right, a family. And that means we'll do whatever it takes, no matter what!" "*Gasp* No matter what?" "No matter what, and that's forever!" "*gasp* Forever?" Ugh. My interpretation of the real Saya's version of this conversation: "Shut up and get me a good sword".
I think that, in addition to its technical features, the character of Saya was instrumental in the success of the movie, primarily because she was not the typical anime chick. She didn't look like a Barbi doll with implants, she wasn't whiny and helpless, and she wasn't plagued by constant self-doubt. On the flip side, she's not a prodigy, good at everything phenom either. When it was hinted that she was very, very old it was believable, because she gave the impression of someone that had been around a while, and had experience doing what she was doing. She tolerated others the way an adult tolerates children because, to her, that's what they were. The series tosses all of that out the window in favor of the classic Saturday-morning anime, with a protagonist that is equally helpless and clueless. It has the feel of a product that was not marketable to kids, so they had to make a PG version for mass consumption and decided to reinforce some good social stuff while they were at it. Maybe they thougt so too, because the second season actually begins to move back to the original model a little, but gives up after three or four episodes and returns to form. Which really is unfortuneate. There was so much in the movie that could have been expounded upon, and even this same series design with the original characters would have been something else.
For all that, it's not a bad series. The plot holds together well, and they manage to stay away from the paths most vampire themes trend down. The characters are fairly well-defined, but so stereotypical they themselves joke about it sometimes. The reluctant hero, the stoic defender, the passionate rebel, the innocent child. Very by-the-book. Worth a rental, don't know about buying.
As a last thought, the story of the original Saya is continued in other media: She shows up in a couple of Japanese PSP games (not available in the US), and in a manga that reveals her actual origin and ultimate destiny. The manga is VERY disturbing, and I can see why the series chose to avoid that plot line. It's just really unfortuneate. The original Saya, creased brow/grey eyes and all, in this series would have been fantastic, and that's a shadow that just hangs over the whole series and ultimately ruined it for me.
Description of Blood +: Part One with Bonus Disc
Saya Otonashi, a seemingly normal high school student, suffers from amnesia and she can't remember the past year of her life. One day, after a man appears and gives her a katana sword, her destiny begins to be revealed. Soon she finds herself fighting the latest threat to humanity ? Chiropteran monsters, ravenous immortal creatures that can change their form, disguising themselves as human beings. They feed off blood and hide themselves within the human world. An organization known as the Red Shield has been waging a private war to wipe them out and now the struggle has grown. Saya?s journey for the truth has begun.Blood +: Part One episodes include:
First Kiss
Magic Words
The Place Where It All Began
Dangerous Boy
Beyond the Dark Forest
My Father?s Hands
I Must Do It
Phantom of the School
Rainbow for Each
I Want to See You
After the Dance
Lured by the White Mist
Jungle Paradise
The Last Sunday
I Want to Pursue!
Siberian Express
Do You Remember the Promise?
Moon Over Ekaterinburg
Broken Heart
Chevalier
Sour Grapes
The Zoo
The Two Chevaliers
Airy Singing Voice
The Red Shield
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