Vampire Hunter D is a Japanimation (anime) film set in the super-distant future, where the world is or isn’t sometimes a wasteland and motion is reduced to about 10 frames per second. In this fairly well-realized world we see vampires, werewolves, and mutants terrorize neo-Victorian villages regularly. People who are ‘bitten’ are ostracized from society unless they join the ranks of the vampire noble elite through marriage or servitude… or both.
This is a movie about D, a half-human, half-vampire hybrid warrior with an extra face on his hand. He is given the task of killing a super old, super powerful vampire MegaBoss for a girl in a village who was bitten recently and doesn’t want to be a totally awesome vampire noble. A lot of the movie is spent exploring this world and describing through some pretty nice visuals how things work in this distant apocalyptic future. I liked the Victorian aesthetic. It meshes well with this style of animation. I’m also a fanboy of Yoshitaka Amano, the character designer for D, and have no real complaints regarding that aspect.
They try their best to make D one super badass mofo while also going to great lengths to show that he sometimes has difficulty surmounting his problems. This film takes the lazy route concluding these scenarios by conveniently having him have some kind of flash of brilliance that relieves tension a little too quickly. What ends up playing out is some kind of DBZ knock-off (or inspiration?) where the situation is instantaneously resolved by lobbing off a head, an arm, or any other sliceable body part. I guess what I wanted was D having to think very critically about solving his problems instead of immediately knowing the answers or just brute forcing his way through.
ThomFiles 
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