Blood: The Last Vampire

I finally watched “Blood: The Last Vampire” (2000) again. I saw it in 2003 or 2004 as one of the films in the infamous ten-movie marathon. Like most the films from that night that I watched with only partial consciousness, I’ve always been interested in giving it a second look.
 

I don’t watch many anime movies. This is due to a conscious restraint in my malleable youth from becoming an anime junky, closet or otherwise. But at only forty-eight minutes long, it’s hard to say no to this movie.

The story concerns Saya, a teenage vampire hunting demons in human form. I like how consistent Japanese films are in their enthusiasm for showing violence between schoolgirls in uniforms.

I thought the best thing about “Blood: The Last Vampire” was the historical setting, a U.S. air base in Japan in 1966. References to the Vietnam war also gave it an anchored sense of time and place that I don’t associate with anime movies. It was also interesting that characters spoke in English and Japanese, depending on the speaker and who they were talking to. Plus great visual style – per IMDb, this was “the first fully digitally animated film from Japan.”