n the year A.D. 12,090, nuclear war has reduced Earth to a wasteland
populated mostly by mutants and monsters. Doris, an over-endowed blonde
living on a country farm, is the daughter of a werewolf hunter; both she
and her little brother Dan are fully capable of dealing with their world's
routine hazards, such as dinosaur-like orchard-robbers and the occasional
glowing ball of flesh-dissolving energy. But when a millennia-old vampire
named Count Lee decides to claim Doris for some temporary amusement, Doris
and Dan decide they're out of their league, and they hire a roving hunter
to deal with the vampire lord.
This mysterious, grim hunter, known only as "D," forestalls the nervous
locals from locking Doris in an asylum, but can't keep Lee's minions
from kidnapping her every time he turns his back. Lee sends various minions
to set traps for D, who hacks apart most of his
opposition without changing expression. Given the supernatural nature of
his opponents, who can warp reality, manifest untouchable killer phantoms,
and crush skulls with telepathy, D would seem to be outclassed. But if this
gory hackfest has a moral, it's that appearances are almost always
deceptive.
Old-guard otaku may find Urban Vision's dub of Vampire Hunter D
surprisingly familiar; rather than re-dubbing the film's dialogue, UV is simply
releasing Streamline Pictures' long-out-of-print 1985 dub in a new package.
Simultaneously, UV has produced an all-new subtitled version, the United States'
first official D sub, featuring a strikingly different script. Both
have their advantages and their disadvantages, but both are perfectly timed
to drum up interest in UV's all-new remake of Vampire Hunter D.
(Company sources say the new film is complete, but a theatrical release date
hasn't been set.)
Walking in a visual wonderland
Streamline's original D dub is painful to listen to; it's packed
with artificial accents and stiff, uncomfortable acting. The characters
grunt and moan in battle like pigs in heat, and unnecessary dialogue has
been added to scenes that are silent in the Japanese version. D fans
have been waiting for Urban Vision's subtitled version for a long time, with good reason. But oddly
enough, the dub's rococo script has some florid charm compared to the sub's
spare, terse language. Consider this description of D from the sub: "He has
dangerous eyes. Eyes that went through so many dangerous battles. He is not
the kind of man who will accept you." The same lines are translated
colorfully in the dub as: "His eyes seek out danger, not love. Those eyes
belong to a man who's torn by conflict and the desperation that comes from
fighting for his life. Can a man like that know how to love?"
But D isn't about dialogue, it's about imagery. The
movie's plot is actually fairly thin: the Count captures Doris, D rescues
her, the Count captures her again. D fights one round of minions and
another appears. Apart from a few signs of spirited independence among
Lee's servants and family, this could practically be a video game.
D's original story comes from a series of novels by anime
scriptwriter Hideyuki Kikuchi (A Wind Named Amnesia, Darkside
Blues), and the film has
the typical flaws of a novel condensed into a short movie: hinted-at
depths, overly internalized characters whose motivations aren't entirely
clear, and unexplained complications. (The sub does no better than the old
dub at explaining, for instance, why D has a smarmy symbiotic creature
growing out of his hand.)
What made D into a classic was the heavy, dark designs of artist
Yoshitaka Amano, now probably best known as the character creator for the
Final Fantasy video game series and the illustrator of Neil Gaiman's
latest Sandman book, The Dream Hunters. The animation can't fully
live up to the amazing detail Amano puts into his work, but his designs
give the entire film a dramatic, uniquely savage quality. Subbed
or dubbed, Vampire Hunter D is a startling visual spectacular, and
it's good to have it back in print.
Still, I'm really looking forward to the new version. Check out the amazing
stills and watch for updates at Urban Vision's Web site.
-- Tasha
n a future where a significant portion of humanity lives
in Earth's orbit, daily space battles are an unquestioned way of life. The
space station NEXT is at war with Earth's government, which is
simultaneously crushing an idealistic revolutionary group called Tera. The
weapon of choice on all fronts is the Metal Vehicle, or MV, the
prototypical anime armored battlesuit. While Tera is raiding Earthside
military bases in outdated, patched-together MVs, NEXT's state-of-the-art
MVs maintain their station's perimeter and deflect Earth's assaults.
But a strange, immense power has manifested in space, spontaneously
destroying NEXT MVs and transport ships from an impossible distance. NEXT
Captain Akane Aoi is ordered to capture the unknown enemy,
code named S.A.C., or simply "S." Hal, the powerful young master of Tera,
psychically senses "S" and decides to commandeer it to win his hopeless
war. While Akane struggles with "Mister Arnold," a willful, inhuman
subordinate with apparent secret knowledge about their quarry's true
nature, Hal drags his weakened forces into space to pursue "S"
personally.
Meanwhile, a ragtag but cheerful gang of pirates live blithely
thoughtless lives in a ruined, abandoned city aboard a severed arm of
the NEXT station. Under the benevolent, almost apathetic leadership of an alcoholic
veteran, the outlaws play cards, bait each other and recklessly blast new
holes in their fragmenting world. When they run low on supplies, they
attack the nearest transport ship and steal whatever they can. But their
whimsical lifestyle is headed for an inevitable end: space is filling up
around them with MVs chasing "S" and fighting each other, and random
encounters with both sides are inescapable. With Hal's sincere
determination on one side and Akane's offers of riches and glory on the
other, the outlaws are obviously going to get dragged into the conflict
whether they want to be or not.
Shadowboxing for fun and no profit
Four volumes into this six-volume series, little about Ehrgeiz is
really concrete. The causes of the Earth/NEXT and Earth/Tera wars are left
entirely to the imagination, other than a few vague comments from Hal about
bringing "true justice" to Earth. Akane's tolerance of Mister Arnold's
insubordination and rudeness seem to indicate he's important, but his
origins and powers are unclear as he flits in and out of the story like a
ghost. While Earth's government is a critical plot motivator, it
has no significant presence other than a few mecha thrown in for
additional conflict. And "S" is still a complete mystery, though one
that presumably will be cleared up if the story is to progress at all. The
entire storyline seems to be composed of people chasing dangerous shadows
for ill-defined reasons.
But those people themselves are Ehrgeiz's saving grace. The pirates are
colorful, larger-than-life characters reminiscent of the offbeat stars of
The Irresponsible Captain Tylor. The conflict between Hal's
self-effacing sense of responsibility and his contemptuous pride is more
significant and engaging than the mecha battles of his faceless followers.
And Akane, a ramrod-stiff soldier rebelling against reality after being
punished for not performing an impossible task, is hard to like but easy to
sympathize with. Tetsuya Yanagisawa's character design, which centers
around wide, thin mouths and oddly angular eyes, is attractively
unconventional, and helps make the stars more interesting than their
vaguely defined universe. At heart, this is a story about personalities,
not politics. And the conflicts that are based entirely on personality
are engaging, funny and often powerful.
But the political drama and the war for control of "S" seem fairly
meaningless. All the key players are loner antiheroes, unrepresentative of--and more interesting than--their obscure causes. It's hard to care which
side wins, so long as the individual characters survive. And it's
uncomfortably easy to brush off the numerous gratuitious deaths on all
sides, since none of the battles has any depth or meaning. Ehrgeiz
can still potentially pull itself together for a worthwhile ending, but so
far it's a cross section of fascinating future-worlders caught up in
events that just aren't worthy of their attention.
Note: this Ehrgeiz doesn't have anything to do with
Ehrgeiz the PlayStation arena fighting game. They just share the odd
title, which means "ambition" in German.
-- Tasha
n the year A.D. 12,090, nuclear war has reduced Earth to a wasteland
populated mostly by mutants and monsters. Doris, an over-endowed blonde
living on a country farm, is the daughter of a werewolf hunter; both she
and her little brother Dan are fully capable of dealing with their world's
routine hazards, such as dinosaur-like orchard-robbers and the occasional
glowing ball of flesh-dissolving energy. But when a millennia-old vampire
named Count Lee decides to claim Doris for some temporary amusement, Doris
and Dan decide they're out of their league, and they hire a roving hunter
to deal with the vampire lord.
