n 1988, a four-episode original video animation series introduced anime fans to Vampire Princess Miyu, a beautiful, immortal girl with fantastic powers, a mysterious, silent, masked companion and an otherworldly mandate to track down and deal with stray Shinma—demon creatures that prey on weak-minded humans. That original series instantly became a fan favorite for its melancholy, haunting,
authentically spooky tone, which evoked Eastern ghost stories and Eastern religions equally in creating a world where there were no apparent heroes or villains, just selfish supernatural powers at war with each other on the fringes of humanity's perceptions.
Ten years later, Miyu finally got her own TV show, but the series' tone had changed dramatically. The spiritualist who served as the frightened but determined protagonist and point-of-view character of the original OVAs was gone, and Miyu herself was the hero. Much of her appealing creepiness and implacable inhumanity slipped away as she started attending junior high and masquerading as human in order to get close to some of the Shinma she was hunting. Her silent companion Larva ("Lava" in the dub) took off his mask and spoke, revealing himself as a blue-haired man in the bland/pretty mode common to shoujo ("girls'") comics, and Miyu herself dropped into monster-a-week mode as she hunted
down and banished a new Shinma in each episode.
These first two installments of 1998's 26-episode Vampire Princess Miyu TV series contain seven episodes, in which Miyu dispatches seven Shinma. (The DVDs helpfully include inserts in which designer Kenji Teraoka discusses the visual development process, and in some cases the changing scripting process, for each monster.) The stories range from eerie to fairly straightforward as Miyu investigates a sinister mask with apparent mind-control powers, a series of beautiful women who disappeared from a train, a mountain forest that might be haunted and, eventually, reports of a girl that looks just like her, publicly feeding on the blood of mortals.
Serviceable but not spectacular
The TV version of Vampire Princess Miyu is nowhere near as baroque or atmospheric as the original OVAs, though it's also not as sketchy and kinetic as the Miyu manga. It's its own separate thing, somewhere between the original Miyu animation and the "magical girl" genre of anime. Miyu isn't exactly Sailor Moon, but as a charter member of a somewhat giggly clique of bouncy schoolgirls (one of whom buys Miyu a friendship charm and invokes their friendship so often that she starts to sound like a treacly broken record), she's also not exactly the force of nature she was in her unsettling first series.
Still, she's got more dark touches than most girl heroes. Most notably, she makes it quite clear that she doesn't hunt Shinma because she loves humanity or enjoys the chase. She's not entirely sure why she pursues them, but is clearly compelled to continue. That geas doesn't compel her to feel pity or mercy, and her coldness toward the people who are sometimes saved by her actions—or, more often, whom she comes too late to save and feels no guilt for—gives her a unique flavor that
starts to approximate her old disquieting amorality.
It's unfortunate, though unsurprising, that the animation quality of Miyu TV is so much lower than that of the OVAs. The glossy character design is very similar, and Teraoka's Shinma are reasonably
fearsome, but the TV show's colors are brighter and blander, and the attention to detail is haphazard, in the usual TV style. The scripting, similarly, is a bit sloppier and highly episodic to the point of predictability, although virtually all of the stories have at least one twist to throw viewers off and give the series a dark fairy-tale flavor. Really, Vampire Princess Miyu TV isn't a bad series, it's just noticeably weaker than its predecessor, as most sequels are. Viewers who haven't been spoiled by experiencing and loving the original series will probably find this one serviceable, distinctive and pleasantly moody. They're just unlikely to understand older fans' devotion to the Miyu mythos.
The story touch that most evokes the cult-classic quality of the originals is Reiha, another supernatural creature that follows Miyu around, "helping" her, sometimes in aggressive or inappropriate ways. Her selfish motivations, her open semi-enmity with Miyu, her weird companion, and her utter lack of humanity all make her more interesting than Miyu, and more familiar for OVA fans as well.
— Tasha
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