Today is my favorite kind of day – we have a brand new Guest Reviewer here on Okazu! Many of you will have noticed that Megan has been a strong advocate for the newest “girl-meets-girl” vampire series on the block. Her persistence was impressive and I finally watched the first episode – and I didn’t dislike it. But it seemed like there was someone else who deserved to do this review more than me. ^_^ So, please give Megan a warn Okazu welcome!

Okazu readers – welcome to my guest review series for Vlad Love (ぶらどらぶ)! My name is Megan, and I share my thoughts on Yuri and Japanese LGBT+ media on my twitter (@AnimeSocMegan). Let’s get on with the review because there’s a lot to talk about!

You can watch the first episode on Vlad Love’s official Youtube with English subtitles worldwide.

Oshii Mamoru is back with a slapstick Yuri vampire anime. That’s not a sentence anyone, including Oshii, quite expected a few years ago. But here we are, with Vlad Love’s premiere ending on an unmistakable mission statement: “And that’s how I became an unstoppable phlebotomist for Mai, my slightly peculiar girlfriend’s, sake”. 

Vlad Love’s premise is fairly simple. Mai, a vampire girl from Transylvania, runs away from home and washes up in Japan. In her search for blood she runs into Mitsugu, a girl crazy about donating blood but held back by her rare blood type. Mitsugu brings Mai back home, and the two form an arrangement of sorts – Mai gets Mitsugu’s blood, Mitsugu gets a live-in girlfriend. Mitsugu later sets up a school blood donation club with the help of school nurse Chihiro, which is how we’ll probably meet the supporting cast. 

Most reviews of anime wouldn’t include an overview of the show’s funding and production, but for Vlad Love it is worth mentioning. Instead of the “Production Committee” model used for a vast majority of anime, Vlad Love as a project has only a single investor: Ichigo Animation, a subsidiary of real estate and energy firm Ichigo Inc. This arrangement has given Oshii a great deal of creative freedom. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Vlad Love in its’ current form making it past a more standard anime production process. For better or for worse, Vlad Love is no more and no less than what Oshii and his handpicked team want it to be, and this alone lends it a uniqueness amid recent anime. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. This premiere, for all the zany slapstick trailers promise for the rest of the season, is relatively straightforward. (Vampire) girl meets (blood-donating maniac) girl, girl moves in with girl, girl sets up a blood donation club. It’s nothing remarkable, but the storytelling is efficient.  No scene takes longer than it needs to, no line of dialogue is out of place (other than the Oshii lore we’ll get to shortly, but that’s just part of the package deal). Without feeling weighed down by exposition, this first episode equips us with most of the information we need – about Mai’s backstory, both girls’ family situations, Mitsugu’s rare blood type, and more – before the introduction of the rest of the cast probably starts in the next episode. 

The episode and staff interviews establish Mitsugu and Mai’s relationship as the anime’s focal point. Mitsugu’s attraction to Mai is portrayed at this point as based on her beautiful appearance. As Mai’s voice actor commented, Mai flirts with Mitsugu to get access to her blood, but Mai’s feelings probably don’t go deeper than that yet. The task for the next episodes is to develop their bond beyond blood-sucker and blood-donor. 

Vlad Love probably won’t win awards anytime soon for pushing forward lesbian representation in anime, but there’s still some things worth praising here. Mitsugu seems more confident than many Yuri protagonists in her attraction, especially physical attraction, to women. An awkward nude scene is such an old trope Evangelion parodied it, but Mitsugu is completely into it. Another refreshing moment is Chihiro’s line about Mitsugu’s “first girlfriend”. This line isn’t a punchline, or really met with any reaction at all. 

On that note, one question going forward is the influences on the Yuri. The premise of a strange, magical or alien girl moving in with a run-of-the-mill protagonist is almost as old as anime in its’ modern form, and the series that arguably did more than any other to popularise this trope is Urusei Yatsura (1981)… the first 106 episodes of which were directed by none other than Oshii Mamoru himself. From the premiere, this sort of perennially popular shounen romance represented by Urusei seems to be a more obvious source of inspiration than tropes the Yuri genre has developed in the decades since. Oshii has said he doesn’t watch modern anime, so I’ll be keeping an eye on whether the show overtly draws from other Yuri works, or continues to tread its own path going forward. 

A slapstick show could be said to live and die on its animation, and even if the show’s slapstick side hasn’t completely taken off yet, Vlad Love is delivering pretty well on this front. The art looks a bit rough around the edges by modern standards, though this may be an intentional retro choice, but this is made up by the great work on expressions – I was never left wondering what any character was thinking – and the pleasing sense of physicality. The show hasn’t exactly shown off its sakuga chops just yet, but with reports of a solid lineup of animators to come, it looks like we’ve got more to look forward to. 

Before we wrap up, let’s go over the Oshii references in the premiere. The opening scene gestures heavily towards the likes of Jin-Roh. This scene and the OP feature a blond-haired doll tied to a girl back in Transylvania, possibly Mai’s sister or childhood friend, and the visuals imply a tragedy in Mai’s past greater than she’s currently letting on. One of the more inexplicable lines, about Fallout 4, is also an Oshii reference – he’s a big fan of the game. Another strange tangent, about Social Democratic Lower House speaker “Otaka-san”, was the nickname of Japan’s highest ever ranking female politician, Doi Takako. 

Vlad Love‘s first episode didn’t show its full hand yet. The show’s apparently signature slapstick is only getting off the ground, we haven’t met most of the cast, and our two female leads’ romance has just started. Still, the early signs are pointing in a positive direction. For fans of Yuri as well as oldschool slapstick or Oshii’s other anime, I invite you to join the ride with what is shaping up to be 2021’s most unique Yuri anime. 

Ratings:

Story – 8, unremarkable yet but well told

Art – 7, expressive and fun if a little rough 

Yuri – 5, early days but the intent is there 

Service – 7 by TV anime standards, Chihiro when she strips off doesn’t leave a huge amount to the imagination. 

Overall – 8 

Thank you for reading the review! I would also like to thank all my twitter mutuals and followers who’ve given me their support, and of course Erica, for giving me a spot to share my enthusiasm here on Okazu. This guest review series will continue after the show’s airing begins at a currently unconfirmed date. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to reading your comments! 

Erica here: Thank you, Megan. Your enthusiasm motivated me to watch episode 1. The highly detailed backgrounds, the fanservice and the comedy felt so much like Oshii’s Urusei Yatsura, with that pervasive “what fever dream am I watching?” sense that I associate with UY Beautiful Dreamer. (Which admittedly, I saw at 2AM while working 7 days a week at 3 different jobs, one of them a Renaiassance Faire., so life was actually pretty surreal. ^_^) We look forward to watching this along with you!