Blood-C

By Andrew Osmond.

Blood-C is a part – undoubtedly the most controversial part – of the Blood franchise, about a girl named Saya who fights monsters with a sword. Blood-C is a reboot, a reimagining, which means you don’t have to have seen any of the other versions. It consists of a 12-part TV series, broadcast in 2011, and a sequel cinema film, Blood-C: The Last Dark, released the following year. They’re both included in Anime Limited’s new Collector’s Blu-ray edition.

Although the series and its sequel film are closely connected, they’re also quite different visually and tonally. I’ll cover both iterations below, with a spoiler warning when I move on to the film.

Blood-C brings together heavyweights in anime and manga. There’s the female manga group CLAMP, creators of everything from Cardcaptor Sakura to xxxHOLIC; and then there’s the Production I.G studio, home to Ghost in the Shell. The result is a controversial mix of extreme cuteness and extreme splat. The BBFC rates the show ‘15’ but notes it “contains strong bloody fantasy violence and gore.” Perhaps the best way to enjoy it is to approach Blood-C purely on its own terms.

In the Blood-C TV series, the heroine Saya lives in an idyllic country backwater. She’s very cute, which is itself a shock to viewers who know the grim, hardcore warrior of other Blood anime. She wears glasses and falls over so often she could have “MOE” tattooed on her face. She sports oversized pigtails like great black wings, and sings on her way to school, where she excels at sports, is teased by her classmates and blushes at boys. Her home is a shrine, where she’s devoted to her priest dad (“My father is honest, kind and tough!”). Oh, and at night she fights monsters.

Very funky monsters they are too, often verging on brilliant, and showing the creative spirit of the sorely missed Ray Harryhausen. In the first three parts alone, we get a statue turning into a giant stone mantis, an ambulatory flower monster with a vagina dentata maw, and a train carriage which eats people. Saya battles them all with fearless aplomb, unfazed by her injuries, before reverting to a cutesy schoolgirl the next morning. But slowly the odds rise, as first townsfolk, then Saya’s own friends, start falling victim to the carnage. And then things get much, much worse…

Blood-C is a series which provokes strong reactions; some anime fans loudly hate it. It’s been accused of trolling and suckering viewers, of ramming vacuous extremes of cute and splatter together. It’s certainly an exercise in playing with form, but then so were Madoka Magica, Higurashi When They Cry and more recent series such as Re: Zero and Deca-Dence. While the action of the Blood-C TV series always stays in Saya’s small town, the series itself ends up in a radically different place.

But to say the show doesn’t play fair is, well, unfair. The hyper-charged opening titles, deftly parodying magic girl shows with blood flaking like blossoms off Saya’s body, make clear the series won’t stay in its happy starting place. The early episodes demand patience, but the repetitive, inconsequential action, peppered with clues and punctuated by superlative fantasy battles, has a Groundhog Day magnetism that’s highly enjoyable if you’re willing to play the game.

Just what is going on with Saya’s happy town? Some fans see the series as a long build to a sick punchline, and certainly some of the gleefully gory excesses invite that reading. But it can also be seen as a purposefully contrived, extreme study of the nature of horror; the way blue skies and songbirds tip inevitably towards screams, hysteria (in all senses of the word) and blood, blood, blood.

Blood-C was conceived when Production I.G. had just adapted xxxHOLIC, the popular manga by the CLAMP group, with which the studio had an excellent relationship. Production I.G’s president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa told me the CLAMP Blood was made for female viewers. “Production I.G’s fanbase is overwhelmingly male… CLAMP has a mainly female fanbase, so obviously by combining their work with what I.G does, perhaps we would make something that would appeal more to female fans.”

Blood-C’s original design concepts were provided by CLAMP artist Mokona, while the story concept was by fellow CLAMP member Nanase Ohkawa. She wrote the series with Junichi Fujisaku (sometimes written Fujisaki) of Production I.G, a driving force behind the Blood franchise since the start. Blood-C was directed by Tsutomu Mizushima, who’d also helmed the film and TV versions of xxxHOLIC.Without giving too much away, there may be other links between the titles; consider the characters Saya meets in the story.

The TV show is full of harmonically-composed colour schemes and elongated girls-comic character designs. The backgrounds aren’t hyper-detailed, yet the compositions convey a strong place and mood, going back to an old Disney dictum that the backgrounds a viewer doesn’t particularly notice are good backgrounds. The weight is on character animation, particularly in the battles. For all Saya’s superhuman prowess, the fights convey her desperate humanity; her last sword duel is stunningly brutal.

The series has a clear, terrible emotional arc that’s finished in the last episode. It’s not the end of the story, though…

BLOOD-C: THE LAST DARK (spoilers for the TV series follow)

The sequel film was an important stepping stone for its director Naoyoshi Shiotani, who’s now associated with every version of the formidable Psycho-Pass franchise. At the time of Last Dark, though, Shiotani was known for much softer fare. He’d directed the seen-from-both-sides romcom Tokyo Marble Chocolate, and designed the adorable sheep doll Cotton in the film Oblivion Island. You can find an interview with Shiotani on this blog about his broader career. However, when The Last Dark opened in 2012, I visited Production I.G to interview him about the film specifically.

The Last Dark is set six months after the gory end of the TV series. Visually, the film is in a radically different world. The look is spectacularly hyperreal, utterly three-dimensional without being in 3D, and full of gleaming lights and fleet-footed virtual cameras. The action feels squarely in the tradition of I.G’s urban SF-conspiracy thrillers, going back to Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor in the 1990s. Saya herself was redesigned, in line with the glowering sailor-suited warrior of the 2000 film Blood: The Last Vampire.

“The series is set in summer in a small town in the countryside; the film is set at winter in Tokyo,” says Shiotani. “I asked the animation character designer, Kazuchika Kise, to make Saya darker, more adult and gloomy. The series explained why she’s like that, giving her background. In the film she’s strong, aloof and she doesn’t really relate to other people.”

Nonetheless the film sees Saya joining a group of young Tokyo hackers to fight an enemy from theTV series. In particular, Saya teams up with a young woman called Mana. “Mana is like the audience’s point of view,” says Shiotani. “It’s very difficult for normal people to communicate with Saya. She’s always gloomy, she may be dangerous, you don’t know if she’s friend or foe.

“We expect the audience is feeling uneasy, but at the same time attracted by this mysterious girl, like Mana is. We also wanted a character in which Saya could recognise her own situation, after what happens to her in the TV series.” Saya in The Last Dark is a cold, ruthless warrior, but the naïve Mana recalls Saya as she was in the Blood-C TV series. Indeed, you could see Mana and Saya as two sides of the same person.

Shiotani wanted the setting of his film to feel immediate. “It’s not a town in Japan somewhere [as in the TV Blood-C]; it is Tokyo now. Consequently, the audience feels the story is happening now in their town, and they relate with the characters and story in the most realistic way possible. For this reason, the places in the film actually exist. We did not just digitise photos, but redrew everything.”

Much of the film takes place in a mansion, based on the real former Iwasaki estate in the Ueno district, which once belonged to the founders of Mitsubishi. A high school hall where a huge battle happens is based on the Okuma Auditorium at Waseda University. “I checked all the blueprints for that,” says Shiotani, “even the seat placings, which took a very long time.”

The film also tips its hat to the 2000 anime film Blood: The Last Vampire. Last Dark starts with a fight on the subway train; back in 2000, Saya’s gory “hit” on a similar train became a calling-card advert for I.G’s technology. “The first Blood was the studio’s first fully digital anime,” says Shiotani. “This time I wanted to make use of 2D traditional animation, but also the best that could be achieved with CG, and with blending the techniques. You see a massive use of CG in this movie.”

You also see a massive amount of detail – everything from reflections in the metal pipes of the Tokyo subway to actual words in the newspapers on the street. Animators and fans argue endlessly about if traditional and computer animation can mix, a challenge Production I.G has risen to spectacularly in past films. “Matching traditional animation with CGI is always a gamble because they’re completely different things,” says Shiotani.

“Usually when you work in 2D and add computer elements, you decrease the amount of information from the CG part, in order to match the 2D animation. But I didn’t want to do that. So, using the lighting and the other effects that could be added in compositing, I tried to upgrade the 2D characters to match the CGI, without actually adding details to the characters themselves.”

It’s easy to imagine fans poring over particular shots in the film generated by the overlapping processes. They’re so complex that The Last Dark could be taken as a meta-statement of the ever-glossier techniques cultivated by I.G. Shiotani was still fine-tuning details on the morning before the Japanese press screening, though he denies the film is about the technique.

“The movie as a whole was very complicated, so I can’t say a specific scene was harder to make than the others,” says Shiotani. “In my memory, the whole movie is hard! Of course, we tried to create a good-looking, cool animation, so we did our best from a technical point of view. But that was only to entertain the audience, not to show we are good at doing this. We want people to be enthralled by our story, and to relate to Saya and the other characters. Saya doesn’t talk very much, and I wanted to show what she sees and feels through the pictures. That’s why you have a high level of information in the images.”

In particular, light was central in conveying Saya’s feelings. “I made a specific order to the staff – I wanted Vermeer-like light, throughout the movie. I wanted warm light, but also light that expressed depth and distance, not a flat picture.”

Some scenes in the film use very dim light. “Dim light is difficult to do… If you’re working with computer animation, you can control the light better because once you set the parameters, the objects in the scene are illuminated at the same time, at the same level.  But for traditional 2D animation, even if you’re dealing with similar scenes set in the same building, you have to do the colouring a different way each time. The ‘camera’ might be closer to the character; there are little changes that mean you must adjust the colour for every single scene, otherwise you don’t get the right feeling.”

There was another problem with dim light. “In every theatre you have different light, so you can never be sure what it’s going to look like. So you have to think; will this be okay, will you lose details in that kind of darkness? It was hard to calculate all that.”

Andrew Osmond is the author of 100 Animated Feature Films. Blood-C is released in the UK by Anime Limited.