The setting is thousands upon thousands of years from now, in a future where nuclear war leveled humanity, which has since managed to regrow itself up to roughly the point of 18th or 19th Century Europe, in the barely-lingering ruins of the old world. While you're watching it, Vampire Hunter D doesn't feel like the vanguard of anything: it's just a down-and-dirty violent horror movie with some terrific world building and creature design to take advantage of the fact that, in animation, an eldritch monstrosity of incomprehensible origins isn't really all that much harder or much expensive to put across than a run-of-the-mill human. But more narrowly, its director, Ashida Toyoo, went directly on to make Fist of the North Star, and while I can imagine the subsequent history of anime developing more or less the same way without both of those films, I have a much harder time imagining the same thing with neither of them. This doesn't mean that we can breezily state that a whole branch of Japanese animation is directly descended from this film, of course. Vampire Hunter D came into the world as an original video animation in 1985, adapting the first in a successful series of novels written by Kikuchi Hideyuki and illustrated by Amano Yoshitaka, and it proved to be quite a substantial success, helping to legitimise both the growing direct-to-video animation market and the graphic content that market encouraged. It hardly needs saying that this was never as true in practice as in the popular imagination, but that there was and still is a tradition of ultra-violent animation designed for a narrowly-targeted audience of young men can hardly be denied, and we have here one of the key films in kicking that tradition off. And once it got out of its "this is just for kids" phase, it very quickly arrived at its "some of this is very specifically just for adults" phase, and soon we have all the geysers of blood and violent sexuality that were, for a good long stretch in the '90s, the dominant stereotype of anime in the West. It so happens that D is one of the world`s best vampire hunters, and he takes it upon himself to cut through Magnus Lee`s many minions, and put an end to the Count`s rule.As we all know (and like many of the things we all know, it's only partially true), Japanese animation got through its "this is just for kids" phase much earlier than the animation industries of every other country. When a young girl is bitten by the Count and chosen as his current plaything, she seeks out help of a quiet wandering stranger, D. The story focuses on a small hamlet plagued by monster attacks and living under the shadow of rule by Count Magnus Lee, a powerful vampire lord who has ruled the land for thousands of years. Packaging is not representative of this release.ฤก0,000 years in the future, the world has become a very different place monsters roam the land freely, and people, although equiped with high tech weapons and cybernetic horses, live a humble life more suited to centuries past. Screenshots from another edition of Vampire Hunter D Blu-ray
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