Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust
| Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust | |
|---|---|
| File:Hunterd.jpg | |
| Directed by | Yoshiaki Kawajiri |
Release date | 2000-08-25 |
Running time | 102 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | English |
The second film, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (バンパイアハンターD), character designed by Yutaka Minowa, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, is widely regarded as the cinematic superior of the two due to advanced animation techniques, voice-acting originally recorded in English (English voice casting/direction by Jack Fletcher), and a more sophisticated orchestral soundtrack. It's also far more faithful to the art style of the illustrator and original character designer of the first movie, Yoshitaka Amano.
The storyline is more thoroughly developed, with a larger cast and more characterization, echoing the flair of Kikuchi's writing. The second Vampire Hunter D movie (VHD2000; Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust in the USA) is based on the third of Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D novels (Demon Deathchase in English).
Plot
Template:Spoilers One of the last remaining vampires, Meier Link, has taken off with Charlotte Elbourne, a human girl. Her father hires D to find her—and kill her humanely, if turned into a vampire. Her older brother also hires the notorious Marcus brothers as backup.
Borgoff, the very American leader of the group, bites cigars and battles using a special repeating crossbow that he wears on his right glove. The bow is capable of launching hundreds of silver bolts at its targets.
Nolt is a quiet behemoth with a white cross tattooed on his face, who wields a warhammer made from an enormous wooden stake, clad with silver at the point.
Kyle, fights with a special pair of boomerang-like blades that spin on his fingertips, and likes to throw wisecracking insults.
The bed-prone Grove astral projects his spirit, capable of devastating psychic energy attacks, after being given a special injection. However, even in this form, Grove is still vulnerable to attack, and the process weakens him.
Leila, conspicuous as the sole woman of the group, is not a genetic member of the Marcus family, but fights alongside them using a special small ultra-powerful gun. As in the novel, she gets the most character development, attention, and screen time of all the Marcus family. In a touching scene, she tells D that she became a hunter to avenge her parents, who were victims of vampires. In this same scene, she forms a pact with D that, if either one of them survives, the survivor can bring flowers to the other's grave. D agrees because, as he says, a "dunpeal" doesn't get to have a life like she does.
The two parties race inexorably toward a final confrontation with Link, but not before battling the mutant Barbarois—a group of mercenary bodyguards with strange, lethal powers. A bizarre, lecherous unicycle-riding old man speaks on behalf of the Barbarois (and hits on D).
Several events don't seem to add up. As the story unravels it is revealed that Charlotte's abduction may not be all it seems—and that D's reasons for this pursuit are not solely monetary!
Meier is one of the few vampires ever respected by humans as an honorable lord; he is never known to have harmed a human, and never attacks unprovoked. So why has he suddenly run off with a young human?
As the story ends, a bloodbath ensues, and D must battle Carmila, Meier's dubious patron, the ghost of a long-dead vampire countess. Once, when vampires were all-powerful and unchallenged, this countess reigned supreme within the Castle of Chaythe, but her bloodlust was unparalleled, and she was slaughtered in disgust by D's father, Count Dracula, King of the Vampires. Her name is borrowed from that of the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory.
Many years after the events at the castle, D arrives at Leila's funeral, watching from a distance, and is greeted by her granddaughter, who invites him to stay with them for a while. D declines, saying that he simply came to "repay a favor to an old friend, who feared no one would mourn her death." The girl thanks him, and D replies by smiling gently at her, eliciting the typical awe Kikuchi's heroines show for D's beauty. In one of the simultaneously funniest and most touching scenes in all anime, D's infamous talking hand remarks as they ride off, "That was nice. You're not so bad after all. You just—dress bad."
It should be noted that despite popular belief, a Japanese dub to the movie does exist, with Tanaka Hideyuki as D, Yamadera Kouichi as Meierlink, Hayashibara Megumi as Leila and Shinohara Emi as Charlotte (also featuring Seki Toshihiko as Grove). The Japanese version has some differences from the English version, most obviously in style (it's much less wordy, which makes for a darker and more tense mood) and script (it's very different from the English script in places, including the famous last line which goes "I wouldn't have taken you for such a romantic. Ah well, nobody's perfect."), and the world it depicts is more accurate to that of the novels (the currency used is dalas instead of the dollar, the general attitude toward dhampirs is made more obvious, etc.). In fact, sometimes it directly quotes the novels—for example, at Leila's funeral the priest is reciting a poem from the sixth novel. Interestingly, in the Japanese dub the Left Hand gives Carmila's full name as Carmila Báthory.
Differences between the novels and the movie
This time, the movie adaptation provides more characterization and straightforward plot pacing than the book. The novel is both more violent and bleaker than the film; what it lacks in the movie's sympathetic character development, it replaces with greater background detail—both for the world, and the story setup.
The book focuses on the Marcus family, not D, and is far less charitable to them. They are reduced to amoral thugs. All of them show some form of genetic enhancements bordering on mutations, allowing them supernatural physical skills.
Leila, the only daughter in the Marcus Clan, is described as having predatory cat-like eyes. Although she is given superhuman prowess with mechanical objects—particularly vehicles—far exceeding her brothers', she is repeatedly victimized by them. Novel Leila is younger than movie Leila, with long hair rather than a utilitarian butch cut, and physically no match for her brothers, being small and lithe. She is the victim of forced incest, all of her brothers violating her when she attempts to settle down with a suitor, which makes her become colder and crueler as a Vampire Hunter, although Kikuchi fails to explore her reactions to this event. In the movie, the Marcus Brothers are cold-blooded, hard-nosed hunters, but nevertheless fond of their adopted little sister.
The four brothers are also quite different. Borgoff, the largest, is often referred to as a "granite statue with whiskers" and shows a lack of intellect, often described as having expressions bordering on moronic. His bow is primitive (merely a stick with a string attached, the arrows just metal darts). He dies gruesomely, devoured by flesh-eating ants, when a trap set for Mayerling (Meier Link in the film) turns against him. Although not turned into a vampire, Borgoff is possessed by Mashira, and fulfills a similar role of threatening the characters in the climax. Borgoff also possesses strange psychic abilities and genetic enhancements, including a form of projected remote viewing and weightless running.
Nolt is far smaller than his movie self, without a tattoo. (Crosses are not used in the books but remain a part of the iconography of the movies). His staff grows and changes length with the swing. Also he is killed by D, not Bengé, when he tries to finish him off after D is blasted into a river by Borgoff.
Kyle wears black, and his weapon is just a crescent moon boomerang blade on a string, similar to Rei Ginsei's in book one. He shows a fondness for Leila, but rapes her to provoke Grove into a seizure. He is turned into a vampire slave by Caroline and is killed by Borgoff when he gives his change away by light sensitivity.
Grove (also Groveck) is bitter and selfish in the book, but softens when placed into a protective/romantic encounter with the nameless Girl (movie Charlotte). He is featured more prominently in the book, as opposed to his brief appearances in the movie. Instead of dying nobly to save his beloved sister from a zombie Borgoff, he is butchered when Borgoff tapes a small bomb to him to trigger one last psychic attack.
The opening setup is entirely different, with the Marcus clan first arriving at the dead zombie-ridden town to meet the last inhabitant with some human faculties left—the girl's father, who addresses the unseen D instead with his plea to rescue his abducted daughter. Throughout the entire book, her name is never given. She has few lines and fulfills a barely sketched role, whereas in the movie, Charlotte is an active character, who speaks on her own behalf. In the novel, the nameless girl is endangered by sexual assault twice: once by Mashira, and again by a nameless lascivious huntsman. However, the condition of the dead town is more thoroughly explained in the novel.
The three Barbarois bodyguards are significantly different in the novel. Instead of mutants, they are the descendants of a variety of halfbreed demons, indebted to Dracula, who appears in their past as a savior.
Bengé, while still a trickster, is completely black and unnaturally slim, as opposed to having kabuki-like white face and hands in the movie adaption. He still crafts illusions, but never ensnares D with the movie's dramatic time-space warping trap (an element apparently borrowed from the second novel). His death is almost identical, as he attempts to attack both Borgoff and Kyle. Caroline and Mashira both show disgust with his antics and modus operandi.
In the novel, Caroline is a bizarrely powerful dhampir, though her origins are vague. Rather than controlling substances through bonding with them, she can turn anything she bites into an "undead slave" by drinking its lifeblood: here, a mechanical arm's fuel or a tree's sap. Blonde and voluptuous, a siren rather than a feral, green-haired mutant, Caroline continually wears a dress, emphasizing her use of proxies in battle rather than her own efforts. Her powers lead to an exploration of the world's history, when she possesses the remaining piece of a long-dead, gigantic machine race who independently achieved sentience and fought ancient ideological wars observed by the Nobles.
The book's tragedies ensue from the lusts of both the Marcus Clan and the hired bodyguards—as Caroline plots with Mashira to separate the human and vampire couple. She seduces and turns Kyle, then bites Leila while D lies prone under the dirt, the battle ending in a stalemate. Leila succeeds in resisting Caroline's bloodcall, managing to kill her in the last scene.
Mashira is not the noble young bodyguard who acts with gentle consideration toward Charlotte as in the movie, but a lascivious traitor bent on raping her. He is not a mutated werewolf but a parasite like Left Hand, inhabiting the stolen body of a middle-aged man. Much about the nature of Left Hand's race is revealed in dealing with him, implying that D and Left Hand share a very unique bond, as Left Hand's mind and will have not dominated D.
Very little of this novel is written from D's viewpoint, and the movie's theme of overcoming racism and xenophobia, highlighted in the relationship between Leila and D, is never addressed in the novel. The novel Leila is rescued several times by D, and shows evident love for him, rather than the platonic respect for a fellow hunter she demonstrates in the movie. The movie's prime characterization scene, where they both talk while D recuperates, never happens in the novel; D remains unconscious while Leila defends him from Caroline, receiving grave injuries in the process. The town scene where D encounters an old man he once rescued as a child also exists only in the movie.
The name Meier Link is phonetically close to the version originally used in the novel (マイエルリンク —literally Maierurinku, Maierlink); it was split into two words for the movie. However, the novel version of the name is the standard Japanese rendering of the geographical name Mayerling, and for the English translation Kevin Leahy chose to use a transliteration faithful to the origin of the word rather than a close phonetic adaptation. Novel Mayerling's character is similar, but given less focus; his relationship with the lovestruck nameless girl is very hierarchical, although more detail is given on their meeting and the girl's "abduction".
The ending is markedly different from the movie, and comes suddenly. Instead of Chaythe, the ruined spaceport of Claybourne awaits the ill-fated lovers; but when they arrive, the rockets are completely ruined. D and Mayerling face off, with D mysteriously sparing his opponent at the last minute. Mayerling is killed by the posessed Borgoff, and the girl then commits suicide on his claw.
D and Leila leave without much commentary; he pays a man to bury the lovers, and still has a characteristic smile in the end, but it's for Leila, who leaves to find the one man who offered to marry her, years ago.
Trivia
- Carmila of 'Bloodlust' does not appear in the novels, and is based in part upon the fictional Carmilla and in part upon the historical Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Báthory.
- In the English trailer of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the voice-over was done by Micheal McConnohie who voiced the original English voice of Vampire Hunter D, the first film.
- Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust was ranked 7th of overall DVD sales for 2002 according to Nielsen VideoScan.
- The word "Dunpeal" is actually a derivative of the word dhampire (half-human, half-vampire).
- The movie "Blade 2" was going to be called Bloodlust. By coincidence, the original Blade: Trinity script was to take place in a post-apocalyptic future where the world is reverted to the same feudalistic society featured in D.
- Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust was supposed to be nominated for a Best Animated Film Academy award but due to studio politics, it did not happen.