If you're a vampire, you're well advised to stay far away from Saya. The gut-slicing female protagonist of Blood: The Last Vampire makes Buffy look like a rank amateur.
But if you're a computer-animation junkie, you'll find plenty to intrigue you about the first animated feature release to seamlessly blend Japan's unique "anime" style with computer animation.
Not least is distributor Manga Entertainment's decision to stream the movie on the Web for 24 hours this Tuesday. Manga will simultaneously show the film at theaters in Los Angeles and New York, and sell DVDs online and at Suncoast Video.
"If people thought it was great online, hopefully they'll go and tell their friends who didn't see it," said Manga president Marvin Gleicher. "This is a different way to market a film."
Gleicher is breaking a cardinal Hollywood rule: Sell theater tickets first, then sell videos and DVDs while negotiating TV and pay-per-view rights. He's also providing an object lesson for independent film producers and distributors who find themselves outflanked in the market by the big studio machines.
"We've always been underdogs," said Gleicher. "We've always had to find niche ways to market films to compete with the likes of Disney and Warners."
Blood is the most dramatic example of a strategy that has made Manga and sister company Sputnik7 leading sites for watching streaming anime films. As with Blood, visitors can buy the video or DVD after seeing the streaming version.
But Gleicher has never screened an anime film and allowed fans to stream it at the same time. He's betting that Blood's eclectic mix of 2-D cell animation and 3-D computer imagery -- in a press reel Titanic filmmaker James Cameron calls it the "future of digital animation" –- will drive fans to spend money to see the film in better resolution at theaters or on DVDs. The film will screen this fall at theaters in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.
A successful run is relative. The film has earned perhaps $2 million at the box office in Japan. Hollywood, by contrast, considers a film that earns less than $50 million at the box office a failure.
"A million dollars theatrically, to me that's big money," Gleicher said. "I don't think another company would make money."
That's how much he made in U.S. theatrical distribution on Ghost in the Shell, a science-fiction film by the Japanese director of Blood. That film helped inspire The Matrix and other recent brooding science-fiction films.
Blood has the same brooding quality, a characteristic of Japanese anime.
"Disney animation is all about motion," said Julie Davis, editor of Animerica Magazine, a U.S. publication devoted to anime. "A lot of anime is more about setting the mood. It's a different way of telling a story."
Computer imagery is used throughout Blood to create the dark, detailed backgrounds and 3-D depictions of subways, planes and buildings. The characters, by contrast, are two-dimensional and largely hand-drawn, giving them a ghost-like, insubstantial feel. The artists used computers largely to smooth characters' motion.
This is decidedly not Disney fare. Set on a U.S. army base in Japan in 1966, the mysterious Saya is on a quest to destroy vampires (also called "chiropterans") who have infiltrated an American school near the base. Armed only with a samurai sword, she must slay the demons with a thrust that causes so much blood to gush out that the vampire can't recover. Her bloody handiwork is on display in a speeding subway in the first three minutes of the film.
She's aided in her work by a mysterious Men-In-Black-type American military handler named David, whose implacable demeanor makes him almost as scary as the demons he's supposed to ferret out.
The film's setting on a military base and a closing scene in which U.S. warplanes buzz off to Viet Nam seems to be making a fuzzy comparison between vampire-hunting and America's bloody quest to "liberate" Vietnam.
It's a clumsy plot line that is counter-balanced by one of the more unusual animation efforts to come out of Japan.
