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Because I’ve been hooked on horror films ever since watching Nosferatu at the much too young age of 7 (how did that happen?), I decided to watch Blood: the Last Vampire the other night and I LOVED IT! And I stumbled on a great ‘transmedia’ storyworld. In brief, the chiroptera demon slayer, Saya has inherited the task of slaying ‘blood suckers’ and is out to revenge the torturous death of her father by the most powerful demon, Onigen.
The project was initiated by Production I.G’s president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa and the story began with the seed image of a girl in a sailor suit wielding a samurai sword submitted by two film students, Kenji Jamiyama, who went on to write the script for the 2000 anime film Blood: the Last Vampire, and Junichi Fujisaku, director of the anime series, Blood +. The anime film was directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo, previously key animator for Katsushiro Otomo’s Akira. Saya’s story continued in a single volume manga sequel titled Blood: the Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts, which was published in North America in 2005. Three Japanese ‘light novel’ adaptations aimed for high school fans followed (not quite sure what that means on the gore scale as it’s pretty high across the board), and then a two-volume PS2 game extended the action.
The anime film is set in 1966 primarily on the American Yokota Air Base with Saya acting for a secret seemingly American organization hunting down demons. The trailer for the first anime film is a gorgeous rendering of what later opens the live action film
The single Manga takes place in 2002 with Saya, now amnesiac, searching for demons in a high school with further details of the mythology emerging as we learn of Saya’s twin, Maya, and the backstory of the attempts to create human/demon hybrids in the 19th century.
Originally described as a 3 part multi-media project, the storyworld was then extended in a 50-episode anime series that ran between Jan. 2005 & Sept. 2006 in Japan. What’s particularly interesting about this series is that the need for logical unity across storylines seems not to be a primary concern, as the stories on different platforms often offer contradictory information as to the origin of Saya and her nature, as she is variously a vampire or a human-vampire hybrid, of unknown age or with a possible fixed childhood.
A PS2 game in two volumes was released in and set in 2000 teams Saya with a teenage boy fighting demons in Tokyo:
The opening of the video game is here:
And numerous fight scenes are online:
And for hard-core fans a 50-episode anime series, directed by Junichi Fujisaku, takes us into an alternate universe where Saya, now amnesiac and appearing as a normal schoolgirl, begins a new sequence of confrontations when she encounters a chiroptera and encouraged by Haji (ok, he kisses her), she fights & kills that demon and then continues on.... The anime series is only loosely connected to the anime feature.
Bill Kong, producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Dragons, (amongst other memorable films) led the development of the live action film film which was released in 2009. And yes, while some of the CGI can be a bit hokey (though only relatively speaking), there is more than one gorgeous fight scene including one in a forest that stands it’s ground against the extraordinary forest fight sequence in Crouching Dragon.
What’s fascinating about this expanding story world is the unimportance of logical narrative coherence. Perhaps this is partially due to the fantasy/horror frame as having leapt into one improbable world, why should future iterations be consistent? As transmedia now seems to be gaining an established definition with the PGA credit, perhaps this alternate model should be kept in mind before we see too many strict definitions being enforced. In the end, if the fans love the world and the protagonist, and the individual iterations have coherence and quality, who’s going to fight this other innovative model?
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