Vlad Love

Hello everyone! And welcome to “Garbage of the Season [1]!” The series where I discuss the current season's trashy pile of unwatchable monstrosities so that mom can’t say I’m doing nothing with my life. But before I start, I’d suggest you smash that helpful button and click on notifications so that you won’t miss out on any of my upcoming reviews. So without further ado, roll the intro… *Journey - Don’t Stop Believin starts playing* … *End of intro* Today’s garbage is the ever popular Vlad Love by the vastly known Mamoru Oshii. Who’s done with making pretentious movies and choses to go back to the old days ofdirecting comedy shows. Sadly, the style of comedy in Vlad Love expired during the same era. It’s terribly out of date and even if it was modernized, still lacks a punch because it’s not executed with any finesse. Like haha, they talk about expositional dialogue. That’s breaking the fourth wall, fun! Or haha the doctor calls our protagonist Bamba for Bambam again for the fifth time...*laugh track*. *Ad time* This review is sponsored by Fallout 4. Because that is a fun reference. Hope you like reference humour, the show is full of them, and they are outdated just like pretty much anything else. Do you want to know what’s not outdated? The visuals...at times. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they’re sloppy with very little in between. It’s colorful and has style to it. But much substance to it there’s not. The two OP’s look phenomenal but the actual show pales in comparison visual-wise. Pales like a vampire. References are hilarious. There aren’t many positives to note. Voice acting is solid, but the characters they’re playing are as rich as blank paper. Walking charactertures most of them, that are as flat as the jokes they deliver. To summarize, I would describe the show the same way as moldy bread. Not fun to consume anymore. But that’s what I do. I consume trash, and this has been “Garbage of the Season” with me...GotS! Leave your thoughts about Vlad Love in the comments below and I’ll see you in the next review. Roll the outro… *A video showing John Travolta doing squats starts playing* The End...

Vlad Love, a show full of simps, made for simps and brought into life by a genius team full of simps. This is, Mamoru Oshii shitposting on modern anime culture. With constant spreading of otaku culture, we are now at a stage where consuming anime is not leered by surrounding, something which we can not imagine in late 90's or early 2000's. With the increment in audience demand, anime has delved into more and more varieties. There’s a demand of everything seeing animated by a Japanese studio. We are ready to evaluate ANYTHING drawn by them. Despite however, how has this affected the creative talents?With keeping in mind the type of audience you are making anime for, what should be the proper attitude? How many shows truly feels like an inspired product, where you can find love and caress poured into every episodes? I'm talking about the rewarding factor. A show made with your 100% and a show made with 50% of your intellect somehow ended up having same level of evaluation. Because you know, "this is just an anime", "anime is trash so am I", This is how present day otaku looks like. A medium full of simp consumers who are ready to take anything that is, hand-drawn and animated by a Japanese studio. "Vlad Love" is a show full of simp characters, just like viewers. They simp for a vampire beauty called Mai Vlad Transylvania (400 years old, worry not) who does nothing but sucks your blood. Sounds familiar right? She truly gives you nothing but the sense of watching her physical beauty unfolded before you. In return she'll suck your blood, and she does need a lot of blood. Not even just that, the types of blood she imbibes makes differences in her personality ; if she drinks a violent person's blood she gets violent, she'll get stinky if she drinks a stinky degenerate's blood (looking at you, weebs). She is loved by everybody but you are not. She stays pure because you won't like another person tickling her. She takes everything from you (takes 500k yen to dance with her) but gives nothing (you are not allowed to touch her!) She won't be yours because she is for everybody. You can’t stay still without seeing her because you are a simp. In simple word, Mai Vlad Transylvania (coolass long anime name) checks every waifu standard. She'll give you the best smile you can imagine, will depend on you since she can't live without drinking your blood, will listen your blabbering but somehow she won't be yours, since she's for everybody. Oshii created a perfect metaphor of waifu culture, using Mai as the centrepiece, presenting how it lets you become more and more obsessive with something which has no returns. The main heroine Bamba presents her blood as favour, gets sucked up everyday and feels grossed when Mai drinks an ugly person's blood. Bamba has only one thing to do, pleasing Mai. Same as weebs who want nothing but her waifu's smile. Characters in Vlad Love are more or less cantered around this theme. Most interesting of them is the Cinema Club president, Watabe Maki, who makes movie/documentary/PV featuring Mai. And she does a horrible job at making, being the knowledgeable on movies but naive on making movies. She knows "Failure is the pillar of success" so she isn’t afraid if her movie gets booed by audience. She's so confident on making the perfect movie that she ends up making nothing but garbage. Sounds familiar? Currently the least-rated anime on MAL is airing, we all are familiar with the type of confident directors like Maki. Another character which takes my interest, is the disciplinary committee girl named Jinko. She's so obedient to rules, craves for perfection and doesn’t like it when it goes into unholy hands. She ends up taking the director position for a stage drama in school festival since everyone else was slacking off. With a cast full of inexperienced actors her project didn’t have a chance of succeeding. As it turns out, the serious stage play becomes a chaotic comedy show. Her perfect image was in stake, but plot twist, she received huge applaud because guess who was in the stage? Yeah, Mai, her charm swells over every negatives of an otherwise shit product. This leaves an impact on Jinko as her view of being obedient to rules gets challenged and she accepted the new meaning of success, leads to the hot sensei commenting "Finally she's on our team now!" (Team full of characters who don't take their job seriously) With Mai as the waifu, Bamba as the simp viewer, Maki who's all for naught making a good movie and Jinko who understands efforts do not get acknowledged here, we got the image of how present day anime works. Your project will be praised if it has a waifu like Mai You shouldn’t care about quality because there are simps like Bamba who are all ready to buy your shit if it has Mai You don't need to bother on making good product because you believe that your failure of this time will lead you to your future success And you don't even need to put 100% of your efforts because they won't be rewarded with proper recognition. This is the sad reality of anime, a veteran like Oshii understands it better. I call him a simp earlier, mainly because only a simp for animation can afford to make a bizarre shitposting on the medium. Unlike Bamba though, he's self-conscious of his love for this medium. Seems like producers at IG port gave him a budget to do whatever his mind wants to play with and that's how he created the gorgeous looking shitposting namely this, breaking his long hiatus from anime industry. Talking about it's production side, this looks gorgeous. Character design is stunning (Mai and Maki have the most complimentary design to their character) , there are tons of comedic faces drawn which is a sign of creator's goodwill, background art and colour design managed to create the perfect atmosphere, from horror to comedy to casual life. Impressive and strong drawings, with countless reference to many old movies, in dialogues as well. There are two Opening, both of them are eye-catching and I liked "Winds of Transylvania". One of the most impressive aspect of Vlad Love is the voice acting. Veteran seiyuu like Romi Park and a bunch of other popular seiyuu including Hayami Saori, Ayane Sakura, Hikasa Yoko and Miyake Kenta putting an unbelievably strong performance. Specially Sakura Ayane recently has been torturing her vocal cord with Gabi's screaming in ep65 of Attack on Titan and here Bamba takes a lot of vocal power. Everyone did a good job at showing their skills, this really is a blessing for any seiyuu fans in general. However, this isn’t a show which can be enjoyed regardless of your mood. Not every episodes are as endearing as the others. There’s a lot of dialogues which hardly makes sense to any casual viewers like me. Not much to say about music, this is certainly not the most Impressive work of Kenji Kawai. Vlad Love is meant for everybody, but certainly not to be enjoyed by all. Maybe after years of burning out with anime, you'll return to this show and laughed at how much it tried to tell. This is truly "Mamoru Oshii shitposting" which is better than most unfortunately uninspired anime and I'm all in for it. If not anything, you should watch this because it has beautiful sexy girls. Who doesn’t like them?

What to say about this. It felt like a genuine waste of time. It felt like there wasn't any passion put into this anime. Like, for example, the last episode didn't have any connection at all to the rest of the episodes, making it separate and making the other episodes seem pointless. Characters - it's just a bunch of one-dimensional characters making the same joke over and over again. They tried to create depth in the last episode but it's too late tbh. Animation - Coming from Production IG, I expected too much from it. It is passionlessly made by the studio. It tried to create a uniquestyle of animation, but nah, it just looks lazy. Enjoyment - I got bored halfway through. It had potential but it didn't take itself seriously. It's a shame cause I had great hope for this. Music is decent. It's the only saving grace of this anime. The opening is good, but everything else is decent. Overall, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. (3.4/10)

Vlad Love is an anime that immerses the viewer in an inventive and fascinating way in its stylization Synopsis: Mitsugu Banba is a high school student who loves to donate her blood, to the point of feeling obliged to visit a blood bank, despite being treated severely by the nurse. One day, she meets a beautiful girl who appears to be from abroad. The pale girl looks like she's going to pass out any minute, but then, she starts destroying the blood bank. The girl loses consciousness and Mitsugu takes her home ... It is incredible how Vlad Love manages to blend some more generic and commonchoices very well with a more evident stylization. The anime plays with pop culture themes in general in a very fun and relaxed way. One of the points that I liked the most is how he manages to arouse a curiosity with such themes (many of my knowledge has already studied cinema) that are staged in an even more creative way while merging with the main plot, which is simple and shallow on purpose. So, we can say that on the surface we have a relatively simpler story, but that allows the viewer to really embark on the themes that want to be proposed to us. Even the characters have this characteristic, both visually and in their more generic and evident personality, because it is not important (at least not for me) that they have a more thorough examination. What is shown to us in terms of problematics or depth is more used as a pretext to refer to some pop culture theme, while developing a sensitivity with the viewer. In all episodes, even for a brief moment, it is possible to feel a very noticeable sense of immersion. Because it has a more contemplative approach at various times, with more worked scenarios and all kinds of resources used to embellish the scenes, we by nature pay more attention to these details, put the anime is really more beautiful than the ordinary. But I just want to point out that I'm not praising the anime for free for being differently beautiful, but for making an inventive use of it. The way the characters express themselves adds that more relaxed tone that I said at the beginning of the review. The characters speak in a verbose and direct way, the theme is always obvious in the scene, but always with a very comical content. The anime solves a single plan with several frameworks. It merges more open frames with more closed frames through windows, which contain several detailed plans, medium close-ups, close-ups and so on. This technique of using multiple frames in the same scene is not something new, M. Yuasa has already done the same in “Ping Pong The Animation 2014” and other possible directors as well, but M. Oshii does it with a different objective. The viewer is guided without cuts to be able to contemplate the maximum of the scenes almost without cuts. So, we can see a micro expression or a more evident action in one plane, without cuts. The plans are so little moved that when it happens you can even feel it. As in the scene where the Mitsugu Bamba character runs through the back of the theater. We can see the character moving around the scenes, it is almost a feeling of freedom from those more stuck and closed plans. When the characters change scenarios, the anime merges aerial planes that take place in reality, and even has scenes that also take place in reality, this also gives a feeling of movement and freedom. Because it is something new, at least it is new for me, it is possible to have this feeling of fascination with this more contemplative stylization. With each episode, this stylization becomes more evident. Especially because, as I mentioned at the beginning of the text, the plot is simpler on purpose. She does not have that sense of progression that works in an increasing way, so something needs to go forward in some sense, so that the viewer does not stay in limbo seeing the same thing in every episode. Not only do the anime themes change during the episodes, but this more sensory narrative style also progresses and alternates a lot. In short, Vlad Love perfectly builds an experience of senses, knowledge and innovation throughout his Artistic System. There are so many elements that seem to work only separately, but together they have a very positive effect.

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