|
|
|
© Production I.G., Aniplex, MBS, HAKUHODO
© Production I.G., Aniplex, MBS, HAKUHODO
© Production I.G., Aniplex, MBS, HAKUHODO
View all Media
|
|
|
October 18, 2008
by: Serdar Yegulalp
Saya's journey takes her to Vietnam -- and also deep into her own heart.
Review Hardware Used: Samsung SyncMaster 226BW 22” flat-panel widescreen display; Nero ShowTime 4 running on Windows Vista; Tannoy Reveal studio monitors; Yamaha AP-470 USB 1.1 outboard amplifier Disc Description: They are called Chiropterans, ravenous creatures that can change their form, disguising themselves as human beings. Immortal creatures that feed off blood, they hide themselves among us. An organization called the Red Shield has been waging a private war to wipe them out. Now the struggle has grown. Saya Otonashi is a normal high school student who suffers from amnesia; she can't remember anything before the past year of her life. Then one day, a man named Hagi appears and gives her a katana, and her destiny is only partially revealed. The journey for the truth begins... Features - English, Japanese audio
- English, French, Korean subtitles
Disc Review Content: (This section may contain spoilers.) The second disc of Blood+ draws Saya and her adoptive family—and her “Chevalier”, Haji—deeper into the dark world of the “Chiropterans”, the vampire-like creatures that only Saya can stop by using her blood as a weapon. It’s a good, balanced mix of action, intrigue, and most importantly strong characterizations, because all the sneaking around and blowing things up in the world isn’t going to matter unless it’s happening to and with people we care about. And one of the things Blood+ did from the git-go was give us a Saya that was far more identifiably, well, human than the kill-eyed creature she was in the original Blood: The Last Vampire movie. There, she was so cold and closed-off that it was difficult to find her situation interesting. Here, she’s clearly torn between everything that ties her to the “regular” world—her new family (especially her firecracker of a brother, Kai), her life in school—and an ugly underworld where monsters are bred by men of power to do terrible things. The original Saya had little or nothing holding her back. This one has everything to lose. This time around, Saya and her “handlers”, the Red Shield—an organization determined to stop the Chiropterans wherever they may be found—unearth information that implicates the U.S. government in having bred Chiropterans as soldiers during the Vietnam War. Learning this information costs them dearly: Saya’s adoptive father, George, perishes while they are trying to bring him to safety after a Chiropteran attack. Shattered, Saya goes to Haji and demands to know everything about her past—but he won’t tell her. “You are not capable of handling the entire truth right now,” he says. Her retort: “It’s not your place to tell me what I can’t handle.” The weight of her responsibilities now include not only keeping herself together and serving as the first line of defense against the Chiropterans, but making sure that her brothers don’t collapse under the weight of all this, either. 
© Production I.G., Aniplex, MBS, HAKUHODO
Haji stays by Saya's side, but also knows that he must encourage her to fight her own battles.
The next leg of the plot is a bit of a departure from the overall feel of the show, but not grossly so. Here, Saya is clandestinely enrolled in a private girls’s school in Hanoi, a place that seems to be a nexus for a great many of the mysteries unearthed so far. Rumor has it a “Phantom” lurks on campus, kidnapping girls with dark hair—and it doesn’t help that the girls think Haji (now incognito as the campus gardener!) is the Phantom himself. She also becomes friends with her roommate, Min—the only other female character of consequence that Saya has gotten to know since she left Okinawa, come to think of it. Sure enough, once Saya gives into her curiosity and begins investigating the bell tower on campus, the long-rumored Phantom shows up—and may be the next link in the chain that leads them to “Diva”, Saya’s evil twin. All this is interleaved with other plotlines, the most significant of which is Riku and Kai adrift in Hanoi on the Red Shield’s credit card. There, they meet Mui, a local girl missing a leg, and find themselves surrounded by potential friends in the home where she lives. Potential, if only because Kai is not keen on the idea of hanging around: “The longer you know them, the harder it is to say good-bye.” Riku’s not as unsentimental: he buys Mui a metal detector as a way to help her family, but that only reminds him all the more of how much he misses Saya. Mui herself serves as another example of the show’s not-so-subtle theme of the long-term costs of war in the Far East: she lost her leg—and her brother—to an UXO. The analogies about unexploded bombs apply to some of the characters, too: Saya herself is one great big walking weapon, waiting to go off and potentially endangering the lives of all those around her. Especially after Saya visits a local Vietnam War museum and experiences flashbacks that suggest she was there before, a long time ago … doing something that she has forgotten for a very good reason. 
© Production I.G., Aniplex, MBS, HAKUHODO
The show never loses sight of Saya's emotional struggles as well as her physical ones.
< previous | page 1 of 2 | next >
|
