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You Give Love a Vlad Name – A Preview and Primer for Vladlove

by Brian Ruh,

Later this month, we will see the reintroduction of something that has been absent from anime for nearly forty years – a television series featuring Mamoru Oshii in a main creative role. The series Vladlove will debut on Valentine's Day (appropriately enough) and although Oshii didn't direct the series (that task went to Junji Nishimura), he is credited as the executive director, original story, story editor, and screenplay writer, as well as for storyboards on half of the series' twelve episodes. A “special” version of the first episode has already been shown on the series' Youtube channel but it remains to be seen how it differs from the “regular” version.

These days Mamoru Oshii is probably best known for anime movies filled with long takes, philosophizing characters, and talking heads with unnatural-sounding dialogue. Keep in mind, I say this as a fan. This take on Oshii's works was probably cemented during the early '80s with the one-two punch of Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer and then Angel's Egg. Both have come to be accepted as anime classics, but Angel's Egg in particular was a commercial failure and almost drove Oshii away from the anime industry. The most popular film he has directed is probably Ghost in the Shell (as well as its sequel), but he's also known for the first two Patlabor films as well as the more recent film The Sky Crawlers. Of course, “more recent” is a relative term in this context. This is another reason why Vladlove is notable – Oshii hasn't been significantly involved in an animated work in over a decade, although he has continued to write and make films.

Based on what we have seen so far, it seems like Vladlove will be more of a return to Oshii's TV anime roots rather than the anime films for which he is probably better known. Oshii got his start in the anime industry in the late 1970s working on Tatsunoko Productions shows like Ippatsu Kanta-kun (1977-78) and Gatchaman II (1978-79), where he honed his skills at directing, writing, and storyboarding. Glimpses of Oshii's style then surfaced in the work he did on the various incarnations of the Time Bokan TV series, like Yatterman (1977-79), Zendaman (1979-80), Otasukeman (1980-81), and Yatodetaman (1981-82). In the early 1980s Oshii first began making a name for himself as a director, first on The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1980-81) and then on Urusei Yatsura (1981-86), which was the first anime show to really become associated with his idiosyncratic take on the world.

In fact, Vladlove seems like it will be very similar to Urusei Yatsura in many respects. Rumiko Takahashi's original manga featured the lecherous Ataru Moroboshi, who is randomly chosen to save the Earth from alien invasion. He succeeds, but accidentally proposes to the space oni Lum Invader in the process. Through her introduction, we encounter other alien and mythological characters, daily home life and school routines are disrupted, and of course hijinks ensue. Urusei Yatsura had a very flexible formula, which enabled the staff to take the series in a multitude of directions over the course of nearly 200 episodes. Similarly, the key catalyst in Vladlove is when the main character Mitsugu Bamba meets and falls in love with Mai Vlad Transylvania, who is an alien (in the sense of being non-Japanese) as well as a vampire. The basic framework of the relationship between Mitsugu and Mai, and their odd friends, will more than likely be used to go off on tangents that strike Oshii's fancy.

Unlike Urusei Yatsura, though, the characters and scenarios in Vladlove aren't based on an original work by someone else. Rather, they first appeared in Chimamire Mai Love, an app that was released for iOS in 2013 on which Oshii was supervising director and credited with the original story. Although the app was touted as a novel “anime/manga hybrid” it ended up resembling something very similar to a visual novel. Since it cost around US$40 to purchase each chapter of the whole story of Chimamire, which were released irregularly over the course of many months, it ended up being an interesting experiment in format, but it didn't seem to catch on. I don't think I've heard anyone else ever talk about Chimamire Mai Love, so a few months ago I made a Twitter thread where I summarize the app chapter by chapter. (One reason for this is the fact that the app is no longer available, so even if you wanted to check out Chimamire in the wake of Vladlove, there's no longer a way to obtain it.)

In Chimamire Mai Love, the main character is a blood-donation fanatic, who encounters Mai Vlad Transylvania one day at a mobile blood center. Mai has been drawn in by the powerful smell of blood, but she collapses and the narrator ends up taking care of her. When he learns she is a vampire, he becomes determined to help her, working with the nurse at his school and his friends to start a blood donation club. And yet, like Urusei Yatsura, this premise is just a base of operations from which the characters embark on a variety of adventures. A couple of notable ones include a quest for a pearl from an albino alligator beneath the school (in a nod to two episodes of Patlabor that Oshii wrote) and a surreal episode inspired by manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge (with allusions to his “Nejishiki” story, among others). In fact, references both high and low abound in Chimamire Mai Love, from theater and film directors Shuji Terayama and Yukio Ninagawa to video games like Castlevania and Hokkaido Serial Murders: The Okhotsk Disappearance.

From our initial look at Vladlove, we can already see plenty of similarities between it and Chimamire Mai Love. The main character of Mai is perhaps the most noticeable, since her character design has remained relatively consistent between the two works. There are other supporting characters that have the same names, but many have been redesigned, in looks if not personality (it's a little too soon to tell if they'll still play the same roles).

But perhaps the most conspicuous change is that the main character in Vladlove is a young woman rather than a man. The narrator of Chimamire was never pictured and we experienced the events in the story from his point of view. In contrast, Mitsugu Bamba shows up in the first scene after the credits in episode 1 of Vladlove, and she looks to be a far more dynamic character than Chimamire's unseen narrator. This also changes a key aspect of the main relationship in Vladlove – since the romance between the protagonist and Mai is still there, it becomes a story of a romance between two young women. This isn't something the series downplays or dances around either – by the end of the first episode, Mitsugu's voiceover is already saying that Mai will be her girlfriend.

If Vladlove was being authored solely by Mamoru Oshii I might be a bit worried about the yuri aspect of the relationship. After all, Oshii has said that he didn't want to make a “bland and harmless” series and that the concept for the show “started with the feeling of 'Let's show what would happen if you piss off an old man.' Let's make an anime that can also serve as a strong medicine." However, the presence of director Junji Nishimura reassures me a bit on this count. Nishimura has a long history of working with Oshii, going back to their days on Urusei Yatsura as well as on Windy Tales (Fujin Monogatari), on which Nishimura was director and Oshii was supervising director. Perhaps more relevant to Vladlove is the fact that Nishimura also directed the series Simoun, which Erica Friedman called the best yuri of 2006 over at Yuricon.

Another notable aspect of Vladlove is that it's not being created in the same way as many other contemporary anime series, with efforts such as music, advertising, publishing, etc. being coordinated by a production committee and divvied up among its members. Rather, the money for the series is coming from Ichigo, “a Japanese real estate company and clean energy producer”, which has created an animation subsidiary to facilitate the show. It makes a bit more sense when you realize that Ichigo owns the Akiba Cultures Zone building in Akihabara, so they have an interest in bringing otaku into shop. Of course, there's currently a Vladlove pop-up shop in the building where you can get your fill of related merchandise, including the branded jackets that you can see the characters wearing in one of the series' two OPs.

Mamoru Oshii has stated that he is open to making a second season of Vladlove if the first one does well. Could this be just the start of Oshii's return to television animation? Very possibly, and I certainly hope so. It may need to wait for another project, though, since he has previously committed to an anime film adaptation of Baku Yumemakura's Chimera series of books, which was announced in 2018, but has seen no updates in the nearly three years since then. If Vladlove does catch on, though, there seems to be another possibly-related work waiting in the wings that's ready to go. A few years back, Oshii directed a live-action film called Blood Friends (Chi tomodachi) that looks like it may have some conceptual ties to Vladlove. There was a documentary on the film that ran on NHK BS and it received a sneak preview screening at a Japanese film festival back in 2019 but has sat on the shelf since then. Perhaps 2021 will see a vampire renaissance in Japanese media! In any case, Vladlove itself will be notable for showcasing Oshii's return to his TV anime roots after so many years. I hope it is the “strong medicine” that we need.


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