Dance in the Vampire Bund, or the failed Vampire District

Well, what can I say. It didn’t quite ful­fill my expect­a­tions. I’m not sure why, but the whole epis­ode was very dif­fi­cult to per­ceive. Such thing as an atmo­sphere didn’t even think of exist­ing; the cam­era pos­i­tion­ing, frankly, sucked; con­sist­ency failed. The authors aimed at cre­at­ing a report­age, but in my opin­ion, they failed quite badly. If I was to choose an example from the cine­ma­to­graphy, Dis­trict 9 was the ideal of what the first epis­ode of the Dance in the Vam­pire Bund wanted to be. I also think the bad cam­era angles and many other little dis­turb­ing things were the con­sequence of the talk show format, and to be hon­est, I can’t stand the aver­age Japan­ese TV talk show. When I think about those things, the first word that comes to my head is ‘disgusting’.

So, why do I think the report­age failed? Let’s com­pare things to Dis­trict 9. (Sorry for com­par­ing it with a movie, but no anime comes to mind with such an ele­ment; TV in anime plays more of a role of a fact-bringer than of a story-teller). In Dis­trict 9, it begins with a fac­tual sum­mary of what the heck happened. A doc­u­ment­a­tion, with pic­tures of the hap­pen­ings shown. In Dance in the Vam­pire Bund, they show a fake play of what happened, with hired act­ors. Almost sim­ilar, except for the fact that in Dis­trict 9 we believe what was shown to us, in DiVB how­ever, we don’t. That’s actu­ally the main mis­take. Because of that, what you see later, whatever hap­pens on the screen, how the people in the show may look hor­ri­fied or sur­prised, your com­mon sense tells you: This may be fake. Spe­cial effects, act­ors, dot. Even though we, as real view­ers, know that it really hap­pens. That spoils the impres­sions quite a bit.

Bad nar­ra­tion aside, the story itself was a dis­ap­point­ment. The plot sum­mary prom­ised con­spir­acy, hid­den vam­pires, the goal to show the world that they do exist and to build their own city dis­trict — but we actu­ally get all of it already in the first epis­ode, minus con­spir­acy. And more import­ant, with no fukken effort put into it. Some­how, it’s more appeal­ing to see a char­ac­ter struggle to win, to see him fall and get up, cough, talk mono­logues about friend­ship and prom­ises, than to see a little girl com­mand an over­grown liz­ard to death. Without even twitch­ing an eye­brow. I mean, c’mon, at least change your facial expres­sion, girl. Do some heroic pose and swing an arm — but no. These dreams prob­ably won’t come true.

I’m very intrigued; this is still expec­ted to be the show of the sea­son after DRRR!!, and I’d like to see whether some­thing will change in the next epis­ode (prefer­ably to the bet­ter) or not. That doesn’t, how­ever make up for the simple fact that I am, in short, disappointed.