#281: Vampire Princess Miyu (1988-89)

 

Studio: AIC

Director: Toshiki Hirano

Screenplay: Shō Aikawa

Based on the manga by Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi

Voice Cast: Naoko Watanabe/Anne Marie Zola (Manga UK dub)/Pamela Weidner as Miyu; Mami Koyama/Stephanie Griffin as Himiko Se; Kaneto Shiozawa/Zach Hanner as Larva

Viewed in English Dub

 

If one wants a really moody late eighties anime, the original Vampire Princess Miyu stands out as one which neither gets into the gruesome ballpark of some of the more notorious from the straight-to-video era, instead a significantly more melancholic horror story. It is also a personal project for its director Toshiki Hirano, who was also the original manga author with the illustrations done by his wife Narumi Kakinouchi, prolific in both the animation industry, in manga and book illustrations. Credit to Hirano and the teams on both animated adaptations, they made sure to transfer her career designs and style to the moving image, Miyu beginning as a manga in 1988 and concluding in 2002, with additional spin-off titles. This franchise, beginning with four straight-to-video episodes, also marks as much a distinct part of Toshiki Hirano's career, an animation director who was as much one of the names part of that streak of more ghoulish and lurid anime from the eighties into the nineties, especially for the straight-to-video market, as much as for adapting giant robot stories. One adaptation which he had a firm hand in adapting all the entries for Iczer franchise, based on an hentai manga, but as an adapted in the first and most well known entry, Fight! Iczer One (1985-1987), is definitely one to cover at some point as a mecha story with explicit body horror, as a race known as the Cthulhu (in that spelling explicitly nodding to H.P. Lovecraft) are secretly invading Earth by sending down parasites which mutate human beings in horrifying body horror mutations, only for a female alien, teaming with a schoolgirl distraught from her family and friends being victims to synchronize with a giant mecha's ultimate power, to fight back with an explicit all-female yuri romance nodded to.  That is definitely as idiosyncratic as you can get for a title, though the sequels would move in their own directions, as Vampire Princess Miyu is in both forms, and as notorious his adaptation of Apocalypse Zero (1996) also was, which was not able beyond two episodes to really adapt a body horror post-apocalypse super hero with explicitly grotesque and Freudian monster designs. He has also had a remarkable comeback into consciousness with the 2021-2023 adaptation of Baki the Grappler, Keisuke Itagaki's martial arts series which was picked up for the streaming platform on Netflix and Toshiki Hirano has been a large part of the adaptation for.

The Miyu adaptations have their shared familial traits - Miyu herself is a dhampir, half-vampire and half-human, given temporary immortality and the ability to give this gift as a vampire to humans, in servitude to banishing the "Shinma", figures between the Japanese yōkai and general monsters who are terrorising the morals and not in the otherworld where they should be. After that however, there were notable revisions for the 1997-8 television series, felt with the first episode about a possible vampire stalking Kyoto, draining all the blood from female victims and terrorising the area. With the name of Shō Aikawa as the screenwriter as important to bring up, both notorious for many lurid anime straight-to-video titles from this era but also acclaimed for his later works in the decades after, you feel the pessimistic take on human beings throughout these four episodes even if there is a clear flaw to this adaptation, that at only four episodes it feels too short to stretch itself.

There is an exclusive character to this adaptation, a female spiritualist named Himiko who is introduced to a possible real possession of a girl asleep for days. Also noticeable is that, even if the English dub may complicate this, Miyu herself in this version is a very different character to the TV series, even if we learn of her tragic back-story in the last two episodes. She is more glib, happy (even gleeful) to feed off people, and has none of the melancholia of the version of her in the later series, instead a teen girl in attitude, the kind of macabre vampire who would frolic along the streets even if aware of the importance of her job, more so as she has all the advantages of being able to walk in sunlight and holy water being ineffective. The set up of the episode establishes the animosity of Himiko to her, in Himiko's own moral code seeing Miyu's glib attitude to the incidents. It also sets up this as a visually stylish work whilst also a pessimistic one about the Shinma fed by human incidents, Miyu's nonplussed way of disposing of them even if still with human causalities angering Himiko. Another prominent name, and a big get to have even if this was very early in his career, is Kenji Kawai, who would become a huge name in composing especially with his collaborations with director Mamoru Oshii, someone who would return for the 1997 Miyu series when he was a big name with a sense of respect for those involved for this production, one clearly made with love.

Episode two opens with a room of mannequins - some eyeless, some laid about like about like corpses - the result of a female Shinma who looks and dresses like a traditional Japanese doll if made flesh in her human disguise, one who at a high school turns people into said dolls as a literalisation of staying young forever, including the fact they can still bleed and are alive. This was my favourite episode as it plays with the mood and characterisation the adaptation was able to convey, in a work arguably too short to feel fully fleshed out able to have an episode here with the most complexity. Himiko is our assumed consciousness, believing Miyu (as a true anti-heroine here) is after the handsome male student the Shinma is after too just to take all his blood, only to complicate this further in that, as a teen girl, it reveals she was crushing on the mortal. He is entirely falling for a Shinma who does not realise her own love for him until the conflict hits it's fullest, and that one dynamic makes this really interesting especially with how the story ends. It is a really interesting one, [Spoiler] one where the Shinma wins but with the guy, even now as a doll as she is, finding true love dancing in the afterlife with her as sentient dolls [Spoilers End]. With a really distinct surreal style of these uncanny anatomically complex doll creatures involved and a romantic love triangle involved, this is the highlight for this adaptation.

Episode three is the team up story between Himiko and Miyu, if a begrudging one, with greater emphasis on the back story of Miyu and her friend/assistant Larva, who emphasises how, as vampires are not in Japanese folklore, many Japanese stories which have them reference their histories as foreign in origin, Larva a Western vampire part of explaining Miyu's bloodline origins, only to become her servant when she consumed his blood at a younger age, losing his voice and having to wear a mask as a result, details excised from the TV series. The last two episodes intertwine in dealing with Miyu's back-story, this surrounding Larva's brother trying to get to Miyu through a sentient suit of armour possessed by a dead soul, whilst episode four is set in Kamakura, around a story from Himiko's childhood in a strange house that turns out to be Miyu's old family home, explaining the tortured origins of Miyu becoming the Guardian whilst leaving the Himiko character, never to return, with the suggestion she may become like Miyu in a delayed reaction.

Then this version of the story was closed. The sense of this version of Vampire Princess Miyu ended abruptly cannot be ignored, still with a sumptuous mood and bittersweet attitude to humanity, but we would have to wait for the 1997 TV series to be able to try to flesh out this story. That was a reboot of this titular character in tone and details, losing the likes of Himiko as a character and replacing her with others, even a cute demonic Shinma rabbit, and using an episode tone to tell its story. My interest in both is for their ideas and their styles, something made with a distinct tone and attitude that is felt with one of its creators in the director's seat for both. Even in terms of a purely glib enjoyment, as horror anime, this wins me over for its tone, even in the fact that one of my favourite obsessions, a troupe of the straight-to-video and older anime of phantom worlds within reality characters kept ending up in which are surreal, are found in both because Miyu has her own pocket dimension she can enter on whim, which is a win on a petty level as a viewer.

Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi would continue, even after the end of the original manga series, to continue this franchise on in published comics to the 2020s, a beautiful collaborative life as a married couple who adored these characters and moods to these stories to continue them. Annoyingly most of this series in published form never got English translations, which is a shame as, especially with the success of Baki the Grappler under Hirano's directing hands, I would have thought a series he held so dear to him as his own creation would have caught interest. Especially in just this adaptation, its melancholic tone with a female protagonist that is noticeably in power, never sexualised in either of the adaptations in creepy ways, but in a series even known for yuri readings with certain character relationships, and this would be a franchise who would have won so many new fans in the modern era. It is a huge compliment to say that I could imagine a new Vampire Princess Miyu and, if Hirano was allowed to keep control of it, it would do gangbusters in popularity.

#199: Demon of Steel - Battle of the Great Demon Beasts (1987)

 

a.k.a. Daimajū Gekitō: Hagane no Oni

Director: Toshihiro Hirano

Screenplay: Noboru Aikawa

Voice Cast: Toshio Furukawa as Takuya Gloose; Kazuhiko Inoue as Haruka Alford; Mayumi Shō as Lyse Morn; Osamu Saka as Galun Hayetz; Sakiko Tamagawa as Rui; Shūsei Nakamura as Kim/Narration; Toshio Furukawa as Takuya Gorozu

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Demon of Steel is an okay work, an obscure straight-to-video animation which is surprising in regards to who worked on this. An AIC (Anime International Company) production, the studio behind the likes of the Tenchi Muyo franchise, directed by Toshihiro Hirano, who would be known in earlier decades for the likes of Vampire Princess Miyu (the 1988-89 OVA or the 1997-8 television series) or Fight! Iczer One (1985-7), a director I have liked for idiosyncratic work, even for the notorious Apocalypse Zero (1996). A nice turn has come in his career in the 2010s when, an older veteran, he directed the newest original net animation adaptation of Baki (2018-2020), a Keisuke Itagaki manga adaptation which streamed to success on Netflix. The screenplay is by Noboru 'Shō' Aikawa, who around this time was behind notorious work like Urotsukidôji: The Legend of the Overfiend (1987-9), but decades later would become an admired writer for the likes of Full Metal Alchemist (2003-4).

This is fascinating then, even as a dry production which could have gotten to its plot quicker and with more bombast, that Demon of Steel is a work clearly with a bit of production behind it. With names of weight, it is however forgotten and was obscure even for myself. The economic bubble Japan had in the eighties, and the animation industry benefited from, allowed the industry to produce the likes of this, this for everyone involved just part of their full filmographies. Nearly an hour long, Demon of Steel is categorised as horror, but for me really is not. Here, an experiment with a mysterious energy, the "Quark of Malhuder", leads to an incident three years prior to the main plot when, using a weaponized version for a satellite in a test in destroying a battleship, a giant form suddenly falls out of the sky into the ocean.

In the present, a former member of an island research base Takuya reluctantly returns to it when a male colleague still working there, Haruka, has sent him a letter in a desperate plea of help. The problem with Demon of Steel is simply that it takes too long in exposition to set up a very obvious plot trajectory. That, feeling like a bromance with Takuya throughout despite there being a female love interest working at the base, Haruka has been working with the strange discoveries found as a result of the Malhuder energy experiment which is altering him. All based on a theory that the Malhuder can open alternative dimensions and that strange entities were summoned by accident. The horror aspect is that Haruka is changing, acting weird, and eventually reveal with superhuman strength and a violent temper as the entity he is working with has influenced him. In truth, this is just sci-fi, specifically that this is actually a mecha narrative, as the entities that fell into our world are sentient bio-mechanical figures of monstrous height you can pilot. They in themselves are only really horror, especially because of Haruka's, due to mecha design possibly indebted to H.R. Giger.

It is an entertainment piece, and if this review seems dismissive in its slightness, that is only because the story takes too long to explain the obvious, and loses the chance to expand its denouement. It feels idiosyncratic to another time, a very serious sci-fi with adult characters, and is still a solidly made production with reward in just that. Even without the absurd rock song montage near the end, this is a pulpy genre work. The score by Masahiro Kawasaki is a snappy soundtrack full of moody synth, and nothing in the OVA is bad, just okay. Again, many titles were being created back at this point, of an hour or less, so this is one of many you could find from back then. It is still, among them, a fascinating curiosity to have found.

#34: Vampire Princess Miyu (1997-8)

From http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/voiceacting/
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Director: Toshiki Hirano

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka, Mitsuhiro Yamada, Sadayuki Murai, Tamio Hayashi, Toshiki Hirano, Yasutomo Yamada, Yuji Hayami and Yutaka Hirata

Based on the manga by Narumi Kakinouchi and Toshiki Hirano

Voice Cast: Miki Nagasawa (as Miyu); Asako Shirakura (as Chisato Inoue); Chiharu Tezuka (as Yukari Kashima); Kokoro Shindou (as Hisae Aoki); Megumi Ogata (as Matsukaze/Reiha); Mika Kanai (as Shiina); Shinichiro Miki (as Larva)

There are sadly cases where, after the original anticipation is strong during the first few episodes, there's a crushing sense of disappointment. Vampire Princess Miyu is fascinating knowing that its really a personal project for director Toshiki Hirano, based on a manga co-created with his wife Narumi Kakinouchi which he brought to the screen twice, originall as a four part straight-to-video series in 1988-9, and it certainly has a fascinating premise, bolstered by my liking of other Hirano works (even Apocalypse Zero (1996) but that's another discussion entirely). Shinma (i.e. demons and various monsters that can take on human forms) plague the world but there is a Guardian selected to always deal with them, not necessarily to protect the mortal human beings killed or tricked by the shinma but to merely send the demons back to the darkness from where they came. The Guardian, a young and solemn vampire girl named Miyu, enters a town posing as a transfer student at the highschool to do her job, joined in her cause by a Western shinma named Larva who switches sides after his defeat by her, and Shiina, a demonic bunny rabbit with a giant, distorted eye that allows her the gift of foresight and the ability to see past illusions. At the school Miyu befriends Chisato, an affable classmate, and her own friends Yukari and Hisae, only with the clear issue at hand, over episodic monster of the week stories where Miyu faces a different shinma, of whether Miyu's friends will find out what her true identity is.  

From https://cracktheworldshell.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/vpm01.jpg

The episodic nature at first is not inherently a problem. The first few episodes create the equivalent of a horror themed, gothic magical girl show where Miyu, able to conjure fire to burn the shinma away, must discover the demons in the midst of committing foul actions and then dispose of them, such as a figure responsible in one of the first episodes for women disappearing on a late night subway train. The generally melancholic tone gives the show a great moodiness, even in the end theme in having Miyu as a tragic figure stuck in permanent immortality and desiring, when her task is done disposing of shinma, for Larva to end her life. Especially with Kenji Kawai's music, there's a darkness to the material compounded by the fact that rarely does anything happy happen, the characters introduced for one episode stories after the next either dying or having their pain taken away by Miyu draining their blood, left in a blank living state. Were it not for the fact Miyu doesn't really care for the mortals, only showing sympathy for one Chinese female conjurer chasing a vampire in Miyu's territory, baring her three friends and especially Chisato, it would be an utterly misanthropic show at its heart.

As a monster of the week show for the most part it tackles subjects such as a man finding a mermaid locked up in a secret aquarium or a cat being directly responsible for jealously, antagonism between couples and eventually joint murder and suicides in an apartment block, a dark morality play at times especially in the episodes where Miyu only bookends the stories or doesn't appear until their endings. Briefly the show flirts with a more complex morality with the shinma, those Miyu starts to develop sympathy for and/or promises to spare as they show kindness. An example of this is an episode about a female shinma who sincerely loves a mortal man. The complications of the shinma is emphasised by the other interesting figure of the series in Reiha, a younger female shinma who is a Yuki-onna, wearing a kimono and with a talking doll as a sidekick, possessing ice and snow based abilities, whose antagonism and willingness to even kill shinma Miyu has given mercy to causes growing friction with the Guardian. Episodes like this or Miyu having to face a doppelganger, including having to play act as a ghost to scare the local taxi services and protect herself after this event, or the sole episode written by a favourite anime screenwriter of mine, Chiaki J. Konaka, about a man obsessed with a humanoid fairy in his greenhouse, do stand out as being rewarding.

From http://v022o.popscreen.com/eG1ncWo2MTI=_o_
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The problems however arise in how twenty one out of twenty six episodes are episodic stories and almost half of them are underdeveloped or just awful. The first issue goes back to how it feels like a magical girl show, almost every episode having the shinma finally reveal themselves, with text on screen in freeze frame telling the viewer their name, only to soon after be burnt to a crisp by Miyu. Especially as many of the stories are more appropriate for a slower, more psychological or visceral take of horror, these shifts in the end to fantasy action jar badly against what comes before in the episodes and also gets predictable fast. Baring the final five episodes, only a two parter about Larva changes the pace, where Western shinma attempt to bring him back to their land, but this eventually turns out the same way as everything else with no sense of progression or a change in tone for the action.

The rinse-wash-repeat mentality starts to get worse as the stories start to get bad or lazy. An episode about a demon corrupting a girl into a pop star he can control with magical red shoes takes the biscuit in terms of contrivances with having the girl introduced as a member of the classroom interacting with Miyu and her friends, a contrivance worse when she has only a few references to after throughout the rest of the series. The nadir of this, which would've been hilarious in another series, is a story about a man who loves cats who encounters a female shinma who grows demonic flowers in her garden with the souls of dead felines, something that I couldn't have made up if I tried. The flatness of these tales are compounded by the fact that, whilst it drip feds potentially interesting characters and reoccurring plotlines, they eventually are wasted. Reiha's climatic fight with Miyu isn't the conclusion of their relationship and the episode itself is lacking, whilst the schoolgirl friends are complete non-entities for the most part without an emotional bond to them. For every fascinating episode, the one with the mermaid or one about a female creator of life like dolls who ends up in a triangle with her female maid and a life sized doll she loves, so many are a waste and they outnumber the interesting ones until even the good ones start to show flaws in their script or the fact that, as a hand drawn TV animation, it lacks an appropriately macabre or imaginative aesthetic for it throughout most of the programming.

From https://cracktheworldshell.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/vpm03.jpg

[Major End Spoilers - 

Skip this paragraph is you intend to watch the series without knowledge]

The show then reaches its final five episodes and things start to completely collapse despite the fact that, on paper, what takes place would've made this a great series if it was actually set up properly. It finally tries for deeper characterisation and drama that takes place over multiple episodes, but because it's used up the twenty one episodes before, its forced to transcript the plotting in such a short amount of time and with no connection to the events of before barring the merest of suggestions. In a better structure, this finale would've been a great gut punch, and its sudden jump to a darker and esoteric tone - Miyu's back story set against a carnival in the past that evokes Shūji Terayama of all things, strange images of giant eggs sat in seats in a classrooms, Chisato being revealed to be the strongest shinma, meant to defeat Miyu, who kills her friends Yukari and Hisae - would've been wonderful and tragic, but here because of how abruptly included it is it's an utter catastrophe to sit through.  

As interesting as it is to see Miyu's back story by way of a carnival of shinma protectors, a slow paced episode also explaining Reiha's hatred of her because her magician father's final words were about the Guardian, it's useless to switch to a more arty and interesting tone knowing this episode should've happened much earlier in the series to build from, especially as its only by the end of the show true antagonists are shown in a group of "birds", suddenly introduced with no sense of threat to them. The third to final episode has Chisato's brother introduced as an evil shinma, only to be easily vanquished with the potential drama wasted, and then by the last two episodes it finally introduces what should've been the ace in its sleeve for giving the viewer heartbreak, that the sweet and likable Chisato is the final villain who, as mentioned, kills her friends when she's awoken. Sadly, when the friends are one-dimensional and Chisato's turn is abrupt, going as far as even proclaim she wanted to become her older brother's bride and never age in as drastic and inappropriate a personality 180 degree as you could get, this is squandered. That's not even mentioning the Machiavellian figure behind it is the luck charm salesman from one of the first episodes, only shown again for the final two episodes turning into a birdman and evoking the worst type of reveal for a killer from a bad slasher film than great drama. The final shot of the show is legitimately sad and haunting, Miyu forced to take Chisato's severed head to her supernatural dimension so she can live with her forever, but the utter lack of time for the material is dreadful and tarnishes the sudden spike in artistry and pathos.

[Major plot spoilers finished.]

And as a result of not setting up a story over twenty one episodes, and then attempting to in the final five and clumsily, not building up characters beforehand in titbits and no doing what fellow horror anime show Requiem From The Darkness (2003) did and make the central characters important in each episodic story,  the result beat me down until I felt numb. So much that when it finally tries to have greater character depth and a sad tragic ending its utterly absurd rather than rewarding. I still intend to see the original 1988 OVA, as it is said to have a different tone and the central character of Miyu is interesting, but the viewing of the 1997 television series was an incredible letdown. Considering as well how this is clearly a personal project for its creator, I feel legitimately sad realising how increasingly bored and hostile I was to the episodes as I got further through it.

From http://www.rightstufanime.com/images/productImages/814131017185
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