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Young Akira Kaburagi's life is turned upside-down when he learns he's a werewolf, sworn to protect the life and bloodline of vampire princess Mina Tepes. She's planning to create an empire for her kind in the middle of the modern world, but she has enemies on all sides -- and within.

Despite an intriguing concept, a brilliantly-staged first episode and high-grade imagery, Bund remains stuck in middle gear throughout, never quite transcending its contrived plot or some of its morally questionable elements.

Pros

• A creative first episode and some dazzling design and visuals.

Cons

• The all-too-young look of the main character is deeply distracting.
• Coincidence-driven plotting torpedoes any long-term story credibility.

• Director: Masahiro Sonoda
• Animation Studio: SHAFT
• Released By: Media Factory
• Released Domestically By: FUNimation Entertainment
• Audio: English / Japanese w/English subtitles
• Age Rating: TV-MA (violence, blood, nudity, thematic material)
• List Price: $69.98 (Blu-ray/DVD combo)

Anime Genres:

• Action/Adventure
• Drama
• Supernatural

Related Titles:

• Black Blood Brothers
• Hellsing
• Blood: The Last Vampire
• Ga-Rei: Zero
• Vampire Princess Miyu

A remarkable first episode...

The opening episode of Dance in the Vampire Bund is a blast of creativity and visual ingenuity—so much so I feared the rest of the show would be downhill from there. And, sadly, it is—there’s just no way they can sustain the clever burst of imagination shown in that first episode. What we do get is a gorgeous-looking, entertaining, but ultimately unresonant story about a boy, a girl, and a vampire nation.

So, that first episode. It takes the form of a half-hour TV variety show, wherein the audience learns in fairly short order that a) vampires are real, b) their queen, Mina Tepes, is setting up base in Japan, and c) she has an honor guard of werewolves that will give their furry little lives to protect her. It’s a mutant version of the approach Orson Welles used in his legendary War of the Worlds broadcast, brought up to date and with some sly humor injected.

... with less-than-remarkable follow-up

Then comes the rest of the show, which is many steps down from that initial high. It revolves around Mina and one of her former werewolf honor guard members, Akira Kaburagi, a kid with a convenient amount of missing memory (sorry, I hate it when amnesia is used to drive a story). Yes, he used to be one of hers once upon a time, but after blanking out has since settled down into what he thinks is a normal life as a Tokyo teenager. Then one night she turns back up in his life and gives him a good incentive to rediscover his hairy and monstrous dark side, and he feels the stirrings of loyalty—and maybe a lot more than that—returning to him. His loyalty gets tested, though, both by Mina’s manipulations and by the affections of another (female) were-creature, but never severely enough to really matter.

The “Bund” of the title is the name of an independent mini-state which Mina plans to create as an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. The details of how she accomplishes this are straight out of Ayn Rand’s wet dreams: she and the other vampire clans have accumulated so much wealth over the course of human history, they can afford to buy the land from Japan outright by paying off the country’s entire national debt. The whole sequence where she drops this bombshell, in the form of a news conference, is one of the show’s highlights.

Politics, plot problems and a little too much skin

Mina’s also not above employing a little creative blackmail to further her cause—like, say, kidnapping the prime minister’s son and threatening to vampirize him if certain pro-Bund bills don’t get passed in the Diet. This creates one of the show’s many uncomfortable internal contradictions—the more we learn of Mina’s ruthlessness and political machinations, the weirder and less credible it is when the show tries to portray her sympathetically.

Another problem is even more obvious. Barring a few moments when she unleashes the full extent of her powers, Mina has the body of a very young girl, and we see entirely too much of it. Granted, she’s centuries old, but it’s still deeply creepy to see her in various states of undress—such as in an early scene where Akira has to oil her down with the vampiric equivalent of SPF 3000 suntan lotion, the better to keep her from being incinerated when she steps into broad daylight. Scenes like this forced FUNimation to edit the show for its original online broadcast run, although the home video version is uncut.

One thing that’s never in question is the show’s overall production quality. Most every frame, especially on the show’s Blu-ray Disc edition, is full of lush color and a high degree of detail. The animation crew also has fun with the monster-on-monster combat, of which there’s no shortage throughout. What’s missing is a stronger, more thought-out story, and reasons to care about the characters that don’t arise from the self-serving demands of the plot.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.