Blade

ThatAnimeSnob Apr 14, 2012

3

Blade is the fourth Marvel attempt to get a piece of the pie out of the anime fans and once again it’s just wasting its precious money on lame adaptations. I have watched all three previous shows and I could already see from the pilot episode it is following the exact same pattern as those. It is quite safe to say that I knew in just a few minutes that it is mediocre at best since the makers repeat the same crap as before. To be honest, up to now Marvel derived anime were slowly getting more interesting, meaning the makers were slowly learning how to make a good action show and we had the more than obvious analogy of Iron Man < Wolverine < X-Men. You see, the action was getting better and the amount of heroes was increasing which was making each attempt a bit more enjoyable than the previous one. So I expected for Blade to be even more enjoyable for improving the formula further but to my disappointment it is the worst of them all. And don’t tell me I reached to conclusions too early; it is more than obvious if you see the storyboard and the execution in comparison to the other three. First of all the music part is by far the best thing in this show as those rock pieces are nice to listen to lots of times. All the rest are terrible. Just 3 minutes in the show and you see that the bad guys are nothing but dumb vampires attacking innocent civilians and being vaporized by the hero. There is nothing interesting about them, they are just cannon fodder. Hell, they don’t even fight in an interesting way; they are just brainlessly attacking with claws and get owned in less than a second because Blade moves faster than light or something (lol at the after image he leaves as bait; what is this, early Dragonball episodes?). Great strategy there guys; too bad Solid Snake is better. What is even worse is how these mooks are killed. It is true that in some stories with vampires they are instantly combusting when they die but this is plain laughable. They don’t burn and turn to ash with a few bones remaining to fizzle away in the wind. I mean it was so cool in the live action trilogy or even in From Dusk Till Dawn. So what crappy way to combust is this here? They just go poof and disappear like it’s a Digimon being defeated. Plain horrible; they look like kagebushin rather than monsters with personality.What is even worse than even that is how they look like. In an attempt to flavor their appearances, they are all sorts of combinations. Just imagine a vampire catfishman who uses vampire cats and water as hindrance. Weird? How about vampire chicken? Vampire imps? Vampire ninjas? This is plain ridiculous, especially when it is pointless. No matter how they look, they are equally weak and use the exact same dumb technique of “running towards the opponent with no plan at all”.There are also human collaborators to the vampires, called familiars. Not only they are even easier to beat than vampires yet they have the nerve to attack Blade in hopes of defeating him with simple clubs. They are also idiots enough to have tattoos on their wrists showing the vampire insignia of the guy they are working for. Amazing secrecy people, do you have the map to his lair drawn on your ass too?And then there is the Big Bad of the show, whose actions make no sense. He clearly is ten times stronger than Blade, continually defeats him easily and continually lets him escape despite the more than obvious fact that he needs his blood to complete an experiment. Instead of capturing him single-handily, he keeps sending his troops to be massacred by Blade and he just walks away when he has him cornered. Yeah, that makes sense. It’s called the “We can’t have a showdown before the last episode” strategy. There is zero interest in the action and it is supposed to be an action show. Since the first episode, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to already figure out the animators are using the exact same choreography as before. Random slashes and gunshots, most of which are done with still frames and a cheap fire effect covering the monsters. And all vampires are defeated in less than a second with a simple punch or kick before they are set on fire; as if they are made of paper. They are not even shown suffering before they die. Hell, they are not even shown being damaged much before dying. Hell, there isn’t even a body remaining as proof a battle took place there. Furthermore only vampires are killed in this show, as normal people always survive or just fall unconscious. This is of course done because the show is supposed to be for teenagers and thus it couldn’t be too brutal. And for some reason vampires don’t count as people but as Digimon, so it’s ok to kill them. Anyways, my point is that normal people are always spared but vampires are killed. And since both are defeated equally easy, that ends up making the vampires to look far weaker than normal people! Shouldn’t a story full of dark areas and vampires be scary or unsettling? Well this one here isn’t in the slightest. How can you be afraid with such piss poor weak adversaries? They look stupid too. This is a retelling of the action live movies and it is nothing we haven’t already seen. They aren’t even trying to make a twist with an already simplistic plot (and don’t tell me there is complexity in the Blade movies). I practically felt like I watched the first movie repeating in the exact same way, with far less interesting action and atmosphere. So ok, Blade is after the guy who bit his mother. Doesn’t that make him his creator? Why is he after the guy who thanks to him he is now so cool and saves people from vampires? He should be in-dept to him. Yet all he does is killing random vampires, as if he has nothing else to do. That gets tiresome fast.As for the story? Aside from Blade chasing after Big Bad it is practically random traveling around the world and fighting mooks, while listening to the overblown dramatic tales of unimportant people you will never see again past the episode they appear in. So practically there is NO PLOT AND STORY THAT FITS IN TWO LINES OF TEXT. Heck, even the major secondary characters that aid Blade are a weak girl, a grandpa, and a dog. Does that sound interesting? Nope.As you can tell early on, my impressions of Blade are veeeery negative. It is a mediocre work like all the other Marvel derived works, and thank goodness it is the last. Now Madhouse can you please try harder?

DavidAlatriste Nov 20, 2015

6.8

Look, this is a simple anime: it's based off the Blade series, and sorta reminded me of the movies in some aspects. It's not aweful bad, but it's clearly a very forced attempt to get American stories into the Japanese market. Points for the Wolverine cameo though.

MAK2Hybrid Jul 22, 2013

4

Now let’s get into Marvel Animation. Like DC Comics is having trouble with their theatrical releases aside from the Nolan Batman movies, Marvel is doing worse in their animation department considering from I heard on the internet about the two beloved series Spectacular Spider-Man & the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes got canceled mostly due to Disney being a part of Marvel and after seeing Ultimate Spider-Man, fans were pissed at the result of that show and while that happened, Marvel decided to cross into anime territory along with the help of studio MADHOUSE with Marvel Anime, a 4-part anime project that reintroduces them for Japanese audiences and the following feature players were Iron Man, Wolverine, X-Men & Blade. Now I’m only covering the Blade anime for today as the others will be on another day (summer 2013, coming soon). Erik Brooks was half-man, half-vampire after his mother Carol was attacked by a vampire named Deacon Frost. He sought assistance from Noah Van Helsing and over time, vampires worldwide fear him as the "Daywalker" or "Blade". He investigates a vampire organization in Asia called "Existence" starting from Japan all the way to Southeast Asia. Okay, I know most of you have heard some of this plot before and if you haven’t, you didn’t see the first Blade movie. Yes, the plot of Blade hunting down Deacon Frost for killing his mother is a part of the first movie but in the series, the killing of said mother takes place in England, which I heard that Blade was originated from in the comics so yeah, Blade is British. Joining the hunt alongside Blade is Makoto, a female vampire hunter who at first hunts Blade for killing her father, even though she should’ve been hunting for Frost since he turned him into a vampire and Blade was just doing his job and making sure she doesn’t die. There is also Noah Van Helsing, most likely the one who supplies Blade with weapons and for that, he does a better job of that than Shen from the live-action TV series and he has a wolf-dog whose name I don’t know or too lazy to find out. Most of Frost’s flunkies or either vampires of the High Council are served as easy targets for Blade whether he comes close and it doesn’t seem much of a fight but just as a fly in his face and the weirdest (and dumbest) thing about it whenever Blade finishes an adversary, he calls out a move like it’s a damn videogame move. All the other very minor characters in the series often share their backstories but we as an audience can’t get too close to them since after that episode, that part never gets mentioned again. Even Deacon Frost just turns out to be a pretty generic villain and yet I don’t know this version of Blade is better or worse than the Stephen Dorff version and yet both versions want the vampires to rule the world, even going against the purebloods……which is the exact same thing that happened in the movie but in here, it feels too much of what we already seen in most action-oriented and/or comic book series. So, in the U.S., the show (along the other Marvel Anime) aired on the formerly geek-centric G4 and the dub of this was made by Studiopolis, Inc., an ADR production company who worked on dubs (either anime or Western animation) in the past such as Afro Samurai, Blood+, Bleach & Naruto. The voice of Blade in this effort was Harold Perrineau, whom you know from Lost, OZ & Link from The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions and he was fairly decent in his part, not better but still better than Sticky Fingaz’ effort. While the animation by MADHOUSE does look very beautiful and dark to look at but the action scenes animated there rate from sub-par to weak, since I mentioned the calling-out your move when finishing an enemy earlier and the character design of Blade looks……odd in some way but not in a bad way but very strange. The music overall is awful in this series, mostly a generic rock theme for the series that never fits the tone whatsoever and the rest of the music is standard anime music but not exactly being  a standout. FINAL VERDICT (THE ANIME): Very, very uninspired and overall boring. I will say that plot is more Blade-focused rather than going for the other characters’ less important side story and most of Blade’s past in the series has more detail added than the movies but the action gets rather too repetitive too quick and too monotonous. I can’t judge the whole Marvel/MADHOUSE project too quick since those I’ll check out later but for this one, I’ll say watch only once.