Vampire in the Garden

Overall it was a pretty bland watch with good art and music and at times good animation but the story and characters were terrible. The only halfway decent character was the uncle and he didn't get any development until the end. They studio tried to put too many slow moving scenes along with too much material which ends up with a lot of stuff being crammed into a short runtime. The characters become unrelatable from this pacing as you don't really understand their actions. To put it in perspective it makes no sense that Momo the main character would leave with Fine and in no ... time at all have an us versus the world mentality when vampires had been her enemy her entire life. Granted she does not view them with hatred but she does have a bias against them as seen in her first interaction with Fine.

I had some hopes for this anime at the start but even though it was only 5 episodes (and I always finish short anime since it's not that big a waste of my time) I was seriously about to drop it, but alas I stuck with it cause why not just finish it. You also get some strong yuri vibes if your into that, personally I don't care for it but if the story is good I'll watch it. So take it as you may and watch it if you want but it doesn't get my stamp of approval.

This isn't such a waste of time.
I give this a 4/10 Its [i]Fine[/i]
You wouldn't get it...

This is a positive 4/10. It's absolutely not original, but the execution is not terrible. Still pretty enjoyable.


To sum this anime in a few words; it's exactly what you'd expect from a vampire show where the two main characters are a vampire and a human. This anime really does not have much to give but it doesn't mean it's bad...

I personally didn't care for it at all and i'm going to proceed to forget everything that I saw because of how inconsequential all of that was. It had no ... thought put into it whatsoever. It was your typical Romeo and Juliet plotline.

Very typical

Not disgusting, you can still find yourself enjoying it but if you're looking for somthing special, this isn't it.
Not bad, If you're just bored and don't want to gamble on a show that could be horrendous, well watch this. It's mediocre, but you won't have to gamble!

spoiler__________________________

I will not make a real review for this shit. The "lesbian" dies, as in tradition...
Yes, they can die but you need to have a few alive you know. Most end in tragedy, it's not a coincidence.

At first you might think it's going to go deep in the vampire/human relationship, but nope not at all. No deep diving in the presented character too, but look a cool guy with a sword not taking anything seriously, but being way too strong and vampire (who took over the world?) way too weak.

5 episodes for it to end (you can spot the end from the first episode) like ... it started (in tragedy) and a time skips for 5 sec and now happy ending and look she has a child now, awesome. Just so freaking bad. I want my time back.

This show is bad. While there are some interesting ideas and potential for an interesting story, it's most severely harmed by its limited run time and inability to flesh out the world and characters. If they're lucky, characters get 1 trait and the vaguest hint of motivation, but several are confounding. Despite this, the emotional climax of the story still managed to move me, just not enough to negate all concerns about earlier questionable plot choices.

The character designs are fairly unremarkable, aside from transformed vampires, which are appropriately horrifying; and the animation is generally good enough, with the exception of conspicuously noticeable CG for hand ... and finger movement in a piano sequence, and episode 4 utilizes of number of slow pans over still frames for characters dancing and frolicking. The English dub (at least the first episode) is very stiff and unnatural across the board. I watched the remaining 4 episodes in Japanese and it was a significant improvement.

The opening moments of the story explain how humanity has been driven to the brink by vampires, and humans are struggling to reclaim the world, while a few early scenes with the vampires imply the morality isn't so clear cut, but the show never really explores how the world reached its current dystopian state. The show is also kind of flexible with how dangerous daylight/UV is to vampires. It's a major plot point in the first episode that the city is protected by a wall of (spot)light(s), but Fine gets blasted with UV light multiple times and seems only minimally effected by it (this may be because Fine is the queen of the vampires, but there are only about four lines referencing this in the entire show, most of them in the first episode).

The protagonists Momo and Fine flee their warring oppressive human and vampires communities to find a utopia where both species can live in peace, and before they find it, they find a regular city where it's split in half by a river where the two sides have some kind of peace worked out, which kind of undercuts the earlier premise.

Another issue with the plot is that Mome and Fine arrive at the fabled peaceful mixed vampire/human village at the end of episode 3/start of episode 4, so you know that with 2 episodes to go, something will go wrong. If you made three guesses as to what that something is, you'd probably get at least 2 of them right, because the show isn't exactly groundbreaking.

As for Momo and Fine's relationship, which is clearly intended to be the core of the story, it's disappointingly underdeveloped. It hints at a romantic connection between the two of them, but because of Fine's past trauma from how her previous relationship ended leads to her repeatedly distancing herself from Momo emotionally, and relying on traveling montages to establish their bond, it's hard to explain why they should be together.


Ultimately, the show is brought down by incomplete and underutilized concepts and characterization. There are some interesting ideas, but rarely are they brought to the level of a complete thought.

One time, a few years ago, I mentioned to some people in a fandom that I wasn't a particularly big fan of a show because I felt that it came across as too treacly and saccharine, with the main character embodying a lot of those qualities. But apparently a lot of people didn't like this and proceeded to accuse me of only liking tragic edgy shlock and claiming that I hate it when kids shows have an optimistic tone. If anyone's seen some reviews I've done for the various seasons of Pretty Cure, I can attest that that's not true. I just prefer the shows ... I watch, books I read, and games I play to actually have substance to them, and not just lean too far into both extremes, such as being too sugary and saccharine or being too morose, dark, and bleak. Unfortunately, Vampire in the Garden, a new Netflix anime made by Wit Studio, is the latter. If anyone is looking for a good example of a show that's absolutely drowning in pointless edginess and misery porn, Vampire in the Garden pretty much embodies all of those qualities, and not for the better.

Basically, the story focuses on a world where vampires and humans are locked in endless conflict, and because vampires have heightened senses of hearing, humans have forbidden music of all kinds. Momo is a young girl living in one of the few human strongholds left, and while she's had experience with killing vampires due to her mother's job as a military general, she grows weary of all the fighting. When she gets into a fight with her mother over a music box, she runs away and encounters the supposed queen of vampires, Fine, and the two escape together. Although their initial encounter is rough, the two slowly become friends and bond over a shared love of music. But their newfound friendship is considered taboo by both humans and vampires. Momo and Fine hear an urban legend about a paradise called Eden, where humans and vampires supposedly live in peace, so they decide to try and find it, hoping to escape the conflict that they're embroiled in. But their journey is not a happy one.

Yeah, the whole premise feels like a cookie cutter YA novel trying to capitalize on the vampire trend, similar to what the Twilight books wound up doing years ago, only here there's no romance. But the premise like this can be done well, and others have managed to pull it off well. But Vampire in the Garden is not one of them, and there's so much wrong with it that it's not even funny. For one, the series is fairly short, only going for about 5 half-hour episodes, so the pacing is very fast, having very little in the way of breaks and quiet moments. Now, I know a lot of series that have less episodes and even shorter episode run times, but have managed to make optimal use of them in order to do what they wanted, with some examples being Yoru no Kuni, the various PokeToon shorts, and even Pokemon Twilight Wings. But here's the thing: All three of those short series I mentioned have one thing in common, which is the reason that people like them show much, that reason being that the three shorts managed to make you, the audience, care about the characters and their plight, mainly because the shows themselves cared about them enough to show how they grow and achieve their goals in the end, even when the roads to getting there weren't exactly pleasant. Which leads me to the main reason why Vampire in the Garden fails as an anime: It's so obsessed with being as bloody, violent, edgy, and downright miserable and morose as possible that it's completely impossible to care about the characters and the situations they're in.

Honestly, watching Vampire in the Garden felt like I was stuck in a bloody mud pit and couldn't get out. Everything about it feels like whoever produced this wanted to make it the most miserable, morose, unnecessarily angsty anime possible. For one, none of the characters save for the main two are even remotely likeable, and even the two leads are bland as hell, barely changing much throughout the show, and any changes they do go through are so predictable you can see them coming from a mile away. The show makes absolutely no effort to develop its characters or give them any depth beyond their most basic archetypes or short flashes of their backstories that just are just there for more forced drama. Most of the characters end up dying anyway, and the show thinks it's good at making you care about them, but its method of doing so involves shoehorning in a LOT of melodrama, a lot of it in the form of characters constantly screaming, crying, angsting, and being angry with no end in sight. Any moments of levity and quiet are really short and often followed up by, you guessed it, more fighting and blood and angst, leaving practically no time to catch your breath. Also, can I just say how much I hate Momo's mother Nobara as a character? Most of her screentime consists of being a hardened military leader and yelling at or slapping Momo around. The show is trying to make the case that she wants to save Momo from the vampires, but with the way the show presents her, it never felt to me like she truly cared about Momo and was only trying to save her for her own benefit. And even if Momo did act willful and ungrateful during their argument, does that really justify Nobara slapping her and treating her like shit over really petty things? Any time Momo and Nobara are seen together, Nobara is either angry at her or pulling a gun on her, and any attempts she made to apologize to her all felt shallow and fake as a result of her inconsistent characterization.

Which leads me to Vampire in the Garden's biggest flaw: Momo and Fine's journey winds up being rendered completely meaningless and pointless as nothing in the show ever changes from when it first started. From beginning to end, Vampire in the Garden shows nothing but the vampires and humans at war with one another, and any solutions to the problem are rendered either too good to be true or wind up never having existed in the first place. Combine that with all the blood, gore, violence, and characters being absolutely nasty to one another, this makes the series feel completely meaningless, as the characters we're supposed to care about never manage to achieve their goals, with their whole journey being in vain, nothing ever gets better for them, and any happiness they find winds up being an illusion. The war between the vampires and humans never gets resolved, and most of the cast dies at the end, making Vampire in the Garden nothing more than a painful slog of nothing but seemingly endless misery and tragedy porn. Actually, Vampire in the Garden is literally just relentless, neverending misery porn, nothing more. Honestly, the only good things Vampire in the Garden has going for it are its detailed backgrounds, animation reminiscent of early 2000s stuff, and the soundtrack which consists of mostly classical music and opera singing, and even those can't save the show from just being a relentless angst fest with no light at the end of the tunnel. The whole series feels like it's constantly beating you with a hammer while screaming "FEEL SAAAAAAAD!!" and it just doesn't work because it has nothing else to offer.

Look, I like my fair share of tragedies and bittersweet endings every now and then. But making a show be literally nothing but non-stop angst, drama, and misery, without any meaningful reason for the audience to care about your characters and story, and have it end with basically nothing changing in the end, really doesn't work. At all. I just watched a French movie recently called Long Way North, and while that movie had plenty of tragic moments, it at least had the characters accomplish what they wanted to do in the end, so everything they went through wasn't in vain. The movie In This Corner of the World took 70% of its screentime to establish its story and characters and make the audience care about them first, knowing to save the tragedy and sad moments for later, making it hit harder than it would have had the movie used it earlier. One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1997 Dog of Flanders anime, and it starts off happy-go-lucky and sweet but slowly becomes more tragic as it goes on, and it also has a sad ending, but it actually had a point to its tragedy, to establish how classism hurts both the privileged and the working class people. Hell, what many consider to be one of the best video games ever, Mother 3, is universally praised as being one of the saddest games ever, and didn't need to rely on having absolutely nothing but constant sorrow and drama for 30 hours straight. My point being, if you're going to make your story a tragedy in some capacity, don't make the tragedy all there is to story, and have more to offer than just that. Vampire in the Garden has literally nothing to offer except endless angst that's ultimately pointless in the end. I once wrote a fan fic years ago that many people claimed was pointlessly dark and edgy, and some of their complaints about it are valid, but if there's one thing I can say about it, it's that I at least TRIED to have there to be more to it than just angst and drama. I made sure to at least develop the characters and throw in moments of needed levity, even if I didn't always succeed, and stuff like this and Magical Girl Site are way worse and edgier than my old fic could ever be.

Vampire in the Garden is on Netflix right now, and maybe it can be something you can use to introduce a teenager to and have them transition to watching anime that's more mature than stuff like Pokemon and Naruto. Otherwise, Vampire in the Garden doesn't have anything to offer unless you're masochistic enough to endure seemingly endless angst, gore, and melodrama.

Edit, 5/22/2022: I found out I was admittedly wrong about one thing. Apparently there was a stinger scene at the very end of episode 5, after the credits, that I didn't see on my first watch. Because I didn't see this stinger, I thought that Momo's journey wound up being completely in vain, making the series feel completely pointless, but it turns out the stinger has a much happier outcome for Momo than I thought. Because of this, I've decided to be a little bit generous and bump up the rating slightly. That being said, my overall feelings for Vampire in the Garden remain the same, and had the series been longer, bothered to put in some more moments of levity, and flesh out all its other characters, it might have been something good or even great.

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood
Show's predictability is only likeable for 2 and a half episodes. Then I stopped binging
Watch 1 and a half more. Didn't like it more
The "no music allowed because vampires have superhearing" is kind of dumb.
I get authoritarian figures aren't usually logical but Idk... it didn't go anywhere interesting.
Entertainment/art/culture good I guess?
Also why are vampires not making more friends from the warms?
In the first 5 minutes we learned that when warms get bitten they become vampires.
And then we have like 5 seconds of plot where a warm becomes a traitor and serves vampires. And it was cartoony like ... he just want to serve them but not want to/actually become one of them.

This show could use more fun if it doesn't want to be intelligent.

Up to episode 2 and half of episode 3 this was a solid 7. Xanthe's and Larissa's voice acting was out of this world, easily on par with the japanese cast. It may have even been an 8 had there not been so many plot holes.

But after that the whole thing fell apart. They kept using the same plot gimmicks to pull at your emotions, and when Fine's about to die by the 5th time it gets old real fast. So that's why this wound up as a 4.

I'll rewatch up to episode 3 to get the bond between them, but other than that don't ... watch past episode 3.

Have you ever seen a story involving star crossed lovers? Vampires? An authoritarian regime? If so, you can skip this, because it was likely executed far better there. A bowl of oatmeal has more personality than this show. The production value is fine, the backgrounds are nice, but I can't bear to give it a 4 because for me I might still recommend a 4 to someone if it's in their wheelhouse. But this show has nothing, its the most formulaic waste of time that make your 2D waifu look like a three dimensional character. There's hardly anything else to insult because so little actually ... happens, a girl and a vampire run around for a bit, and the world makes no sense except as set dressing.

This is more of a vent than a review, spare yourself the trouble and find something else to watch.