Vlad Love

Vlad Love is Mamoru Oshii’s indulgent critique of the modern simp. Mitsugu Bamba is a harem protagonist taken straight out of your average 80’s slapstick romcom and unceremoniously inserted into the year of our Lord, 2021, but instead of having the standard selection of waifus to choose from, she only gets one. Fret not, though, because Mitsugu is the ultimate and final simp. Her waifu is an insatiable vampire, but Mitsugu conveniently has a fetish for giving blood, and even goes so far as to systematically cuck herself by creating a Blood Donation Club at her school to orchestrate a bloodletting pyramid scheme amongst the ... club’s members to satisfy the thirst of her new sugar baby, and you, the viewer, likely an otaku defined by your subservient love for Japanese cartoons, are obviously meant to see yourself in her folly. The dynamic between Mitsugu the simp and Mai, her gold-digging waifu, is a clear-cut metaphor for you and whatever product or service you find yourself a slave to in our consumerist society. As much as I hate to use the phraseology of anarkiddies, tankies, & progressives, Mai truly is the vampire of late-stage capitalism, & she will suck your blood dry as you happily expose your veins for her beautiful lips to find, just like the parasocial simps who jump at the opportunity to let the e-girl of their dreams empty their coffers for mere seconds of her superficial attention. Vlad Love is a truly biting piece of social commentary which pokes fun at the sheer shallowness of people like Mitsugu who would be even a tiny bit attracted to such an unpleasant woman with the worst personality in the history of existence just because she’s hot. Waifus are portrayed as intrinsically corrupt beings bankrupt of all virtue who will physically drain the vitality of you and everyone you know.

Oshii wasn't the only member of Vlad Love's creative staff to resurrect themselves from the grave to make this gem and have it animated it with such vibrant characters and such expressive designs, and everyone on board was clearly delighted to craft something so amusingly dated whilst simultaneously commenting on something so sharply modern. Since the project was produced in-house under Production IG, Oshii and director Junji Nishimura were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted, so if you ever wished to see the shameless lovechild of every storied, if not previously retired veteran of the industry who spent the last decade resting on their laurels earned from proving their unmatched talent in the 90s and early 2000s who came back to the industry for the soul purpose of creating a passion project without the corporate oversight of a production committee telling them what they could and couldn’t do, then Vlad Love will be worth the watch for its artful individualism alone. It’s not a homage, it’s not an inspiration, and it’s not a parody. Vlad Love is good old fashioned, hyper personalized, aesthetically distinct, cleverly directed, strictly hand-drawn animation LOVE! And if obscure Japanese political references, military aircraft references, retro game references, obscure literary references, blatant jabs at Miyazaki, blatant jabs at Japanese society as a whole, 80’s style slapstick comedy, an utter disrespect for the fourth wall, and enough weird Japanese speech patterns to make subtitles fundamentally insufficient tools of translation isn’t enough to prove just how auteur this screenplay truly is, then take it from the staff. In an interview on the Vlad Love YouTube channel, one of the voice actresses said, “We tried understanding what it was all about, we really did...but we couldn't get it, so we just pretended to get it while doing our best.”

Oshii himself, on the other hand, said “It all started with the feeling of ‘Let’s show what would happen if you pissed off an old man’ while also making an anime that can serve as a strong medicine.” Personally, I want to believe Oshii made Mitsugu a girl because he wanted to give her a happy ending even though she still has all the typical flaws of his teenaged characters because he’s less angry with his younger self at this point in his life, and changing the gender of the character he’s projecting those same trappings onto just makes his ability to distinguish himself now from how he was then a little easier, even if said character is still emotionally delusional, selfish, willing to throw everything away for a vague dream just to momentarily escape the monotony of the present, etc. I bring this up because despite Vlad Love being consumable as a slapstick comedy—filled with esoteric references and boomer humor, but a normal comedy nonetheless—the obvious and incessant theming of Oshii works including this one always makes me want to overthink. That said, the dialogue in Vlad Love just flows so naturally and feels so much like improv, it all comes across as conversational and benign in a good way. Even Beautiful Dreamer, a comedy much in the same vein as Vlad Love, and Gosenzo-sama Banbanzai, a downright theatrical farce, beat you over the head with how smartly written and brilliantly directed they are, but Vlad Love doesn’t, at least not for the first half. It really just lets you sit back and appreciate the fact genuinely funny and interesting people don’t typically write anime and imbue it with so much of what they personally love. It’s all so idiosyncratic and innocently fun, with comedy, energy, personality, and style. Vlad Love is definitely one of those anime which will have to work hard to find its tiny audience, should it even exist, but once it does, it’ll have a healthy and well-deserved cult of personality hailing it as a classic for years to come.

Thank you for reading.

Hello everyone! And welcome to “Garbage of the Season [1]!” The series where I discuss the current season's trashy pile of unwatchable monstrosities so that mom can’t say I’m doing nothing with my life. But before I start, I’d suggest you smash that helpful button and click on notifications so that you won’t miss out on any of my upcoming reviews. So without further ado, roll the intro…

*Journey - Don’t Stop Believin starts playing*

…

*End of intro*

Today’s garbage is the ever popular Vlad Love by the vastly known Mamoru Oshii. Who’s done with making pretentious movies and choses to go back to the old days of ... directing comedy shows. Sadly, the style of comedy in Vlad Love expired during the same era. It’s terribly out of date and even if it was modernized, still lacks a punch because it’s not executed with any finesse. Like haha, they talk about expositional dialogue. That’s breaking the fourth wall, fun! Or haha the doctor calls our protagonist Bamba for Bambam again for the fifth time...*laugh track*.

*Ad time*

This review is sponsored by Fallout 4. Because that is a fun reference. Hope you like reference humour, the show is full of them, and they are outdated just like pretty much anything else. Do you want to know what’s not outdated? The visuals...at times. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they’re sloppy with very little in between. It’s colorful and has style to it. But much substance to it there’s not. The two OP’s look phenomenal but the actual show pales in comparison visual-wise. Pales like a vampire. References are hilarious.

There aren’t many positives to note. Voice acting is solid, but the characters they’re playing are as rich as blank paper. Walking charactertures most of them, that are as flat as the jokes they deliver.

To summarize, I would describe the show the same way as moldy bread. Not fun to consume anymore. But that’s what I do. I consume trash, and this has been “Garbage of the Season” with me...GotS! Leave your thoughts about Vlad Love in the comments below and I’ll see you in the next review. Roll the outro…

*A video showing John Travolta doing squats starts playing*

The End...

Vlad Love, a show full of simps, made for simps and brought into life by a genius team full of simps. This is, Mamoru Oshii shitposting on modern anime culture.

With constant spreading of otaku culture, we are now at a stage where consuming anime is not leered by surrounding, something which we can not imagine in late 90's or early 2000's. With the increment in audience demand, anime has delved into more and more varieties. There’s a demand of everything seeing animated by a Japanese studio. We are ready to evaluate ANYTHING drawn by them.
Despite however, how has this affected the creative talents? ... With keeping in mind the type of audience you are making anime for, what should be the proper attitude?
How many shows truly feels like an inspired product, where you can find love and caress poured into every episodes? I'm talking about the rewarding factor. A show made with your 100% and a show made with 50% of your intellect somehow ended up having same level of evaluation. Because you know, "this is just an anime", "anime is trash so am I",
This is how present day otaku looks like. A medium full of simp consumers who are ready to take anything that is, hand-drawn and animated by a Japanese studio.

"Vlad Love" is a show full of simp characters, just like viewers. They simp for a vampire beauty called Mai Vlad Transylvania (400 years old, worry not) who does nothing but sucks your blood. Sounds familiar right? She truly gives you nothing but the sense of watching her physical beauty unfolded before you. In return she'll suck your blood, and she does need a lot of blood. Not even just that, the types of blood she imbibes makes differences in her personality ; if she drinks a violent person's blood she gets violent, she'll get stinky if she drinks a stinky degenerate's blood (looking at you, weebs).
She is loved by everybody but you are not. She stays pure because you won't like another person tickling her. She takes everything from you (takes 500k yen to dance with her) but gives nothing (you are not allowed to touch her!)
She won't be yours because she is for everybody. You can’t stay still without seeing her because you are a simp.

In simple word, Mai Vlad Transylvania (coolass long anime name) checks every waifu standard. She'll give you the best smile you can imagine, will depend on you since she can't live without drinking your blood, will listen your blabbering but somehow she won't be yours, since she's for everybody. Oshii created a perfect metaphor of waifu culture, using Mai as the centrepiece, presenting how it lets you become more and more obsessive with something which has no returns. The main heroine Bamba presents her blood as favour, gets sucked up everyday and feels grossed when Mai drinks an ugly person's blood. Bamba has only one thing to do, pleasing Mai. Same as weebs who want nothing but her waifu's smile.

Characters in Vlad Love are more or less cantered around this theme. Most interesting of them is the Cinema Club president, Watabe Maki, who makes movie/documentary/PV featuring Mai. And she does a horrible job at making, being the knowledgeable on movies but naive on making movies. She knows "Failure is the pillar of success" so she isn’t afraid if her movie gets booed by audience. She's so confident on making the perfect movie that she ends up making nothing but garbage.
Sounds familiar? Currently the least-rated anime on MAL is airing, we all are familiar with the type of confident directors like Maki.

Another character which takes my interest, is the disciplinary committee girl named Jinko. She's so obedient to rules, craves for perfection and doesn’t like it when it goes into unholy hands. She ends up taking the director position for a stage drama in school festival since everyone else was slacking off. With a cast full of inexperienced actors her project didn’t have a chance of succeeding. As it turns out, the serious stage play becomes a chaotic comedy show. Her perfect image was in stake, but plot twist, she received huge applaud because guess who was in the stage? Yeah, Mai, her charm swells over every negatives of an otherwise shit product. This leaves an impact on Jinko as her view of being obedient to rules gets challenged and she accepted the new meaning of success, leads to the hot sensei commenting "Finally she's on our team now!" (Team full of characters who don't take their job seriously)

With Mai as the waifu, Bamba as the simp viewer, Maki who's all for naught making a good movie and Jinko who understands efforts do not get acknowledged here, we got the image of how present day anime works.

Your project will be praised if it has a waifu like Mai
You shouldn’t care about quality because there are simps like Bamba who are all ready to buy your shit if it has Mai
You don't need to bother on making good product because you believe that your failure of this time will lead you to your future success
And you don't even need to put 100% of your efforts because they won't be rewarded with proper recognition.

This is the sad reality of anime, a veteran like Oshii understands it better. I call him a simp earlier, mainly because only a simp for animation can afford to make a bizarre shitposting on the medium. Unlike Bamba though, he's self-conscious of his love for this medium. Seems like producers at IG port gave him a budget to do whatever his mind wants to play with and that's how he created the gorgeous looking shitposting namely this, breaking his long hiatus from anime industry.


Talking about it's production side, this looks gorgeous. Character design is stunning (Mai and Maki have the most complimentary design to their character) , there are tons of comedic faces drawn which is a sign of creator's goodwill, background art and colour design managed to create the perfect atmosphere, from horror to comedy to casual life. Impressive and strong drawings, with countless reference to many old movies, in dialogues as well. There are two Opening, both of them are eye-catching and I liked "Winds of Transylvania".
One of the most impressive aspect of Vlad Love is the voice acting. Veteran seiyuu like Romi Park and a bunch of other popular seiyuu including Hayami Saori, Ayane Sakura, Hikasa Yoko and Miyake Kenta putting an unbelievably strong performance. Specially Sakura Ayane recently has been torturing her vocal cord with Gabi's screaming in ep65 of Attack on Titan and here Bamba takes a lot of vocal power. Everyone did a good job at showing their skills, this really is a blessing for any seiyuu fans in general.

However, this isn’t a show which can be enjoyed regardless of your mood. Not every episodes are as endearing as the others. There’s a lot of dialogues which hardly makes sense to any casual viewers like me. Not much to say about music, this is certainly not the most Impressive work of Kenji Kawai.

Vlad Love is meant for everybody, but certainly not to be enjoyed by all. Maybe after years of burning out with anime, you'll return to this show and laughed at how much it tried to tell. This is truly "Mamoru Oshii shitposting" which is better than most unfortunately uninspired anime and I'm all in for it. If not anything, you should watch this because it has beautiful sexy girls. Who doesn’t like them?