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.
