JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood

England in the nineteenth century. A foster child arrives at the house of Jonathan Joestar, son of a wealthy family: Dio Brando. Dio has come out of a poor life and wants only to rise; he begins taking everything in Jonathan's life away from him one by one. Then what a stone mask in the house does becomes clear, and Dio stops being human. Junichi Hayama directs. The source is the first part of Hirohiko Araki's comic. The film's own story is strange. It was shown in cinemas in Japan in 2007 and no home version ever followed; no disc was released, it was not screened again, and it has never been available through any official channel. It is the hardest work in the series to see. The narrative compresses the first part of the comic and the running time is not enough; the characters develop at speed. The later television adaptation covered the same part at far greater length, and that is the version people go to now. Visually it tries to carry the comic's exaggerated poses and use of shadow, and in the action that partly holds. Who it is for: followers of the JoJo series and anyone curious about the history of its adaptations. Who it is not for: it is compressed, insufficient for a newcomer, and there is no legally watchable version of it in any case.