Vampire Hunter D

An animated film set in the far future. The year is 12090. Civilisation has collapsed; people live in villages and nobody goes out at night. What holds the region is a family of noble vampires and the mutants they made. A young woman named Doris is attacked on her farm one night and bitten. After a certain time she will turn. A stranger comes to the town. His name is only D; he rides, says little and hunts vampires. Doris hires him. D is not entirely human himself; that is the tension at the centre, and the villagers fear him as well. There is a talking face in his left hand that keeps needling him. The narrative moves towards a castle. The count's daughter, mutant guards and the townspeople's own calculations come into it in turn. The air is a mixture of gothic horror and science fiction: a hunter on horseback, laser weapons, ruined castles and machines together. The source is Hideyuki Kikuchi's series of novels; the character designs are by Yoshitaka Amano. Toyoo Ashida directed. It is one of the known examples of the animation made directly for video in the 1980s and found an audience outside Japan as well. A familiar choice for anyone who likes dark fantasy animation. For a viewer expecting the measures of animation today, the technique belongs to its period and the movement is limited.