Blood: The Last Vampire - Coming to a Theater Near You?
Filed under: Animation, Foreign Language, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Deals, Fandom, Remakes and Sequels, Cinematical Indie
With the ever persistent and popular comic book-to-film craze American cinema has been experiencing the past several years, anyone with half a brain has been expecting an eventually slide over into manga and anime titles for motion picture adaptation. A few properties have been purchased, and a few rumors have circulated; no doubt the first few stones in a very possible avalanche; and today another stone joins the slowly increasing trickle. The word on the block is Billy Kong (of Crouching Tiger fame among others) has signed on to produce a live-action version of the popular anime film Blood: The Last Vampire. He plans to shoot the movie in a mix of languages, with English likely featuring preeminent. This will dovetail with a recently announced anime TV series based on the same film.Typically, I'm really hesitant of any suggestion to turn an anime into live-action cinema. They frequently ultra-stylish animation just doesn't tend to translate well into reality, and we here in America have a pretty terrible understanding of the general storytelling and cinematography stylings of the East. However, given that Kong is attached to this film and not a proto-typical American producer*, I think it has a pretty decent chance of translating to live action. To be honest, though, I'm not really a big Blood fan to begin with -- but I'm sure I'll give it a watch just to see how it turns out.
*Don't get me wrong, I love American action as well.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-19-2006 @ 7:26PM
Finished.Law.School said...
Depending on how they recreate the monsters this might turn out ok. Although I am not sure as to whether they could turn it into a blockbuster.
Reply
5-20-2006 @ 1:52PM
ThePete said...
Well, I'm a bit of an otaku, but for some reason I'm on the fence about this. Blood is a great one-off pilot episode for a series, but if I remember correctly it was more of a 45-minute intro to a Japanese video game (yes, the original Blood wasn't even feature length). I definitely think the premise is interesting enough that, even without the monster-style vampires, it could make for a decent live-actioner. However, "the recently announced anime TV series" has actually been running in Japan for a while now. I've seen about 13 of the episodes and while I enjoyed them, they don't feel anything like the original. The original Blood has this great "end of the world" kind of feel to it. As long as the live-action version has that, I'll be happy.
Reply