Welcome to animation quick look, in short I watch a few episodes of an animated series and tell you if it’s worth a damn.
Last week, I reviewed Attack on Titan. It was fantastic but also brutal so admittedly I was looking for something a little lighter. Blood Lad is about Staz, a powerful but extremely lazy vampire. He is the boss of a demon territory, but all he really cares about is stuff from the human world, especially anything from Japan. He obsesses over manga (Japanese comics), video games and action figures and doesn’t particularly care about anything else. He thinks it’s a dream come true when Fuyumi, a human girl from Japan somehow has accidentally wandered into the demon world. Unfortunately it’s not long before she’s killed and becomes a ghost. At that point, Staz decides it’s his duty to revive her. Unfortunately, he has no idea how…
If you haven’t watched much anime, Blood Lad might seem pretty unique based on it’s premise, but really it’s not. It’s the Japanese version of your cookie cutter sitcom. There’s nothing horribly wrong with it, it’s well animated, it’s got a few solid laughs but demons and humans interacting and having separate worlds that interact is an extremely common theme in Japanese anime. The characters have extreme reaction to every single thing. They throw in the usual cute furry sidekick. give girls who are clearly of high school age huge tits and make them unusually sexual with constant references to their breasts and fleeting glimpses of nudity for no reason other than titillating desperate virgins. I don’t have an issue with animated nudity or sexuality and it can be used to comedic effect quite well but this just hammers it over your head again and again in every episode and feels extremely pervy.
And as oppossed to Attack on Titan where I watched a bunch of episodes because I was instantly hooked and wanted to keep watching, I watched about five episodes and figured that was enough. And the series is only ten episodes long. Even five episodes in there is clearly some filler material with Staz’s brother only giving him vital info about resurrecting Fuyumi if he’ll go kill a evil monster on the loose terrifying the various demon territories. What is this, an rpg? It’s not like the brother needs Staz’s help in taking the monster down, he’s more powerful than Staz is. It’s more like he feels it’s beneath him to get involved but he still needs to deal with it anyways (that does lead to one really good joke about Staz initially saying no because he just doesn’t give a shit).
The one really unique thing that I actually did enjoy is that most anime don’t really acknowledge that other anime exists and Blood Lad is filled with quick humorous references to things such as Naruto and Dragonball Z and Shonen Jump manga. But it’s not really enough to give the series a unique identity or anything.
If it sounds like Blood Lad is awful, it’s not. Overall I enjoyed it much more than I groaned at it. It’s a perfectly decent enjoyable anime that you can pretty much finish in an afternoon. It’s just doesn’t really do anything to stand out or be original. It’s the Japanese equivalent of a CBS sitcom. You might enjoy it while watching but then promptly forget about it not long after.
Rating: 3/5 Busty schoolgirls being eaten by carnivorous plants.