Vampire Hunter D 2 Bloodlust

Short Summary: Evil vampire kidnapping or Young Vampire Love? That is the eternal question. A group of Bounty Hunters, the Marcus brothers are hired to find and kill Meier Link, a vampire who kidnapped a young girl named Charlotte (By young we mean about 16). Her father wants her back, unless of course she's been changed, in which case, he wants her dead. But two things are keeping the Marcus Brothers and their protege Leila from getting that bounty and killing Meier. 1: D's been hired as well, and you best believe you can't compete with his mad vampire Hunting skills, and 2 the fact that Charlotte is in love with Meier, which makes more Romeo and Juliette than Kidnapping, really.

Review: Remember the old D movie? Remember how they sort of said "hey, let's make a movie about D and take Yoshitaka Amano's character designs and shove them up our asses!" ? Well, this movie seems to be paying mass pennance for that bad bad decision. They stuck to the character designs! D, instead of being the boring, brown haired macho hunter from the first one, is now the femme bishounen badass that he was always meant to be! Like the original Vampire Hunter D was in its day, so the sequal is now an example of cutting edge anime, with flawlessly smooth animation, intricate character designs, and creepy computer generated background effects. It starts off on a bang, with Meier Link's carriage runnin' through town like a bat outta hell, hell bent on kidnapping Charlotte. As he goes through the town, flowers wilt, lights go out, crosses on top of the buildings melt and implode, and oh yeah, the fountains freeze over from the bottom up, mid trickle. As much as I even hate to admit it, the dubbing was pretty good. D's voice is a pleasantly sexy monotone, Left Hand's is a gratingly sort of old man kind of nag, Leila's is "I think I might be badass, but I'm not quite sure yet, ask me in the morning" typical female anime chick voice. Meier link's voice was sort of weird. It had this funny accent that I couldn't put my finger on, and that in and of itself added to the ambiance rather well. I'm stoked about seeing the Japanese version, though, because D's voice is even better. The badguys were pretty cool, too. The Bloody Countess Carmilla was kind of ridiculous looking at first, but you get used to it real fast, and hey, she's a ghost, so give her some slack, alright? Ben-ge, was the most interesting of the Barbaroi, the race of monsters and creepy crawlies that make things tough for D and the Marcus Brothers. He twists and manipulates his body like cloth, with a Kabuki styled mask, a freaky voice, and oh yeah, he can swim through shadows. If he stabs your shadow, you die.

I only have a couple of complaints, really. And they're typical anime ones. One: As for a plot, it's a pretty typical one. Nothing extaordinarily different or riveting about it. It more serves as the canvas to paint the actual work of art on, that being the animation. And Two: The dialogue was pretty bad in the English version. Absolutely filled to the brim with things that a normal, level headed person would never even DREAM of saying. IE, Leila talking to D, "One of us isn't going to make it out of here alive. And I would like to make a deal. Whoever survives brings flowers to the other's grave. The rain I guess, it makes me sentimental. It's just that I love flowers, and I don't think that anybody's going to be there to bring them to my grave." D agrees, and then, bam, just as soon as she had begun to be sweet, she's all "Shut up, I was only joking about that, stop being so sentimental." Weird things like that that just don't really jive right in English.

The odd thing is, there is no subtitled version available. Did Japanese creators make this purposely in Enlgish? Are they not going to release the subbed version? Is this an American anime?