Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

Black Blood Brothers: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie Review

Can you sink your teeth into this vampire anime or does it suffer from iron poor blood?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 19, 2011

Be thankful for small favors: for once a dystopian anime society is not the result of a nuclear holocaust. In Black Blood Brothers, everything that’s wrong with the world (and there’s a lot wrong with the world) can be traced to those nefarious blood sucking walking dead, vampires. Now don’t get me wrong—some vampires are okay sorts, as any teenager girl infatuated with the Twilight franchise will no doubt insist, and that’s the case (more or less, anyway) in Black Blood Brothers. While every vampire has that nasty habit of “vantink to drink your blood” (to not exactly quote Bela Lugosi), some of the fanged ones in Black Blood Brothers are generally fine, upstanding citizens, at least when they’re not lying down in their coffins to catch a good day’s sleep. Black Blood Brothers, as with so many animes that ultimately wash up on the West’s shores, was originally a light novel series, and that series provided a great deal of background information that the anime references without ever providing a wealth of detail about. The hero of Black Blood Brothers is vampire Jiro Mochizuki, also known as The Silver Blade, a vampire who a decade or so prior to the series' main timeline helped in an internecine war between vampire clans and managed to kill a notorious leader of the Kowloon Clan known as The Kowloon King. The Kowloons were “special” vampires who could pretty much magically morph any bite victim into a Kowloon, whether that victim were a human or a non-Kowloon vampire. The Kowloons’ reign of terror brought the existence of vampires into the public consciousness, and only after the war had been settled (with the Kowloon King’s defeat) was the public at large led to believe that all vampires had been vanquished. What actually happened is that the non-Kowloon vampires had been sequestered to a Special Zone, a secret city where they were allowed to live (and/or un-die) in peace. The surviving Kowloon Children were not allowed access to the Special Zone, and it is their attempts to infiltrate “honorable” vampire society that informs much of the anime version of Black Blood Brothers.

Vampires sequestered to their own “special zone”? Fans of Dance in the Vampire Bund may be shouting, “Been there, seen that!” And there actually are some analogs between the two series. That said, Black Blood Brothers is decidedly less salacious than Dance in the Vampire Bund, and it also introduces a fitfully amusing but tonally odd comedic element that seems distinctly at odds with the overall dramatic goings-on of various clans, their bloodlines, and Jiro’s attempts to reingratiate himself into the Special Zone. Jiro has the added impetus of wanting to find a safe haven for his young brother Kotaro, a boy who evidently has some great destiny to fulfill as is repeatedly hinted at throughout the series’ twelve episodes. Kataro’s actual background is revealed in one of the series’ more interesting denouements, but one which has a certain “ew” factor if it’s thought about for too long.

Black Blood Brothers is one of those middling anime series which is undeniably entertaining but which rarely rises to any grand heights. Jiro and Kotaro are compelling enough characters, and their somewhat combative aide Mimiko also has her good points. But part of the problem with this series is it has been extracted from a somewhat complex light novel series and the series’ creative staff seems to think that most people tuning in are going to be coming to Black Blood Brothers with enough built in knowledge of the interrelationships and backstories to give the viewing experience context. Without that context, the show seems awfully disjointed at times and character motivations, even those which are ultimately explained, may seem downright confusing at times.

The other odd element to Black Blood Brothers is the weird, almost slapstick-esque comedy angle which is shoehorned into several episodes. Jiro starts to melt in too much light, or when he mysteriously appears out of the ocean dragging Kotaro in tow, bystanders are misdirected by Mimiko’s frantic ravings that it’s all a movie scene being filmed. The comedy in and of itself isn’t bad (it isn’t necessarily good, but I digress), but it’s an odd element to a series that is otherwise a passably interesting revisionist take on vampire lore. Black Blood Brothers would have done much better to have completely jettisoned this angle, and to have concentrated more on the ancient feud between Jiro and the Kowloon Children, something that gives the anime some dramatic urgency at times. (Cynics will grow tired of the repeated screaming and grunting between Jiro and the lead Kowloon villain, Cassa, scenes which typically include escalating shrieks and repeated calls of the two characters’ names, to absolutely no purpose).

The series may not be overly exciting, and it is somewhat derivative, but it does offer an interesting take on the whole vampire genre, especially for those who are completists and want every possible iteration of the idiom imaginable. The various bloodlines provide the most compelling reason for interest here, as well as Jiro’s emotional conflicts which come to a head with the interesting (but somewhat disturbing) revelations about who Kotaro is and what his destiny means for Jiro. The series doesn’t exactly come to a definite conclusion, and indeed it seems to be leaving the door wide open for “more adventures” with Jiro, Kotaro and Mimiko. Like any good vampire who wants to stay alive (or at least undead), those further adventures haven’t yet seen the light of day.

Black Blood Brothers: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Black Blood Brothers is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. As with the series itself, there's nothing very remarkable about either the original animation or its (upscaled) high definition presentation. Colors are suitably bold and well saturated, but line detail is often spotty, with some scenes looking relatively sharp and others having a strangely disjointed appearance. While there are few if any compression artifacts per se, the overall look of Black Blood Brothers on Blu-ray is like an incremental step up from a standard upconverted DVD. Clarity is just enough sharper to differentiate this outing from an upconverted DVD, and the saturation of the nicely varied color palette is probably the most memorable thing about this visual presentation, but the series as a whole and this Blu-ray presentation in particular are pretty standard fare from an image quality standpoint.

Black Blood Brothers: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Two lossless audio options are offered on Black Blood Brothers, both via Dolby TrueHD 2.0 mixes, one in the original Japanese and the other an English dub. Once again as seems to be the case with many of these FUNimation releases, the English dub is mixed just slightly higher than the original Japanese track, adding a bit to the "oomph" of the low end. Other than that minor difference, both tracks are virtually identical (other, obviously, than the voice work) in terms of fidelity, balance, score and effects. Dialogue is very well presented on both of these tracks and the choice of which to listen to will probably come down to whether individual viewers want to read subtitles or not. The stereo tracks have a perhaps unusual amount of panning, which helps to create at least a little space, and both tracks have some nice music, including an especially strong closing theme done by Loveholic.

Black Blood Brothers: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentaries for All 12 Episodes. Don't get too excited. These are commentaries by cast members of the original Japanese language version of Black Blood Brothers, with forced English subtitles, and they are largely unlistenable. Screechy voiced girls "ooh" and "aah" and laugh at each other's inside jokes, while an episode plays in the background. For rabid fans only, and maybe not even for them.
• TV Spots (SD; 2:27)
• Original Commercials (SD; 4:29)
• Sneak Peeks (SD; 5:16) is a collection of "coming attractions" from the series.
• Textless Opening Song (HD; 1:32)
• Textless Closing Song (HD; 1:32)

Black Blood Brothers: The Complete Series Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Black Blood Brothers isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also not very exciting or memorable. This is a middling series that has some interesting characters and concepts but which never fully realizes its potential. The series is hobbled by its weird comedic elements when a more straightforward dramatic approach might have been considerably more compelling. The different vampire clans' stories are quite interesting, however, and those who like this sort of neo-Gothic enterprise might find Black Blood Brothers a nourishing enough blend of bloodsuckers to want to check out this release.