Vampire Holmes: Season 1 – review

Director: Yoshinobu Sena

Release date: 2015

Contains spoilers

Vampire Holmes was a smartphone game that this anime series (of 13 episodes) was created to advertise. Just because a series was designed specifically to advertise another thing does not necessarily make it bad… it being bad makes it bad.

The episodes come in, mostly, between 2 and 3 minutes (and that includes opening and end credits. The slightly longer episodes are extended with actual adverts for the game. The opening credits are, however, the (not really so very-)saving grace as these at least have vampire imagery – fangs, fang marks and crosses abound.

Holmes and Hudson

The actual show sees Hudson (Nobunaga Shimazaki) take the case of the missing Marybeth to the financially bankrupt Holmes (Yoshinobu Sena) – who seems to do nothing with it. Also appearing on occasion are Christina (Ayahi Takagaki), Holmes’ landlord and Kira (also Ayahi Takagaki) a talking demon cat. The only suggestions of vampires through the anime series is the idea that Holmes will melt in the sun during the day (never actually shown) and him collapsing due to anaemia.

the twisted box

A werewolf does come into things – and at the end Holmes seems to have dealt with that and found Marybeth, it’s just… we don’t see any of that. We just get a series of chaotic images using normal anime and chibi style. The one moment where the series became clever was where Holmes opens a ‘twisted box’ and he becomes almost Picasso-esque in design and Kira moves from Chibi to realistically drawn – the fourth wall is broken as this is explored but in episodes that barely last two minutes it isn’t for long.

Christina

As for getting the DVD… well, let’s just say I hadn’t realised that this was what I was going to get and may well have avoided it had I known. The 2 out of 10 this is getting is for the twisted box concept, otherwise the score would have been much lower. This is one to be avoided unless you are a collector of all things vampire (and then we are really talking a name and the credit imagery) or a collector of all things anime.

The imdb page is here.