The Vampire Dies in No Time: Season 1 – review

Director: Various

First Aired: 2021

Contains spoilers

The Vampire Dies in No Time is an anime based on a manga, and my thanks to Leila for pointing it out. It is a case of the (English) title being literally what happens in the show and it is a comedy, following the general anime/manga comedic strictures. If you generally find comedic anime amusing then you will genuinely find this so. I watched the dubbed version, due to the platform I caught it on, but the English voice acting is actually rather good. Due to this I will put the names of the English voice talent into the review.

Although there are frequently recurring characters (alongside the main characters) it is episodic without an overall arc, indeed each episode can be broken down into (up to) three short vignettes.

Ronaldo and Draluc

In the first episode the vampire hunter Ronaldo (Ian Sinclair) is called to a castle where the nearby townsfolk believe the vampire within, the invincible superior vampire Draluc (Frank Todaro), has kidnapped a young boy. Ronaldo takes on the job but, once he is inside and faces Draluc, the vampire almost immediately dusts. He then reconstitutes himself – this is the key to the title as Draluc will dust at the slightest thing - being hit, sunlight, a loud noise, a shock, harsh words etc. It then turns out that the boy has been sneaking in to play Draluc’s video games when he sleeps through the day and lost track of time.

John

A sequence of events in the castle leads to it being destroyed. When Ronaldo gets back to his office, he finds Draluc there, who has decided to move in as Ronaldo’s roommate. He has also brought his armadillo familiar, John (Ellie Dritch). Ronaldo quickly bonds with John – whose speech is made up of the sound “Nu” – but wants the annoying Draluc out of there. However, one person Ronaldo fears is Fukuma, the editor of his book series The Ronaldo Chronicles. When he is forced to write the second volume, it is discovered that the public love the team up and his publishers expect them to continue working together.

some inferior vampires

I mentioned that Draluc is a superior vampire and there are also inferior vampires – for instance we get a vampire cat, Bosatsu (Jeremy Inman), who has powerful hypnosis powers, a vampire mosquito, a vampiric parasite that latches onto the victim’s groin, looks like massive testes and releases powerful pheromones that makes the victim suddenly popular, and a vampire goldfish to name a few. I should note at this point that there are also vampire vegetables at a couple of points and Ronaldo has a terrible fear of celery. There are a weird and wonderful rollcall of other vampires too, as well as unusually attired hunters – to stand out most hunters wear outfits ranging from a baseball outfit, through lingerie to dressing as a duck. The hunters are freelance and there is an official governmental Vampire Control Division also.

The Vampire Nudenium

A couple of the notable (and recurring) vampires are The Vampire Nudenium (John Stimac) who is a mostly nude vampire whose groin is covered in geraniums, he can control plants and if he feeds a seed to a human he can control them. Another is The Vampire Micro Bikini (Christopher Guerrero), whose bite forces the victim to wear a micro bikini and puts them under his power. Tsujigiri Nagiri (Christopher R. Sabat) is a former serial killer who makes weapons out of his own hardened blood and put his essence int a doll, which made him invulnerable to attacks but it also became a weakness (voodoo style).

a chupacabra

The humour is often derived from Ronaldo’s antagonistic nature, especially with Draluc, but it is also frequently resulting from a particularly anime-specific sexual place. However this is neatly written and whilst the sexual humour can be surreal at times, it manages to walk the line rather than cross it – however it certainly isn’t for kids. The animation itself looks nice but isn’t necessarily anything special. However, if you like the comedic end of anime this one is definitely worth checking out 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.