Review for Nightwalker: The Complete Series

Introduction

We must have gone six, maybe seven days without a new anime with vampires released in the UK... You guys must be jonesing for a fix about now. Thankfully MVM have stepped up to the plate and delivered with Nightwalker The Complete Series, also known as Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective. Seriously, I don’t get the fascination with vampires, in any medium. There’s always some movie or TV series in production, some new novel offering a wholly different take on the genre, but then turns out to be exactly the same. You’d think that Dracula would have been enough. Anime, just like any other medium revels in bloodsuckers. It’s the rare show it seems that doesn’t have some be-fanged devil munching on the neck of a poor nubile maiden.


I was ready to give Nightwalker a miss, until I read a little around it. For one thing, it’s a veritable classic, dating from 1998. This is so old that it was made with cel and paint, rather than on computer. I have a soft spot for older anime, there’s less of a predilection for catering to the fan base, fewer of the usual clichés, a refreshing absence of moe, tsundere, yandere, and whatever boxes get ticked off an otaku’s anime clipboard, and there is a certain style and comic sensibility that has been lost in modern anime. The second thing is that the vampire in this show actually looks recognisable to Westerners as a vampire. He drinks blood, doesn’t like garlic, and hates going out in the sun. The usual Japanese vampires have none of these problems, and do all sorts of fantastic things that we wouldn’t attribute to vampires. The second thing is that this show mixes it up a bit, making the vampire protagonist a private eye; it actually predates Angel so a little bit of originality too.


Vampires walk among us. This is actually a good thing, as the bloodsucker Shido is one of the good guys, a private detective who specialises in supernatural cases. He’s trying to escape his dark past and help humanity, which is good for NOS agent Yayoi Matsunaga, whose government job is also to deal with the supernatural, and who relies on Shido’s abilities in her work, much to the disdain of her bosses. But the Nightbreed is on the loose in the city, a far more insidious darkness than vampires, demons that want to leave the darkness and live in the world of light by taking possession of human bodies. The problem is that Shido’s part time secretary Riho has no idea of who he actually is. The real problem is that Shido’s sire, Cain has come to the city, and wants to reclaim Shido into the vampire fold, and wreak his own brand of darkness upon the city.


Nightwalker began life as a series of four OVA episodes, the success of which resulted in another eight being made a couple of years later to get it up to full on TV series (You’re Under Arrest did something similar). It was originally released on DVD in the US by Central Park Media in 2003 although the dub was recorded two years earlier for the VHS release. Siren Visual subsequently licensed it, and released it in Australia back in 2009. MVM have used those masters for the UK release, 12 episodes spread across three discs.


Disc 1
1. A Visitor in the Night
2. The Terms of Stardom
3. A Man on the Run
4. The Golden Dawn

Disc 2
5. Medicine for the Dead
6. The Bottom of a Well
7. A Mother and her Son
8. A Soul Lost in the Darkness

Disc 3
9. Someone Else’s Face
10. The Tear of an Angel
11. A Witch in a Forest
12. Eternal Darkness

Picture

Nightwalker gets a 4:3 transfer across three single layer discs. Siren have given the show an NTSC-PAL standards conversion which brings the show across adequately enough, soft, with a little ghosting and blended frames, but generally clear enough to enjoy. It’s a show that takes place in a lot of night time locales, and detail levels are never spectacular, but it gets the story across. Disc 1 had an issue with pixellation for about 11 seconds, 54:22 into the disc. Fortunately this happens during the opening theme song, so the actual episode itself is unmarred.


Nightwalker is really a tale of two series, the OVA and the TV show. Disc one has the OVA episodes, and the animation quality here really is quite good, detailed character designs, and with smooth, fluid animation. It’s up there with any other OVA of the period, and really does the story justice. The same isn’t true for the rest of the series, the 8 episodes made afterwards to turn it into a TV series. The character designs take a knock, looking a lot more simplistic, while the animation loses in terms of quality and fluidity. There are a lot more in the way of static scenes in the final eight episodes, and detail levels plunge when it comes to portraying the world designs. On occasion the show will throw in some stock footage from the first four episodes, and the difference in quality is jarring.

Sound

You have the choice of DD 2.0 English and Japanese with an optional translated subtitle track. There is a second subtitle stream on the disc, presumably where a signs track should go, but it is empty. Not that it matters, as Nightwalker is of a vintage when studios used to burn English overlays onto the print and you get a lot of screen captions physically in the image here. This results in a fair bit of redundancy, as the subtitles also translate those signs, and you often get the caption on screen twice. Also this release merely repeats the opening Buck Tick theme over the end credits (a white on black English credit scroll), and omits the original ending.


I went with the original language track, and was happy enough with the actor performances, including an early role for Maaya Sakamoto, and as well as the distinctive strains of Buck Tick, there’s also some clichéd smoky jazz to go with clichéd private detective shtick. The English dub is very much of its age, but it’s energetic and well performed, and even after all this time, a viable alternative to the Japanese audio. That’s useful as the curse of early Siren Visual masters strikes again. This is a title from 2009 from Siren, and as well as duplicating signs translations unnecessarily, subtitles are inaccurately synchronised on disc 2. Disc 3 has fewer of the sync problems, but has a tendency to miss out a line or two in each episode. Oddly enough, disc 1 remains free of such subtitle errors, but is hit by audio drop-outs (aside from that video glitch) in both languages at 49:58, 59:46, and 1.28:00.

Conclusion

I’ve been reviewing Cowboy Bebop of late, and for a while I was basking in the glow of nostalgia, wholly convinced that they don’t make ‘em like they used to, and that anime used to be better when I were a lad. As the clichés continue to reverberate through my skull, Nightwalker comes as a timely cold shower, a reminder that all that is old is not necessarily gold. Nightwalker, just like Bebop dates from 1998, but that is all that the two shows have in common. Nightwalker isn’t a show that you’re going to recall fondly two years after you watch it. It’s not a show that will induce you to double dip should anyone re-release it with 5.1 audio, commentaries, and extras. And it certainly isn’t a show that will have you beating down the door of a distributor the second a Blu-ray is announced. It’s just not that good. For half of the show, it’s a mediocre monster of the week show, given a little film noir makeover. It’s utterly disposable and wholly forgettable.


Half of the show is better than that though, although not by much. It’s as if all the creative juices went into the first four episode OVA, and the subsequent episodes were tacked on as an afterthought to cash in on its success. It still starts off as a monster of the week show, introducing its characters and developing them, as well as developing the Cain arc over its run. As mentioned, the animation is strong here, but the writing is sharp too, the character interplays are interesting, and there is a lot more wit to go with its dark and moody horror. It also plays up the gumshoe aspect well. It’s a well formed miniseries, and it’s obvious that it’s inspired by Interview With A Vampire, with Shido the ‘good’ vampire trying to go straight, using his powers and his position as detective to battle the demonic menace of the Breed. Cain is his sire, and he wants to bring Shido back into the vampire fold. Riho is a schoolgirl who works part-time as his secretary, unaware of his supernatural nature. Guni is a fairy (more of an imp really) who tags along with Shido to offer support, and wisecracks. Yayoi is a government employee who hires Shido as part of her duties to fight the Breed, and also offers her blood so he can stave off the cravings.


Nightwalker establishes the rules and the back story here. Shido has no memory of his life as a human, and Cain is holding that knowledge over him. Vampires don’t like the light, while Shido can use his blood to form a blade with which he dispatches the Breed. It all develops in an entertaining way, to a quite dramatic climax, where Shido chooses between his life in the present, and his missing past, with the added development that Riho discovers his true nature, and gets fully inducted into that life. It’s a really nice, entertaining arc, with the proviso that it’s done in the clichéd way that several supernatural anime of the period did, coming across a little as a cross between Vampire Princess Miyu and Ghost Sweeper Mikami. It’s not quite as dour as the former, or as wacky as the latter.


Then the final eight episodes arrive, and as the quality of the animation subsides, the rules go out of the window. Suddenly vampires are fine with daylight (although they prefer cloudy days), Shido’s blood can make more than just swords, with whips and bullets as well, and suddenly Shido remembers his past. The arc structure of the first four episodes is lost in favour of a wholly monster of the week scenario with little interconnectivity, and the characters and the writing become a wit free zone. While the first four episodes had pep and vigour, these are more likely to induce sleep. There are a couple of standout episodes though, with The Bottom of a Well having a non-standard scenario, with Shido trapped at the bottom of the aforementioned well, along with a Breed, and a little girl, with his hunger continuing to grow, and the demon taunting him. Someone Else’s Face is a straightforward tale just like the others, but it adds something by being about Shido’s arrival in Japan, and how he met Guni and Yayoi.


The standout here is the final episode, Eternal Darkness, which sees Shido’s world fall apart when Riho succumbs to her true nature. There is a delicious twist in the tale though, delightfully left hanging for a later series that as so often happens never materialised, but if the rest of the series had been on the same level as the OVA and the final episode, maybe Nightwalker wouldn’t have just been a footnote in anime history. Nightwalker gets a pretty agreeable English dub, which is good as the subtitling is lacking on the final two discs. Not that it matters as it’s really only the first disc that has the worthwhile episodes.