Vampire Princess Miyu

1988. OAV. (4 X 30 min.) Horror/supernatural drama. org Narumi Kakinouchi (manga). dir Toshihiro Hirano. scr Noboru Aikawa. mus Kenji Kawai, Kouhei Tanaka. des Narumi Kakinouchi, others. -bc

Vampire Princess Miyu focuses on an adolescent female vampire in modern Japan. An unmistakable work of Japanese anime art comparable to Tale of Genji, it’s less a horror show than a piece of gothic poetry devoted to mood and atmosphere.

The title character is a strange and powerful young girl of about thirteen who is a vampire and must drink blood to live, but is not bound by the normal restrictions associated with vampiric lore. She attends middle school, but is often accompanied on her exploits by a towering, masked mute figure in a dark blue cloak named Larva who functions as her protector. Her mission is to track down, battle, and send back into the darkness a breed of malevolent creatures called shinma, a combination, we are told, of god and demon. Such a mission often leaves human casualties in its wake.

Entering the fray is an attractive twenty-something female medium, or spiritualist, named Himiko, who is called in to investigate strange goings-on and who initially distrusts Miyu, but gradually grows to accept her as an ally, although never sanctioning her essentially cold-blooded nature. Himiko is not the most powerful of psychics, but she is a contemporary woman who serves as a link for the audience between the modern world and traditional occult beliefs.

“Unearthly Kyoto” introduces Himiko, who arrives in Kyoto to investigate the case of a princess who is in a coma. Mysterious murders abound that appear to be the work of a vampire. Himiko meets and suspects Miyu and eventually has a confrontation with her.

“A Banquet of Marionettes” has Miyu and Himiko investigating the disappearances of schoolkids who have left behind wooden life-sized marionettes. Eventually Miyu locks horns with the culprit, a beautiful shinma named Ranka, and the fate of Kei, the school’s handsomest boy, lies in the balance.

In “Fragile Armor,” an armored monster appears and threatens Larva. In the course of the episode we see a flashback explaining who Larva is and how he came to be Miyu’s silent companion.

“Frozen Time” takes us back to Miyu’s origin, where we learn the story of her childhood, the fate of her parents, and how she came to embark on this mission.

Vampire Princess Miyu (1997, TV, 25 eps.)

The characters are all beautifully designed and executed, and many look like created works rather than living, breathing human beings, which is, after all, the point. Miyu has a slightly ethereal, idealized quality befitting her status as an immortal being with supernatural powers. Himiko is dressed like a modern young professional and wears a cross around her neck. She is the most realistic character in the series—dead serious, determined, yet vulnerable and in need of the occasional cigarette break.

Traditional Japanese culture plays an important part in the series. In “Banquet of Marionettes,” Kei and Ranka perform kabuki-like movements on a stage set up in an abandoned church. On the soundtrack we hear kabuki chants and sounds made by wooden clappers. As the characters behave like puppets, a bunraku puppet theater curtain falls behind them.

Other aspects of traditional culture are found in the kimonos favored by so many of the characters, including Miyu, Ranka, and Miyu’s mother. Most of the houses in the series look like traditional dwellings from an earlier era—spare, sparsely furnished, with sliding doors and shingled roofs. In the second volume the houses are rendered mostly in black and white but with meticulous detail, and the background paintings, many also black and white, resemble traditional charcoal landscape paintings.

Vampire Princess Miyu is a rare anime work devoted to building a mood and using all artistic devices available to sustain that mood. It is, perhaps, the Japanese equivalent of gothic horror, immersing itself in the supernatural elements that are an important part of Japanese horror anime, while at the same time avoiding the viscera and violent thrills normally associated with the genre. It offers an intriguing set of characters and a series of stunning visual tableaux depicting a contemporary Japanese landscape intersecting with historical currents traversed by a steady stream of mystical entities.

Miyu is a fascinating character. She is extraordinarily beautiful and angelic-looking but not above creating casualties of her own to satisfy her own needs. She never gets emotionally involved but always stands back and points out how human folly creates its own victims. She accompanies her pronouncements with an eerie, girlish laugh that can be downright chilling. There is some sexual frisson in Miyu’s dealings with the handsome boys she encounters, as in “Unearthly Kyoto,” when she caresses a boy’s face and steps up on tiptoes to apply her teeth to his neck, giving off a slight but unmistakable erotic tremor.

The 1997 TV series played up the confrontations between Miyu and her growing coterie against the shinma-of-the-week. Thanks to Miyu’s alliance with a group of girls at her middle school, the series came to resemble a horror version of Sailor Moon, but with only one girl boasting superpowers. There are echoes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well, since Miyu more clearly adopts the pose of a do-gooder. As a result, she displays little of the seductive amorality that informed her character in the OAV, nor does she allow her own appetites to come into play. She even has a cute, mystical animal sidekick that talks named Shiina. While the settings are often very dramatic and the atmosphere enhanced by a sweeping and colorful new score by Kenji Kawai, the whole enterprise was significantly diluted for television.

Toshihiro (Toshiki) Hirano directed all four OAV episodes as well as the later TV series. He was animation director on Urusei Yatsura and went on to direct the OAV series Dangaioh, Iczer-One, Rayearth, and Hades Project Zeorymer, as well as the TV series Magic Knight Rayearth, Great Dangaioh, and Devil Lady.

Narumi Kakinouchi was character designer and animation director on Miyu and creator of the manga. She was an animator on Urusei Yatsura and Macross and animation director for Megazone 23.

Volume 4, “Frozen Time,” tells a sad and haunting tale that takes us back a few years to when Miyu first had to come to grips with her vampiric condition and legacy as an adolescent, forcing her parents to pay a price so she could remain in the world and protect it from the shinma. Himiko’s connection to this past is revealed as well.

advisory Despite the theme, there is no display of overt sex, violence, or gore. Some of the dark imagery may seem scary and disturbing to the very young (under nine).