Vlad Love

Vlad Love is a really peculiar anime series. At first, it all seems like a sort of madcap comedy, as there are all sorts of crazy things going on and they feel like they were just thrown together in a really disorganized kind of way. However, the show then starts gradually turning into more of a peculiar homage to various movie classics as it goes on and becomes less and less funny and more serious in tone. I still cannot make up my mind whether I liked the way it unfolded in that way. Well, okay - so the creators of this anime series just really like movies, not necessarily monster movies, although due to the subject matter, monster movies are predominantly featured. It starts off full of some insane ideas, eccentricities, frenzied energy, and mild violence (it is a slapstick comedy, after all, according to the tags). The show then gradually turns into a kind of strange mash-up of different scenes and storylines on all sorts of themes (mostly inspired by movie classics), and the initial playfulness and imaginative storyline start to be much more about various expressive animation techniques and styles. On the one hand, I liked that part of the anime series, because some of those hand-drawn scenes and static images are really impressive and counterbalanced my rather cold indifference to the animation that is normally used in this anime series but which I found rather underwhelming. However, on the other hand, the static images also do seem to spoil the fluidity and natural course of the storyline from time to time. Another peculiar thing about this show is the way they alternate between the two openings. Musically, I like them both, one is delightfully energetic, whereas the other is more romantic and sentimental. Originally, I thought that they had designed it in such a way that one would be the opening for the crazier episodes, and the other would be the opening for the more dramatic ones (which would have been a brilliant move), however, after a few episodes, I realized this was actually not the case. As a comedy, I think there were some amusing moments, and I found a few of the jokes were very funny. However, at the same time, a lot of the jokes were a bit weak and I did chuckle a little, but nothing more. For every one of those moments, there were two or three others with jokes that left me completely cold, and truth be told, I did not find it very funny at all, I just raised an eyebrow and thought "really?!?". In other words, my fun-o-meter was showing that this anime series was rather average in terms of the number of jokes that were actually funny. As far as the characters go, I thought the episodes where Banba was the main focus and the driving force of the storyline were a bit more entertaining. The teacher/school nurse who turned up sometimes and her "looong story" was probably the movie homage I found the most intriguing. I thought the other characters, I am afraid, were really forgettable and rather nondescript, and that includes Mai herself, unfortunately. I would probably make an exception for the fathers of the two main female protagonists, as I would for the dashing cosplayer girl because I actually thought she was properly bonkers... So this is a peculiar, original but also contradictory anime series. However, I now have to rate and describe my impression of it somehow, so I am going to give it a long, hard look and after a lot of thinking regarding everything I have written here, probably award a very slight thumbs up. After the first season - I think it is slightly above average. 6.1/10. (03/13/2021) (less) (more)