Review: Dance in the Vampire Bund

From the standout first episode, you know you’re watching something different. Dance in the Vampire Bund shows us a world where vampires step out of the shadows with the wish to establish a home for themselves, the titular bund, and all the forces working against them. Upon this backdrop we follow the lives of Mina Tepes, the ruler of the vampires and Akira Kaburagi, one of her protectors.

In an atypical move, Dance in the Vampire Bund spends much of its first episode using a different narrative style to the remaining series, framing the episode events as a live TV broadcast of a celebrity panel program deciding on whether or not vampires are real, after a woman is attacked and bitten by her assailant, who destroyed the scene as he fled. This of course is largely an engineered stunt to allow Mina Tepes, who has the appearance of a young girl, to reveal the reality of vampires to the world and that she is their ruler.

Akira, the male lead is barely in the first episode, but becomes the viewpoint character for the rest of the series as it returns to a more traditional story format. Akira at first doesn’t remember Mina at all after suffering a head injury a year before the events of the story, but upon meeting her again and having to save her life, the memories start to come back and he discovers that he is something other than human himself. We follow Akira as he takes up his role as sworn guardian of Mina with forays into his school life.

The overarching nature of the plot is surprisingly political, with how the vampires go about establishing the bund and the internal politics of the vampire clans that are sworn to serve Mina, but still vie for power. There are also a variety of forces at work trying to stop the bund from happening or destroying it completely, including both groups of humans and vampires and one organisation formed of both, all running their own schemes. A recurring feature of the story and often the main focus of character development is the subject of promises and of keeping them. The main promise is that of Akira to Mina to always protect her, but as the story swirls along we find that a lot of the motivations of other characters are also based around promises they are trying to keep.

Yuki Saegusa, a school friend of Akira is the main human in the story and leads the peripheral cast made up of other school based characters, along with Mina’s principle protectors and an assortment of antagonists.

The series animation is excellent, with lush colours and fine details. The first two episodes look a little different however, the first because it is largely portrayed as a TV broadcast and the second in which a lot of things appear to have thin blue outlines, for no discernible reason whatsoever. The dub is pleasant, as is the music, and there’s a standout performance from Monica Rial who voices Mina, managing to make it believable that this little girl has lived a very long time and is the absolute ruler of the vampire race.

No review of this series would be complete without mentioning the unsettling content that is likely to make this series somewhat notorious. There is an amount of standard fan service, but it’s never lingering or the series focus and that’s fine, but there’s also bits and pieces of full on nudity, the problem here being that it’s Mina, and it’s not all Barbie doll style. In a way it actually works because it’s either innocent or actually meant to be disconcerting, especially if Akira is around. The real problem for people will arise from a particular scene in the second episode where Mina needs her skin recovered in the gel that stops her from burning up in the sun and for some reason she can’t do it herself…

In the best traditions of ‘if you don’t actually show it, it’s worse’, there are two further scenes that make for particularly uncomfortable viewing given what they imply is going on rather than actually show. One deals with a new vampire being created and another a ‘purity’ exam, which is almost certainly exactly what you’re imagining.

Whilst potentially off putting, it must be made clear that all such scenes have a direct impact on the story and character development and actually work well from a story perspective.

The actual horror aspects of the series, in its bloody action sequences (very nicely choreographed too) somewhat pale in comparison, but it rather depends on what unsettles you more.

The extras are the usual textless opening/closing but with some nice additions. There is a promo video as well as a number of the original Japanese adverts for the series. The most interesting extra is the ‘intermissions’, these are essentially motion comics, where we are treated to what appears to be panels from the manga (in Japanese and I don’t own the manga so can’t be certain) with the words spoken by the voice actors (in Japanese with English subs). The really fun thing is that these take place between the episodes and actually fill in gaps and provide a little more depth to various characters, at least one gives away a fairly major plot point, so I wouldn’t suggest watching them until after the series. Between the actual episodes instead of previews we have ‘Dance with the Vampire Maids’, humorous shorts with chibi-fied characters.

In total, the series is really quite excellent, and well worth a viewing, so long as you’re not easily off put by what some may consider the odd piece of objectionable content.

Ratings
Story
A refreshing take on the standard vampire tale, clever and captivating.
Animation
High quality and slick in the action scenes.
Audio
A fine dub with Monica Rial bringing gravity to the childish-sounding Mina.
Extras
Motion comic ‘intermissions’ and an assortment of trailers and promotional videos for the show.
Overall
Not your typical supernatural fare and benefitting greatly from that fact. Rather enthralling.