Presented by O-Taku Manga Lounge,Japan Foundation
KIZUMONOGATARI -Koyomi Vamp-
Directed by Tatsuya Oishi
Director
Tatsuya Oishi
Writer
Tatsuya Oishi
Cast
Hiroshi Kamiya, Maaya Sakamoto, Masashi Ebara, Yui Horie, Miyu Irino, Hochu Otsuka, Takahiro Sakurai
Composer
Satoru Kosaki
contact
Aniplex of America
Official website
“Oishi directs with a confident auteur’s hand... the film shines because of its tone — equal parts horror, avant-garde and slapstick”– Matt Schley, JAPAN TIMES
“It truly is a visual spectacle (if you have the stomach for it)”– Richard Eisenbeis, ANIME NEWS NETWORK
Teenage loner Koyomi Araragi has a memorable encounter one afternoon with a fellow student, the lovely and ebullient Tsubasa Hanekawa, during which she mentions rumours of a beautiful blonde vampire stalking the city. The very same evening, while running an errand, Koyomi follows a trail of blood into an empty train station. It leads him to an even stranger meeting—the vampire in question, splayed helplessly on the platform with her limbs severed and missing. Fierce and haughty despite her incapacitation, the platinum-tressed, golden-eyed, bounteously bosomed monster is Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade, who has lived for half a millennium, and she tells Koyomi that she will graciously allow him to save her life. To do so will cost Koyomi his own life—or at least, any normal human notion of living.
Those unfamiliar with the novels and anime series of the now-extensive MONOGATARI franchise, fear not (or not much, anyway). Extensively revised and reworked (revamped, if you like) from a trilogy of feature films released in 2016 and effectively impossible to find in our part of the world, KIZUMONOGATARI -KOYOMI VAMP- is your starting point, a prequel that chronicles Koyomi’s initiation into the supernatural realm. Overseen by original co-director Tatsuya Oishi, this resurrection retains the distinctive characteristics of his anime work, not just the dynamic battle scenes and elegant aesthetics but the echoes of French New Wave cinema: the inventiveness and irreverence, narrative fragmentation and existential rumination, and flashes of text to underscore the series’ offhanded yet self-aware humour. Sleek, sly, and startling, it’s a grandiose, avant-garde, neo-gothic nightmare, spattered with splashes of teen sex farce and copious quantities of blood. Bite into it! – Rupert Bottenberg
Showings
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