How could Production I.G. screw this one up so badly? What happenend here? Normally this studio is a guarantee for decent production quality and a plot that makes at least a little bit sense. But here?
Blood-C has nothing of substance to offer in its first episode. There’s nothing going on, there are no characters worth mentioning and there’s no plot you could actually call a plot. The production quality is horribly low and reminds me of xxxHolic that aired so many years ago. It’s as if time stood still. I really don’t want to know how much worse the animation will become when the first episode already has such a low level of quality.
I could forgive the bad production quality if at least the plot would be interesting. But as already mentioned there’s almost nothing. Even worse, the little plot we got wastes an unnecessarily long amount of time by basically doing nothing. The plot in the first half is basically this: After a short talk with her father about stuff I forgot minutes later we see Saya walking to school while singing a random song (Disney style, baby. Even a butterfly accompanies her). Then we’re shown her dull and boring school life which mostly deals about Says so loving her father and a basketball match. Amazingly, this segment proves that Saya is no klutz at all, although the episode introduced her as a massive klutz, falling on her face two times in a row. Talk about contradictory. Then – after more praising her father and unknowingly shooting down a boring love interest – she walks home in a completely empty city.
You know, it’s okay to start things slowly but Blood-C is a bloody joke. Ten minutes of nothing! You could edit this first part down to two minutes and have the same result without losing anything of substance. What’s worse is that the second half of this episode treats us to the same time filler again. Now it’s Saya walking silently for forty seconds towards the enemy (some kind of living statue) on a lake behind the shrine where she lives. Shortly after that we see Saya silently standing in front of her enemy for 35 seconds. The enemy, of course, is also doing nothing.
The reason for the fight is never mentioned so I have absolutely no clue what’s the deal and why I should care about this. Saya comes home, gets the sword for no other reason than to fight and that’s about it. Especially this scene could’ve been used to connect Blood-C to the Blood franchise but it didn’t happen. So I still wonder how the two will come together.
One thing that stands out of this messy episode is the action sequence which is surprisingly well animated and feels down to earth and realistic. Saya isn’t owning her enemy from the start and when she gets thrown around it has a weight and dangerous feeling to it. It’s also nice to see that she seems to have no fleshy moves to win instantly. One thing that totally nags me, though, is another big case of contradictory events. As mentioned Saya at first is unable to cut her enemy so she’s totally overpowered. Some minutes later, though, she’s suddenly able to just that although nothing happened that would explain this change.
Since this anime is a collaboration of Production I.G. and CLAMP it’s a must to mention the visual results. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that when you’ve seen one CLAMP styled anime you’ve seen them all. Blood-C is a perfect example of that statement because over the course of its twenty minutes I constantly thought I’m watching xxxHolic. The characters are elongated beyond recognition, the heads are tiny, the hair is massive and frilly, guys look like Kurogane, there are twins and the spiritual animal has markings on its head. Saya is an especially bad case here because she looks like the child of Kimihiro Watanuki and Himawari Kunogi with her glasses and the abnormally huge amount of frilly and puffy hair.
So all in all there’s nothing I could praise this horrible first episode. The only things it offers are bad production quality, bad design decisions and a non-existent plot. Although I was thinking about blogging this series, the first episode was so much of a letdown that I decided to drop Blood-C. Until another anime blogger mentions an enormous jump of quality I consider Blood-C as a total trainwreck you should avoid like the plague.
