Sunday 14 July 2013

Blood Lad - Episode 2

It's off to the human world we go for this second episode of Blood Lad, as Staz seeks to honour his promise to return Fuyumi to life and resurrect her body.  Of course, he doesn't have any ulterior motives for visiting the human world at all...

Rather handily, the curtain to the human world leads directly into Fuyumi's world, although Staz is decidedly disappointed by how clinical and bare it looks.  Still, there's little time to consider this, as Fuyumi tries to return to her normal life only to find questions everywhere about where she's been and who the Hell the creepy guy now hanging out with her is.  Luckily, Staz has an answer for this, that being his saliva in distilled form, which allows him to exert his will over anyone in range of a spray of said spittle and make it seem as if Fuyumi was never away.


Although is this really what Fuyumi wants?  She thinks not, but Staz's heart is certainly in the right place, and with her demonic body unable to stand long in the human world without disappearing entirely Staz is the only one capable of sustaining her.  There are only more problems rather than solutions on the horizon however, as Staz and Fuyumi run into the original owner of the portal they used to travel to the human world, Bell Hydra.  Although the portal was stolen from her, that doesn't stop her from kidnapping Fuyumi and getting Staz to run errands for her - then again, it seems like she might also have some useful information that will be of interest to Fuyumi and her hopes of becoming human again...

While its low budget animation quality certainly doesn't help (at times this show looks more like a Flash animation than anything else), there also isn't really anything else much to sink my teeth into (with every pun intended) from this series thus far.  It's successful humour is pretty thin on the ground, Fuyumi is perhaps the most boring female character ever to grace an anime adaptation (although at least her stupidity is used for at least one decent gag), and although its plot is fast-moving, that doesn't really deflect from the fact that it feels arbitrary and by the numbers at this point in time.  Perhaps it'll find its feet as it extends its cast, but I'm not holding out much hope at present.

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