Kizumonogatari: Koyomi Vamp

An amalgamation of the three Kizomonogatari Films, Tekketsu, Nekketsu and Reiketsu, which are themselves adapted from the second novel in the monogatari series – a prequel to the others – Kizumonogatari – Koyomi Vamp – which premièred at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival - might be said to have a complicated pedigree. Newcomers should not let that put them off, however. Whilst there are peculiarities to the story which only make (a bit of) sense in the context of that other material, including later works in the Monogatari series, it’s easy enough to watch this simply as a story of boy meets vampire, boy goes all out to help vampire, boy discovers that now-powerful vampire might not be very nice. (Unless you’re as dim as he is, there are not really any spoilers there.)

To be fair, the said boy, Koyomi Araragi (voiced by Kamiya Hiroshi) never pretends to be a genius. We first meet him when he’s chatting to one of his classmates, Tsubasa Hanekawa (Horie Yui), confessing that he’s not such a diligent student as to study during Spring Break and anyway, he’s probably going to fail all his subjects. He seems almost as awed by her grades as he is by her breasts, which viewers may also find distracting, not so much because of their unlikely size but because they possess the unusual capacity to blow in the wind. Is she human? Yes, as it turns out, but it also emerges that if she were not, that wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for him.

In the course of their conversation, Hanekawa mentions something which, she says, everyone is talking about: the rumour of a beautiful blond vampire who stalks the streets at night in search of prey. This makes Araragi subsequent actions even stupider. Walking through the city alone at night, he finds a trail of blood leading into a subway station. Without stopping to summon any kind of help, he follows it. it leads a long way – sufficiently so that one imagines five or six people would need to have been drained in order to spill it – but what he finds, instead, is one vampire (Sakamoto Maaya), blond and golden eyed, missing her arms and legs. She still has breasts – each about the size of her head – which serve to rivet his attention. Introducing herself by the unlikely moniker of Kiss-Shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade (which sounds a lot better, though still rather silly, in Japanese), she tells him that she's dying. Won’t he give her all of his blood, to save her life? He dithers. He seems quite attached to being alive, but then again, she’s tragically helpless, and she’s wearing very skimpy clothing. So he says yes.

When he wakes up, he seems less bothered by having come close to death, and having been made into a minion, than by her having taken on the form of a young child, and no longer having the body parts that really mattered to him.

The bulk of the film concerns Araragi’s quest to recover Kiss-Shot’s missing limbs, which are in the possession of vampire hunters called Dramaturgy, Episode and Guillotinecutter. Getting these back allows her to regenerate more fully, recovering her magical powers, and, rather more mysteriously, reacquiring her lingerie. At the first hint of pubescence she goes from being represented as a cute kid to an acceptable object of desire, which might make some sense from a high schooler’s perspective but is decidedly uncomfortable for older viewers. There’s a little bit of rolling back from this later, however, when she accuses Araragi of liking her only when he thought she was helpless and weak. Her full adult form is not about to put up with such behaviour. She’s shrewd and aggressive and gives Hanekawa the rather endearing nickname of ‘Rations’.

Hanekawa. Yes – she sticks around, her comparative maturity going some way towards compensating for her lack of supernatural powers, though of course she still gets kidnapped and her clothes get torn. Her presence allows for more mundane teenage drama to coexist with the high stakes supernatural stuff. Fresh from a battle in which his own limbs have been ripped off more than once, he finds time to lament “Spring Break is an important time for us, but you’re wasting it on someone like me.”

The composite structure of the film means that there’s plenty of plot to hold the action sequences together. These are not always very successful – the movement and the basic thrills are there, but there’s a tendency to resolve apparent defeats or stalemates by just revealing new, hitherto unconsidered powers, and this saps a lot of the tension. The character animation is nothing we haven’t seen before, but the background elements are more successful. The light is managed beautifully in places, especially where it interacts with smoke or mist, and there’s some beautiful work on water and fields. 3D animation techniques lend themselves well to brutalist concrete architecture, with the ruined cram school where Kiss-Shot hangs out a particular delight. There are birds everywhere, contributing to a more layered landscape and also enhancing the audio texture of the film.

In its latter stages, as Araragi begins to face up to his mistakes, the animation becomes much more playful and surreal, breaking with form to introduce curious experimental sequences. This helps to re-energise the film in preparation for its final battles, and it’s all the more effective because it’s not overused. There is competent direction here, and the film will speak well to a very specific kind of viewer. If you have an amputation fetish, it’s probably a must-see.