2011/07/28

CXXVIII: "Chibi Vampire/Karin"

Here we go again, with another crack at an anime dealing with the supernatural, revisiting the matter of "human X vampire". This time around is Karin, legally known in the English manga as Chibi Vampire. It tells of a vampire that is... different from the kind you usually hear of.

Meet Karin Maaka, the eldest daughter of a family of vampires that moved to Japan some time ago before the initial episode. Compared to her parents, Karin and her sister Anju are special cases. In Anju's case, she is a normal vampre, but not fully awakened as such, and can still walk during the day under certain conditions. However, Karin's is another story. She walks quite sound during the day, and lacks many traits seen in the normal vampire. Oh, and there are those two little details: she has an urge at a certain time period when she enters a berserker-state after not sucking blood for too long. Second, should she still be unable to suck any blood, or try to hold the urge in, she suffers a massive nosebleed. This fault makes her kind of an un-vampire.

It doesn't help when transfer student Kenta Usui appears, and her urges shoot ahead of schedule. After Kenta manages to find out about her being a vampire (he speculates this after seeing teeth marks on him mom's neck), he is entrusted by her family not only her secret, but also the knowledge of their existence. And with his life already hard, he's gonna have to man up for both responsibilities.

Karin is a 24 episode anime made in the J.C. Staff Studio, with Geneon licensing the anime, though thanks to a deal made with them, Funumation has exclusive rights to distribute some of Geneon's works in North America via DVD, this being among them. Karin is the orignal name of the series from Japan, and though the manga's title was changed to Chibi Vampire, the anime retained the original title. Once more, there's a plot difference between the manga and anime. Some characters were made specifically for the anime, such as Winner Sinclar, and some for only manga, like Glark. Because of this, the antagonist for the anime was Victor Sinclair, grandfather of Winner and strong-willed vampire hunter. The anime's plot dealt with him, while the manga's was much more complex and mature, mostly due to discovery for what Karin REALLY was. Karin is voiced by Chelsea Curto, and Kenta is voiced by Kahav Rom in English.

Again, a concept of "human x vampires" that isn't new to media, but Karin was sort of humorous in the aspect. I'm grading a 7.1 of 10 here.

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