Correction: There is only one season of this anime available at the moment. The second season is confirmed though. I saw two discs in the case and assumed it was two seasons, but the second disc is more episodes of season one.

Call of the Night was an anime I bought over the summer, but hadn’t had time to watch yet. As part of The Halloween Spirit, I decided to unwrap the Blu-ray and give it a try (the story is about vampires).

And I am very glad that I did.

The premise of the show seemed interesting, which is why I bought it in the first place, but I think they over-delivered on the premise.

I don’t want to give too many things away, because I think most things are better experienced and discovered during the actual watching of a show, but the main log-line is this: Call of the Night is a romantic comedy about a boy (fourteen) and a vampire who have to fall in love in order for the boy to be turned into a vampire too, which is something that he wants. So the vampire, whose name is Nazuna, and the boy, Ko, come to an agreement whereby Nazuna gets to feed on Ko’s blood in exchange for her letting him try to fall in love with her. Because in this version of the vampire legend, a vampire can only change a human into a vampire if the human is in love with the vampire, not simply by biting them.

That might sound like a strange twist to the legend, but when they explain it, it actually makes more sense than the other way. If a vampire can turn a human into a vampire just by biting them, then every time they feed they could potentially create “offspring” and pretty soon everyone would be a vampire, unless they kill their prey every time, which opens them up to attack or discovery, and could result in all of the prey ending up dead eventually. And it’s made clear these particular vampires we meet aren’t really the killing type, or at least are reluctant to do so. They sort of trick their prey into letting them near enough to bite, in pretty creative ways.

Anyway, so the episodes revolve around the two of them hanging out and having fun for the most part, at night of course, which might sound boring but is actually pretty entertaining. Again, I don’t want to get too much into specifics, but there hasn’t been a boring episode in the first ten or so that I’ve watched. And they bring more people that they meet into their orbit in interesting ways.

And I think the reason it isn’t “boring” is for the same reason we talked about in the post about Conan the Destroyer where Orson Scott Card talked about the imperative importance of the relationship between the characters. And its development. And they do a really good job of that in this story.

Their “problem” is that Ko doesn’t know what love is, he’s emotionally detached but really wants to be a vampire, and Nazuna, even though she is the quintessential seductive vampire, is almost terminally embarrassed by actual lovey dovey stuff. She literally turns bright red and freezes. So that’s their hangup.

I haven’t made it all the way through the first season, there are two as of now (the manga it’s based on went for five years evidentally), but I’ve watched around ten or so. They’re really good. The closest comparison I could give to them would be Dagashi Kashi, if you know that show. It’s one of my favorites. Nazuna sort of reminds me of Hotaru, both in the way she looks and how she acts. Which is a good thing.

And for those of you who actually care about such things, there are a lot of moments that are very suggestive–maybe the whole thing is, they are constantly contriving ways to get Nazuna in some compromising situations–but the fan service and that sort of thing is actually pretty tasteful. There’s nothing cheap or embarrassing that I’ve seen yet, and they’re not exploiting their female characters. But it is a romance with a female vampire–it’s supposed to be kind of hot. She’s a biter after all.

This is a discussion about anime and fan service that would take it’s own post. Or posts. I just mention it here for those of you wondering.

Anyway, I know this is a short review but I don’t want to spoil too many things.

I’m not really a romantic comedy guy. For one, I’m more of an action and adventure kind of movie watcher, or science fiction and fantasy. Two, there are very few romantic comedies that succeed at being both funny and romantic, it’s usually one or the other, and then the whole experience doesn’t really work as intended. And usually, it’s a success in the comedy department, but not the romantic one, and that’s because in order for the comedy to work, one of the characters has to be sort of a clown or a heel. But that makes it hard for the romance to work. Dave Farland, in one of his workshops, pointed out that in order for an audience to love “them” (the couple), and want “them” to be together, they have to love each of the characters individually. So you can’t shortchange the guy’s POV for example in a romance novel, even though the genre is for women readers and usually from the female character’s point of view (generally speaking here), because the reader still has to fall in love with the male character.

The Princess Bride is a story that got this balance right between the two romantic love interests, while also managing to be funny (I have a guilty pleasure for Mannequin also for some reason). Call of the Night is another rom-com that has made my list of successes. I’m awarding it five stars in the form of Pellegrino bottles (and just for the record, there is some action in the forms of fight scenes with other vampires, in case you’re wondering):

P.S. I just realized that I must like female characters with purple hair.

Note: Unless I specify otherwise, these anime reviews are based on the original Japanese audio with subtitles. I always eventually get around to watching the dubbed version, but I always start with the original Japanese. The reason I do this, in case you’re not fully initiated into the anime subculture (if I can even call it that anymore), is because there can be wild discrepancies between what an English localization team will write and what the original version says. I almost always vastly prefer the original Japanese.