Like many anime, Lunar Legend Tsukihime constructs its narrative around a series of martial challenges. From this perspective, it reflects the warrior ethos that still seems to pervade much of Japanese culture. It is an ethos and a character construction that could easily tend towards the bland and the shallow. But this tendency is often held in check by elements that you would not necessarily expect.

The central character in Lunar Legend Tsukihime is not simply a Japanese-style action hero with super-human powers, he is also a confused young man. This quality of confusion, of trying to work out who you are and where you’re going, seems to crop up in a number of anime. In Lunar Legend Tsukihime, for example, an early scene shows Shiki moving in with his sister after his uncle’s death. This is the beginning of a process of reorientation in which memories of Shiki’s past mix with the adjustments he must make to his present situation. In another sequence Shiki kills a vampire: we see him kneeling over the body that is lying in a large pool of blood, then we see him wake up and wonder whether or not the killing was real or imagined. This blurring of the real and the imagined is repeated a number of times throughout these first four episodes of Lunar Legend Tsukihime. By shifting Shiki’s difficulties from a purely physical realm to a perceptual one, his character is constructed very much in terms of alienation, that is, in terms of someone attempting to orientate himself within a universe that is as mystifying as it is familiar. In emotional terms, it imbues his character, which is tinted with the heroic, (at least in the sense of battling monsters and facing fears), with a clearly felt vulnerability. This blurring of the real and the imagined, however, is not simply a strategy of character construction. It also affects the audience who are equally uncertain, at least for a time, as to whether events are meant to have actually occurred or to have been dreamt. This places the audience in the same position that Shiki occupies and effectively creates a bond of empathy with Shiki.

Many anime TV series are made cheaply and quickly, employing an animation style that relies on cost-effective, time-saving techniques such as lower frame rates, minimal movement of characters within the frame, simple facial expressions, an avoidance of directly showing complex movements within a fight sequence, etc. Katsushi Sakurabi, director of Lunar Legend Tsukihime, however, is often able to utilize these limitations to enhance the expressive power of his work. In one of the flashbacks in Lunar Legend Tsukihime, Shiki is gazing at a woman whose beauty entrances him. There is a still shot of her face, with a gentle smile -- only here hair has been animated to softly blow in the wind. (This lack of movement also gives the woman’s face a doll-like quality that, from a Japanese perspective, heightens her sexual allure.) In a strategy characteristic of anime television series, the camera pans past the woman’s face in order to imbue an otherwise static shot with a sense of living dynamism. The gliding quality of this camera movement, however, generates a slightly strange sense of motion mixed with stillness that, within the context of this scene, enhances the viewers’ sense of Shiki’s trance-like fascination with the woman. This is an interesting demonstration of how technical limitations can be used to evoke an unexpected degree of expressive subtlety. On a different level, the technical limitations of these television series result in a style that is visually fragmented. For example, a sequence of images might move suddenly from a shot of a sword glinting in the moonlight, to a splatter of blood on a wall, to a body on the ground, to a drop of blood dripping from the tip of the blade. Whilst these imagistic juxtapositions might lead to a certain visual obliqueness they, nevertheless, create a stylized and highly innovative visual texture. Anime, however, is not just characterized by a sophisticated visual design, but equally by a sophisticated ability, (with deep roots in Japanese culture), to manipulate visual elements to express human experiences. One example comes to mind immediately: a vampire girl, whom Shiki cut into 17 pieces the previous day, is sitting on a swing; she gets up to talk to Shiki, to confront him. There is a shot of the empty swing swaying back and forth. During their conversation the director cuts in a shot that pans unhurriedly across an empty park bench, then a shot of a blue sky with two birds flying silently across it. Our attention is regularly deflected from the presence of the characters talking, to the presence of objects or small details in the surroundings that evoke a sense that the universe is this huge emptiness which is, nevertheless, pervaded and vitalized with meanings that are yet to be explained.

I always find it particularly difficult to convey characteristic qualities of anime in words. The narratives are often layered and complex, but more than this, the use of an overall visual design to express meaning is often on such a high level of sophistication that the inadequacy of words to convey it becomes glaringly obvious. And the visual style of these anime, (in a characteristically Japanese, not in a postmodern sense), is an essential vehicle to communicate meanings. If it is true that no film can be adequately summed up in words, it is more true of anime. And whatever shortcomings critics may or may not voice in regard to a series such as Lunar Legend Tsukihime, these anime always have the quality of an initiation into new and surprising ways of seeing.

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