Well, while we’re in the month of maximum spookiness, what better subject could there be than Vampires? I’ve talked about the notorious nosferatu before, notably in the lamentable A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives and the somewhat less awful Lunar Legend Tsukihime. In fact, I even referenced the vampires here in the opening of the former review. So it only seems fitting that now that we’ve come around to everyone’s favorite season for vampires (your mileage may vary), I ought to take a look at Call of the Night.
Call of the Night is based on a manga by the creator responsible for Dagashi Kashi. Now, here and there you can see commonalities (the way eyes are drawn is especially familiar) but to a greater degree, Call of the Night is disconnected from its predecessor, taking place in a radically different setting with radically different characters and presenting a much more compelling core plot rather than stringing together vignettes.
So, Call of the Night’s main character is 14-year-old Ko Yamori. Ko is something of a middle-school dropout, afflicted with a deep ennui with daily life and a deeply troubling insomnia, such that one night he actually opts to walk around the city after hours.
In the night, Ko meets a very odd individual – Nazuna Nanakusa could easily be visually taken for a peer, but instead presents as a young woman with lots to say about late nights and a business as a “Cuddle buddy” who can help people sleep. Without much else to do, Ko takes the dubious hook of this weird girl and decides to let her do her thing. Which, when he pretends to sleep, reveals that she’s a vampire who wants to suck his blood!
Ko is… not particularly put off by this. In fact, with all the stories Nazuna has spun about night life, he’s rather taken with the idea of becoming a vampire himself. It’s possible, but not as simple as just letting Nazuna have a sip: you have to be in love with the vampire doing the blood sucking in order to turn into one yourself. Nazuna has serious hangups even talking about mushy stuff but she’s willing to let Ko try if he wants as long as that means getting regular hits of his particularly delicious blood, beginning their extremely odd relationship.
The first act of the show is basically Ko and Nazuna hanging out, picking up Ko’s friends (not that he realized he had human friends) Akira and Mahiru along the way. They don’t exactly join Ko’s vampire business, but they do become aware of it and of Nazuna.
Playtime ends (or at least changes character) when we encounter another stranger in the night, a blonde girl named Seri. Seri, it turns out, is another Vampire, one of several that we end up meeting, and she helps the vampire group nab Ko, much to Nazuna’s burning rage.
These vampires are… well, they’re the closest things Nazuna has to friends, at least. Given Nazuna’s hatred of romantic talk, she doesn’t exactly get along with their normal meet and greet behavior, and the lot of them are quite upset with Nazuna bringing a human into the know without any intent to turn him. Ko manages to patch up a lot of the bad blood when he gets across that he does intend to become a vampire, but in the process he hears that there might be a time limit on his window of opportunity. The other vampires are eager to turn Ko themselves if they have to, but Ko would really rather it be with Nazuna and Nazuna herself eventually catches up to offer great violence on the topic.
Still, we end up hanging around with the other vampires a good deal. For instance, spending some time with Seri reveals that she has an obsessed stalker, but deeper down that it’s a guy she tried to ghost when she found herself getting too emotionally attached, and that he’s lovelorn and confused. Ko even plays relationship counselor (despite his own admitted lack of understanding love) and gets the two of them to make up, which of course results in another vampire on scene soon enough. Another of the vampire friends works at a maid cafe, and we spend an episode in relative downtime playing detective as to who might be taking sleazy photos of one of the other waitresses.
That’s all well and good, but remember how I said there’s more of a plot in this one? Well, early on we briefly meet a woman acting as a PI, who seems like she might know something about the supernatural side. Later, when Ko and his human friends are messing around at school in the dead of night, they find another vampire. Except this vampire is nothing like Nazuna and her friends – he’s a feral, starving former school teacher who savagely attacks Akira when he finds his vigil interrupted. The PI arrives and is ultimately able to dispatch the vampire (who had been trying to die via starvation, an extremely long process for vampires), revealing herself to indeed be something of a vampire hunter.
This is fairly impressive because despite my use of Nazuna as an example of a lower power-level vampire, vampires are still normally kind of hard to destroy: they’re strong, capable of flight, and massively capable of regeneration. We don’t exactly know how they face the sun, but we do know that it takes ten years without blood for a vampire to actually expire. None of the vampires knew how to actually kill one of their kind, but evidently the PI has found a way.
Later, she attacks Seri’s new boyfriend (though he manages to not get killed), revealing in the process that a vampire’s weakness is an artifact from that vampire’s mortal life. This also confirms that she is hunting down vampires, which is naturally a big problem for our friendly vampires.
The PI also seems rather interested in Ko, having deduced more or less what he’s about and being against it. She’s willing to bully and browbeat him as well, doing what she feels she has to in order to keep him in and attempt to force him to give up on this whole vampire thing.
Since Call of the Night doesn’t fully adapt the manga, we don’t entirely get a conclusion to this arc. Rather, the climax of the show involves a night where the PI calls the cops on Ko after giving him a breaking speech, sending him running at the same time Nazuna is questioning whether or not she’s doing a good thing. The two of them are apart for a while, Nazuna feeling terrible either about having disillusioned Ko or about having “lied” about how glamorous and fun her night life is, but ultimately the two of them are able to make up and carry on.
Call of the Night is not exactly Slice of Life and not exactly Comedy, even as it possibly flirts with both genres. It has some plot and it has some drama and it does feel like it;s trying hard to be a legitimate take on vampires and romance.
I think what’s most striking about Call of the Night, though, is the visual design. This is a show where, quite naturally, almost every scene takes place at night, which would often be a recipe for a show looking like uninteresting dark blurs. Call of the Night, though, makes a strong effort to make its night scenes absolutely wonderful, with high-saturation colors and well-used shadows that evoke both nocturnal darkness and particular moods, really getting across the wonder and thrill that Ko experiences when seeing the world from a different perspective. The story and characters are good, but the direction and art are the real stars here, with the city at night looking just as magical as Nazuna wants to make it out to be.
For a shorter adaptation that only starts to get into some of the most heavily interesting stuff in the source material, how good the adaptation looks is a huge part of the draw to watching it, and a significant bump in the final rating.
Call of the Night is one that I find it easy to recommend. It’s got some very good material, it’s easy to watch, and it’s visually stunning. Nothing about this show is done poorly, and many elements are highly impressive. For me, it ends up being enough to breach the ranks and hit A-, which for something of only moderate ambition really is good. If you haven’t seen this one yet, do yourself a favor and check it out.