At first, Blood-C shows a lot of promise. Being the successor to a rather good anime, Blood+, together with awesome production values from Production I.G., CLAMP designs and Nana Mizuki at the helm, the show easily piqued my interest. I imagined that the anime must have quite a substantial amount of budget to be able to afford the highly prolific Nana Mizuki, or at least the producer know what he's doing.
And indeed, the production values are the main positives for the anime. The colors are strong and vibrant, the action scenes are well-animated, the songs are awesome, and there's Nana Mizuki. Though, I can't give the animation too much credit because there's so little happening in every scene.
Practically everything else is a wreck. The problem lies with the concept of Blood-C itself. Not the story, mind you, but the concept of its production. The TV series is set to sell a story with a giant plot twist that's meant to be concluded in the movie that would be released sometime in 2012. That's all that is to it; One giant plot twist. Effectively, the entirety of the Blood-C TV series had only enough material for an episode, or 1 hour at most. Someone somehow thought it's a good idea to pull off 12 episodes anyway.
And thus, it killed the show. The first 3/4 of the series is simply a repeat of the same events happening again and again, and each cycle leaves only a tiny bit of clue that keeps the audience guessing. That tiny bit of information that barely reveals anything is hardly worth the "incidents" that got old the third time we saw it. And it's not like Saya learned or used any new moves at all; she would always get thrown around like a rag doll, then goes into "demon mode" and proceed to decimate her foe. It's the same thing. Every. Fucking. Time.
And not only is the plot moving at an excruciatingly slow pace, the anime has so little content that they end up showing a lot of WALKING. I mean, they spent huge amounts of screen time simply showing characters WALKING and nothing else, because they don't have any more story to fill in that 23 mins.
Blood-C is also plagued with tons of continuity errors. With all the blood spilling in the public, you'd think that someone would have noticed what's going on anyway? Doesn't the guy that cleans up all the mess would have suspected something? And there's also the scene where Saya (calmly, probably) watches her classmates being ripped apart by a monster, doing nothing else until the monster finish digesting his first course. What the hell?
And finally, the supporting characters turned out to be pretty redundant in the end. While they contributed to the shock value, the ending doesn't seem to justify any of their expected developments. The story trolled the audience by dumping all of the supporting characters into the exact same situation, then made them all irrelevant.
In hindsight, the plot of Blood-C might have made a pretty good movie. The idea to stretch it into a ~5hr long show by filling it with repeats of pretty much the same battle, WALKING cycles and bad decisions makes it one of the biggest disappointments in 2011.
Plot/Concept: Fail
Story Style: Fail
Audio/Visual: Very Good!
Value: 4
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