Combining elements of post-apocalyptic dystopia, Middle Earth fantasy, and the Wild West, Yoshiaki Kawajiri has created a richly detailed and fluidly graceful feast for the eyes. This is the second anime film based on Hideyuki Kikuchi’s novels; the first was in 1985, and one can only assume the craftsmanship has improved by leaps and bounds since then — it’s magnificent.

Sometime in the "far-distant future," a beautiful woman is spirited away by an amorous vampire, and her father enlists the shadowy D to recover her. A vampire/human half-breed, D is shunned by both races. (His "otherness," his brooding silence and smoldering intensity, owes much to Tim Burton’s conception of Batman.) As D pursues his prey, he crosses paths with a ragtag family of bounty hunters after the same goal. In one of them, he finds something he’s never known before. The film’s plot is thin, but it’s sturdy enough to serve as an organizing principle for the ever-changing atmospheres of murky forests, gothic cemeteries, and turreted fortresses through which these heroes and villains, garbed in their retro-futuristic-mediæval finery, pursue their end game.