Vampire Knight Volume 4
Cross Academy is attended by two groups of students. The Day Class is filled with blissfully ignorant humans, unaware of the evil lurking in their school with their biggest concern being the up-coming ball. The Night Class is preoccupied with vampires, creatures that walk the night and sense the thick smell of blood currently haunting the halls. The Pureblood who murdered Zero’s parents, Shizuka Hio, makes her presence known as she strikes a bargain with Yuki to save Zero from turning into an uncontrollable level E vampire; provide her the corpse of Kaname, or give her own life in his place. As emotions run high, Zero’s long lost twin brother, Ichiru, reveals himself as Shizuka’s henchman and it’s not long before the brothers face each other in combat.
The disc contains the last three episodes of the first season of Vampire Knight; if you’ve been hanging onto the storyline, working your way through the dialogue-heavy series with little action to compensate, then your efforts will be highly rewarded here as episodes 11 – 13 are easily the strongest of the season. All the emotion and secrets building up over time have come to a grand finale that’s sure to satisfy the bloodlust fans as well as the less inclined. Everything building up to the finale is beautifully woven and played out like a dance: the brothers finally meeting and exchanging words of hate, Yuki’s desire to help both the men in her lives – waving from Kaname’s side to Zero’s, plus Shizuka’s tragic past and haunting voice drawing all the pawns together for a great ending.
The story follows the manga quite closely until the last episode where it takes several elements from later on in the manga arc to bring a much more emotionally involving ending to the first season. Like the previous disc, when the series drifted from the original source material for episode 8, it proves to be very effective and provides a cliff-hanger ending that will make you desire the first disc of Vampire Knight Guilty all the more sooner.
Disc 4’s weakness is the series’s continuous thorn in its side: the mundane dialogue. You could easily cut a third of its script and you’d be left with the same, or probably a much stronger, programme. We don’t need to be told twice in the same five minutes that Ichiru can’t be killed by a vampire weapon, we can wait a little longer till we find out how Shizuka’s finale affects Kaname, to leave some mystery for the next season. At times it seems as if Vampire Knight has mistaken its audience for children with short-term memory loss, but its blood-filled and gothic content suggests the opposite.
Despite having long-awaited action, sadly the animation isn’t enough to keep up. Proportions of some characters fluctuate slightly between one scene to the next, and the faster moving actions seem clumsy on the technical side. However, the final episode and the backgrounds throughout remain lush.
The dub on both sides of the pond come off strongly in these three episodes; this especially goes towards the English actors who really pull their weight to make the season finale all the more emotionally involving. First gold star goes to Mela Lee, who really brings the human element to Yuki’s character; she’s caught between two men in her life that are involved in something incredibly dark, yet she doesn’t fail to stand up for herself or thrust herself into the neck of it when she feels that it’s all she can do to save her friends. Both English and Japanese actors of the Kiryu twins also deserve special attention as one actor provides the voice for both brothers; very separate characters yet performed marvellously. Zero is a dark, depressive and emotionally introvert character whilst Ichiru is an angry, sorrowful and extrovert personality; this allows the actors to go wild with their parts and it really shows. Ichiru only really has these three episodes to get his character across yet we easily get sucked into his tragic story and feel his pain when he tearfully expresses his grief to Shizuka.
DVD extras have not made their debut into this series, unless a slight alteration to the opening sequence and a new edit version of ending theme in episode 13 count as bonus content.
We’ve now come to the end of Season 1, covering the first four and a half volumes of the manga, and how has it been? The beginning and ending episodes are easily the strongest in content, storytelling, with a right mixture of conversation and action. The middle segment of the series suffered a downturn of favouring exposition and flashbacks to keep the story going rather than action or up-to-date plot driven events. Looking back, you could easily cut about four episodes to create a tighter programme. But with the lack of girl-targeting anime, the popularly of vampires today and the small amount of darker material still in license; Vampire Knight is a worthy contender in each category if you know what you want from your vampires and your patience can stick with the humdrum script.
