English Dub Season Review: Vampire in the Garden Season One

Overview:

It’s been a long winter for humanity, overthrown from its place of dominance after being defeated in the great war against vampires.
A small city-state protected by a massive wall of light has become one of the last strongholds of the human race -its leaders determined to regain control over the world they have lost.

Our Take:

Netflix is in the middle of some controversy regarding its subscription service. Now that might seem like something I’m not here to write about, but it relates to Vampire in the Garden. Netflix is slashing its animation down and even canceled a few projects. I think this is disappointing because I feel like Netflix was just starting to really nail down a lot of its animation projects. Castlevania, DOTA, Voltron, and Violet Evergarden just to name a few are very good shows with very well done animation.

What does all this have to do with Vampire in the Garden? Well, it feels like this anime is an unfortunate victim of their new stance. I am sure this show was made and produced long before these issues were publicly known but it definitely feels like they knew.

The animation is done really well and the voice acting is quite good but that is more or less where the positives end. Xanthe Huynh and Larissa Gallagher voice the leads Momo and Fine respectively. Xanthe is an amazing voice actress with lots of anime under her belt. I haven’t heard anything from Larissa Gallagher before but after some research, it seems that she has done more Western cartoons than anything but is starting to get big in the anime scene. After hearing her in this I hope that’s true because I really liked how she brought Fine to life. The character designs are interesting and unique. Their take on vampires, while not the most distinctive, is just different enough to be interesting.

Narratively is where the main problems lie. Vampire in the Garden is only five episodes long so the pacing is off and we aren’t given much info or anything. This is a huge shame because the world it drops us in is pretty interesting. It feels like some version of Russia, while obviously a fake place it seems like that was the aesthetic they were going for. Similar to Irina the Vampire Cosmonaut it seems that Russian vampires are more and more interesting. But unfortunately, not much is done with this interesting setting.

Momo wants out of her city and it’s not really ever said why. She has a very overprotective mother but that seems to be about it negatively and how quickly she trusted Fine was jarring, to say the least. Fine’s motivations were also left up to interpretation in my opinion. We later see that she had a human friend who looked and sounded like Momo so I get why she was interested after seeing her but why was she a part of the attack in the first place?

Essentially, Vampire in the Garden should have been a hit. It had Wit Studio backing it but I don’t think it was given a proper chance. It needed a few more episodes at least to really get things going and not feel so rushed. I would say the biggest problem I have with this anime is what could have been. It also felt like a yuri story but they didn’t want to commit to that and the post-credits scene completely destroys that notion anyways. It just feels like they didn’t really know what they wanted to do with this world and its characters. I had high hopes for this one that just wasn’t met, unfortunately.