I watched Vampire Hunter D from 1985 and it was a strange ride.
It's set in a world thousands of years into the future. Vampires are real and are the rulers of this world. The world has basically become a mix of feudal villages with futuristic products. They have cyborg horses and wooden carts with robotoic wheels.
Weapons seem to also cross between ancient and future. The environment looks dystopian and it looks like the world is in a dark age.
D is a vampire hunter that gets hired by Doris to kill the local noble that controls their town. The noble had come across Doris and taken a liking to her. He marked her and this meant that Doris was to be his bride and turned into a vampire.
Doris wants to escape this fate and so she finds D. This was very much by chance.
D takes the job and the rest of the movie is him defending Doris and Dan while getting close to the vampire to kill him. The noble's daughter and a mutant are tasked with bringing the girl back but D repels them.
The daughter of the noble doesn't want to bring Doris to her father as she thinks that is sullying their pure blood. She later finds out her mother was actually a human that had been turned relatively recently which makes her hate herself.
There seems to be a worship of the ancient ancestor, Dracula and we get a scene where the old vampire figures out that D is actually the halfblood child of Dracula. A damphir.
We get a great scene with the old vampire killing the mutant with overwhelming force which excited me to see him fight D but ultimately it was lacking. I don't even remember how the fight went.
I do remember Doris falling in love with D and this being a plot point worth bringing up multiple times. I never got the feeling that D felt any human emotion, the man was basically just stoic.
His arm seems to have some history as it seems to be a person trapped in his arm. I would love to know where everything comes from as it feels very much like we got dropped into the middle of story.
We get very little explanation of who D is and besides wanting to kill vampires, he has no purpose according to everyone around him.
The gothic artwork and design is gorgeous and though there was no specific scene that stood out or that I wanted to screenshot, the entire movie is pretty to look at. Had this been made more recently, I'm sure the animation would have been insane and it would have done well. Due to how old it is, I'm guessing the animation could not go as hard.
The setting, the lore, the world building going on in the background is interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing the next movie. It was made 15 years later, so I'm expecting the quality to be quite a bit higher.
Characters
Doris - The pretty girl that movie is about
Dan - The younger brother trying to be a man
Mayor's Son - Loves Doris and wants her at all costs
Old Vampire - Old dude who saw Doris and wants her
D - The Vampire Hunter, Dracula's son
Doctor - Funny dude who after turning becomes evil and says he should have taken advantage of Doris. Implies that becoming vampire will make you evil
Mutant - Mutant dude who isn't a vampire who wants immortality
Daughter - The old dude's purity chasing daughter
That pretty much covers everyone of note.