Anime Review: Yofukashi no Uta (Call of the Night)

The synopsis for Yofukashi no Uta (Call of the Night) led me to believe that this would be a show about insomniacs roaming the city at night, meeting up, and doing some wild and interesting stuff. Then, when I watched the first episode, I discovered it was about vampires. I was immediately turned off because I just don’t like vampire stories. So… why did I give it a chance and watch it all the way to the end? Because the show had a certain something to it and I thought it might be able to redeem itself in my eyes. Did it?

Let’s go!

The Story

Yamori Ko suffers from insomnia. He sneaks out of his house one night and decides to wander the town. What he discovers is a magical world where the city is empty and the lights never seemed brighter. For once, he felt completely free and comfortable!

As he stops by a vending machine, he meets a girl named Nazuna. One thing leads to another and Nazuna brings him back to her place where she plans to suck him off… his blood, that is.

Turns out Nazuna is a vampire and after she helps herself to Yamori’s insanely tasty blood, he wonders why he hasn’t turned into a vampire like he always sees on television or in books. Well, how it works in the real world is that vampires can only create “offspring” (other vampires) if their victim falls in love with them and Nazuna has no plans to fall in love… ever.

Despite this, Yamori decides he wants to become a vampire so he can escape the land of the day walkers for good and continue to enjoy the nightlife where he feels free. His quest becomes simple… fall in love with Nazuna and then get turned into a vampire! Oh, wait… Nazuna doesn’t want to fall in love! Maybe this won’t be so simple after all! Oh, wait! Yamori doesn’t even know what love is and has no idea how to experience that emotion because he’s only fourteen! Okay… so this isn’t just not simple… this seems damn near impossible!

The Characters

The cast for the show is rather small so I’m going to focus on the main characters primarily and then give a bit of an overview of our supporting cast.

Yamori Ko

As aforementioned, he’s fourteen, doesn’t care for being around people, and wants to become a vampire so he can continue to enjoy the nightlife forever. This means that Yamori is your typical fourteen-year-old kid who doesn’t know a damn thing about the world, is extremely naïve, and only wants what they want in the then and now without considering the future or the bigger picture. Plus, since he has no idea what love is, yet knows he needs to fall in love to achieve his goal, it just accentuates the fact that he’s just a naïve kid.

I’m reminded of the Tool song “Opiate” here. “Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow. What you need is something strong to guide you.”

Sure, Maynard James Keenan was singing about people who blindly follow a religion but the lesson here is completely transferrable. Here, we have Yamori who is, proverbially, deaf, and blind, and dumb as in he really doesn’t know much about anything. He just knows what he wants at that moment. The born to follow part is the fact that he just follows Nazuna everywhere. He hangs out with her, plays games with her, and even helps her run her shady massage business for a night. Because Yamori wants to be a vampire, Nazuna has become the single focal point of his newfound nighttime life, therefore he’ll practically follow her anywhere.

What you need is something strong to guide you is Nazuna. Without her, his “dream” of becoming a vampire is dead on arrival. He needs her and her alone. Sure, there are other vampires out there and we’ll get to them in a bit but he promised to fall in love with Nazuna so she has become that strong leader for him to follow. No one else will do.

It’s this innocence that gives Yamori his charm. There are times when his ambitions seem really cute and pure but then there are times you want to reach through the monitor and slap him silly for how naïve he is. Despite showing he has some intelligence, he’s the kind of person who would believe you if you told him that this magic elixir will turn him into a vampire when in reality, it’s just some Capri Sun in a wine glass.

You would also think that Yamori would progress through the season and learn a little bit about what love is and while I think he has, it’s never really flat-out stated. This keeps everything in line with the fact that he’s supposed to be naïve, innocent, and fourteen years old. In most cases, I often get frustrated when a main character remains dense and can’t come to grips with their feelings when it’s painfully obvious but that’s not what’s happening here and for some reason… it just feels right? The frustration just isn’t there and it feels completely acceptable. It’s a testament to how well the character was written and then how the character was able to stay within the guidelines of how it was meant to be! Even with his flaws, he was still a very enjoyable main character.

Nazuna Nanakusa

On the other end of the spectrum, we have our vampiric waifu of the year… Nazuna. First off, let me just get this out of the way. The internet actually had the audacity to body shame her because they decided to draw her with natural-looking breasts. Yes… that’s how boobs often look out in the real world, folks… maybe if you spent some time with actual girls for once in your life, you’d come to realize that.

One day, though…

As for everything besides her realistic breasts, Nazuna is about as close to a complete package when it comes to a secondary main character. First off, she has a bit of tsundere in her but it’s not massive like Taiga from Toradora or Shana from Shakugan no Shana. It’s there but not enough to overwhelm the character. She’s also an extroverted introvert. She even admits that she’s often bored so she stays inside and plays video games. She doesn’t really like to do much but when she’s around Yamori, this cool, cocky personality just blossoms and she becomes this really fun, carefree character.

As with most girls, she has a bit of a shell but one thing that really was missing was the why factor to her as a character. We get that she doesn’t like to produce offspring but she never really goes fully in-depth about why that is. Even a flashback or a bit of backstory would have sufficed. It just seemed like an unnecessary extra obstacle for Yamori to overcome… especially since Nazuna’s feelings become painfully obvious the further into the season we get. Rather than use that as a plot point, they could have just gone the route with giving her a “shell” to crack and have Yamori work on that over the course of the show. In a way, they did, there just seemed to be too many layers there.

As for the rest of the cast… I wish I could go in-depth with each of them but the big problem here is that none of the cast really mattered all that much.

Whether it was Yamori’s friends Akira and Mahiru, or the other vampires in Nazuna’s little circle, they all played very short bit parts. While they added SOME depth to the story, none of them really stuck around long enough for them to matter. The only character that really had some sort of impact was Anko… the private detective that can seemingly kill vampires. When Yamori met up with her, his entire perspective changed about his “dream.”

Even though each side character played just a small part, those parts did add some meaningful layers to the overall story… I just wish that they played more prominent roles rather than popping in and out to disrupt the Yamori and Nazuna show to say their piece and then leave again. While, yes, the characters were well-established and developed just enough to make them unique, they just didn’t really play a big enough role to really discuss them.

As I just said, this felt like the Yamori and Nazuna show more than anything and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this case.

Art & Animation

Okay… this is where this show truly shines. You would think that a story about insomniacs, vampires, and roaming a city at night would produce really dark and bland colors but that couldn’t be further from reality here. LIDENFILMS went all out to produce one of the most colorful shows of the season and did so while wrapping all of that brightness around a dark atmosphere.

Smatterings of gold, green, blue, purple, and virtually every other color filled the screen against a nighttime backdrop that really painted a unique picture. The scenery and backgrounds were certainly memorable because of that and it shows that just a different take on a typical setting can make or break an entire atmosphere.

 

The characters, though, leave a little to be desired. While they were drawn a bit roughly, it added to the atmosphere by providing the grittiness you would expect from this style of show. When you have your backgrounds drowning in beautiful colors, you need a balance and the rough sketch-style designs of the characters were that balance. It’s like in cooking when you’re using citrus or tomatoes and you need to cut the acidity. You balance it out with fats like milk, cream, or butter… or sweetness like sugar.

My biggest complaint about the character designs though was the eyes. In anime, the eyes are truly the windows to the soul and are often the most detailed part of the body and while one could argue that to be the case here, I just couldn’t grow accustomed to them. Nazuna looked cross-eyed the entire time and Yamori, with his little beady eyes, looked like he was a deer in headlights. Yeah, I did get used to it after a while but I still couldn’t just accept it. It just didn’t look right to me but it’s a small nitpick that really didn’t detract from the overall quality of the show.

Animation-wise, the show was fairly average except for the final episode where they through some sakuga in. Always have to laugh when a show goes from average to great animation on the turn of a dime. That being said, there was nothing bad about the animation. Nothing took you out of the show and made you question life so that can be seen as a good thing. Plus, remember what I said about balance? It works here because the animation style complimented the gritty characters and helped balance out the colorful backgrounds. Plus, a show like this doesn’t need movie-level quality animation to be good.

Soundtrack-wise… ooo ooo ooo. There’s this one song ooo ooo ooo. That goes overplayed ooo ooo ooo. Throughout the show ooo ooo ooo…

I actually found that insert track annoying. If you’re going to do insert tracks… spice it up! Give us some variety… especially if the one and only track you use ends up being less than likable. (Hey, if you liked it, good on you. I didn’t.) Outside of that… I couldn’t really recall any other track as it was just background noise.

At least the show had a massive banger of an opening AND ending which is quite rare. Given the fact that both were performed by Creepy Nuts helped, though. Seriously… it may not beat Ya Boy Kongming for best opening of the year but I think that ending has quite a shot at winning something in February.

Final Thoughts

I know that I listed quite a bit of nitpicks above; however, the overall verdict here is that those nitpicks weren’t enough to stop me from putting this into my Anime of the Year contention list.

This was an urban spin on the classic vampire tale that was propped up by two fantastic main characters. While they did outshine the supporting cast, they did all play their parts to add some depth and layers to the overall story.

While I did bash Yamori a bit, it was because of the fact that the character was written extremely well. Even though there were some times I found the exaggeration a bit much, he and Nazuna played off each other so well that it brought this story to life. Hats off to the VAs who also put in the work to define these characters because it really sold this show.

The story itself was pretty straightforward. A lonely boy with insomnia meets a vampire and wants to turn into one but it’s not as easy as it seems. It’s a simple premise and one that needed well-written and handled characters to shine and that’s exactly what happened. It’s also not a typical “boy falls in love with girl” story, either. It’s a story about self-discovery and second-guessing the things you want out of life. It takes impulsive decision-making and teaches you to always think things through before acting. The old adage of “the grass isn’t always greener on the other side” applies here but rather than trying to shy you away from going to the other side, the show spends its time weighing the pros and cons in an effort to convince you why you SHOULD go to that other side.

It was definitely a nice surprise and a show that almost flew under my radar. I’m glad I checked it out because it’s a show I’m going to gravely miss until season two…. And there better be a season two or else I’m going to sit here and vehemently shake my fist at you, Japan… and trust me… I’m a very good fist shaker!

Until next time…

Ja ne!