It’s a challenge to find an anime that has absolutely nothing to recommend it. Even if a story’s pacing is a little too slow or rushed, it can still be saved by beautiful animation or characters with great depth. It’s rare to find a show that fails on virtually every technical level. Sadly, Studio! Cucuri’s 2015 adaptation of Vampire Holmes — originally a smartphone game that released the year before — truly stands out as an anime with no concept or narrative structure, no cohesion in the animation, and no real attempts at depicting how human beings would actually behave in real life.
The characters aren’t so much meant to evoke real people as they are walking, unfunny punchlines, and it’s an extremely unpolished and awful-looking series. One could say Vampire Holmes is truly a mysterious anime — not because it delivers on its mystery premise, but because it’s truly puzzling how it was ever released as is.
Vampire Holmes’ Story and Dialogue Were Poor From the Start
Unfortunately, Vampire Holmes doesn’t have much of a story to begin with. Though its title positions it as a retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tale with the inclusion of vampires, it’s actually difficult to discern what the story of this anime even is. It mostly appears that the Sherlock Holmes character and “Hudson”, the Watson figure, goof off most of the time and get into misadventures with random animals and unimportant, unnamed side characters.
Much of the plot gets rather lost in translation too, because only fan groups took to subbing the series from Japanese to English. Some of the dialogue becomes completely indiscernible in English, and though that’s obviously not the original creators’ fault, it didn’t help the viewing experience in the West.
However, to say Vampire Holmes is completely irredeemable is perhaps unfair. In the chaos of its bad animation, incomprehensible plot and overall lack of quality, it is at least somewhat enjoyable in the fact that it doesn’t take itself all that seriously.
Vampire Holmes’ Poor Animation Quality Compounded Its Other Problems
This all may seem a bit harsh, but viewers can immediately and consistently notice Vampire Holmes’ sloppy animation in just 25 minutes of anime shorts. It may have been due to budget restraints given the smaller-scale studio that produced the series, but it’s still striking to see these issues next to more impressive 2015 anime like Plastic Memories or One-Punch Man.
The character designs in Vampire Holmes are inconsistent as well, ranging from poor attempts at modeling them in a CG style to the infamously laughable way the titular Holmes is drawn in parts of the series’ last few shorts. The animation is probably the worst part, as it actively distracts from whatever story the team behind the anime is trying to tell.
It would be much easier to stay angry at Vampire Holmes for what it does wrong if it wasn’t clearly aware of its own stupidity. Though that doesn’t save it, it helps a little. The one good thing to come out of this series — apart from the various humorous internet commentaries on it — is that the people involved seemed to have fun with it. That’s a low bar to compliment a piece of media on, but Vampire Holmes is wacky and weird enough to at least give it that.