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The first thing Blood+ shows you is a girl who can't clear the bar.

Not a monster. Not a katana. Not a spray of blood across a classroom window. A high school track athlete in Okinawa, missing her jump, laughing it off, going home to her family's bar for dinner. If you came in off the back of Blood: The Last Vampire expecting the cold, feral Saya who opened that film by putting a blade through a man on a subway car, the premiere of "First Kiss" is a deliberate slap in the face. Saya Otonashi eats too much, sleeps too much, and needs regular blood transfusions she doesn't understand. She's sweet. She's goofy. She has no idea what she is.

That's the whole bet. Fifty episodes ride on it, and Episode 1 is where Production I.G puts the chips on the table.

Where it came from

Blood+ is an anime original. No manga came first. Asuka Katsura's Blood+ manga launched in Monthly Shōnen Ace in July 2005, three months ahead of the broadcast, but it covers the same story events as the anime and ran as a companion, not a source. The show had no readership to serve and no blueprint to betray. Every choice in this episode is the studio's own.

The ancestor is Blood: The Last Vampire, Production I.G's 2000 film. Blood+ borrows the name Saya, the chiropterans, the sword and the Okinawa setting near an American air base, then throws out almost everything else. It plays closer to a reinterpretation than a sequel, and the person standing in the middle of both is Junichi Fujisaku.

Fujisaku was one of the core members of Team Oshii at I.G. He helped create The Last Vampire alongside Kenji Kamiyama, directed its video game and wrote its novelization. He wrote seven scripts for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and three more for 2nd GIG. Blood+ was his first job as chief director of a TV series, and he didn't delegate the opening. Fujisaku is credited as director, series composition and scriptwriter on Episode 1 itself. The man who wrote the original Saya's novel sat down and wrote her replacement's first day.

The first four sessions of Cowboy Bebop show you what the series looks like. "Ballad of Fallen Angels" is the first to show you what it is hiding. Until now, Spike Spiegel has been easy to read. He is lazy, sarcastic, absurdly good in a fight and happy to drift wherever the next bounty points. Jet knows his partner does not talk about his past, but the show has given us little reason to push. Then the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate starts eating itself, and the lazy bounty hunter routine stops explaining Spike at all.

Originally broadcast on WOWOW on November 20, 1998, Session 5 was written by Michiko Yokote, storyboarded by series director Shinichirō Watanabe and directed by Tetsuya Watanabe, with Toshihiro Kawamoto serving as animation director. Those credits matter because this is the first episode where Cowboy Bebop's style stops being decoration and becomes character.

A bounty that isn't about money

Mao Yenrai, an important figure from Spike's old Red Dragon life, has arranged a truce with the rival White Tiger syndicate. Vicious has no interest in peace. The White Tiger delegation is wiped out and Mao is murdered. When the bounty reaches the Bebop, Spike recognizes the name immediately, and for once the money barely matters.

Jet notices. Their argument is one of the first times the series lets us see how little these two men actually know about one another. Jet asks what Mao meant to Spike, and Spike answers by asking Jet how he lost his arm. Message received: you keep your ghosts, I'll keep mine. Neither man explains himself, and that refusal matters. Cowboy Bebop is not interested in opening Spike's file and reading his biography aloud. It begins revealing him through the things he refuses to say.

A man who already died

Spike visits Annie, an old acquaintance from his Red Dragon days, and the mood shifts the moment he walks through her door. Annie does not greet him like an old friend who has come home. To her, Spike died years ago, and Spike has to insist that he is standing right in front of her. That small exchange gives "Ballad of Fallen Angels" its real subject: is Spike Spiegel actually alive?

So... I Haven't Posted in a Week

Apparently disappearing from the front page for a week does not mean I stopped working on AnimeHistory.

Quite the opposite.

The newest additions include Yu Yu Hakusho, Cardcaptor Sakura, Patlabor: The TV Series, The Vision of Escaflowne, Outlaw Star, Record of Lodoss War, Serial Experiments Lain, Dragon Half, Video Girl Ai, Ah! My Goddess and Bas.tard!!.

And I don't really want AnimeHistory to become one of those databases where adding a series just means creating a title page and calling it finished.

A lot of these are already being worked into the archive properly.

There is very little in "Team Ten" that sounds impressive on paper. Naruto is barely relevant to the episode. No new technique is introduced, no Akatsuki member is defeated, and almost no action takes place at all. For most of its runtime, Shikamaru walks through Konoha, sits quietly, plays shogi with his father and tries to come to terms with the fact that Asuma is dead.

That simplicity is exactly why Episode 82 works.

Aired in Japan on October 30, 2008, Team Ten arrives immediately after one of the Hidan and Kakuzu arc’s defining events. Asuma has been killed, Team 10 has returned home without its teacher, and the story has reached the uncomfortable point where everyone has to continue living after the battle is over. The manga provides the essential events, but the anime makes a deliberate choice not to hurry through them. Instead, it stretches the quiet space between Asuma’s death and Shikamaru’s retaliation into an entire episode about grief.

Much of that difference can be traced to the people responsible for the episode. Toshiyuki Tsuru, credited as Yasuaki Kurotsu, handled the screenplay, storyboard and episode direction, giving "Team Ten" an unusual degree of creative continuity from page to screen. Hirofumi Suzuki, one of the principal character designers for Naruto Shippuden, served as animation director. Together they produced an episode that feels noticeably different from the weekly installments surrounding it, not because it is packed with spectacular animation, but because of how carefully it uses restraint.

Characters are allowed to pause before speaking. Expressions are held longer than usual. Small changes in posture become meaningful. The camera often refuses to move when a more conventional episode might cut away. Even the movement of characters’ mouths during dialogue attracted attention from viewers when the episode first aired. "Team Ten" does not try to overwhelm the audience visually. It controls where the audience looks, and more importantly, how long they are made to remain there. That approach is perfectly suited to Shikamaru.

For most of Naruto, Shikamaru’s intelligence has been his greatest advantage. Give him an opponent, enough information and a few minutes to think, and he will eventually find an answer. Asuma’s death is different because there is nothing to solve. No strategy can undo it, and no clever observation can make the situation less painful.

The episode follows Shikamaru through a Konoha that now seems filled with reminders of the person who is missing. People offer condolences. Familiar places take on different meanings. A woman from the barbecue restaurant begins crying when she learns that Asuma has died, confronting Shikamaru with the fact that his teacher existed in lives outside his own. His usual detached personality suddenly stops looking like maturity and starts looking like what it sometimes was all along: a way of keeping difficult emotions at a manageable distance.

The shogi board

AnimeHistory

has always been an archive first; but archives are a lot more fun when there are actually people wandering around inside them.
We have been doing a fairly large pass on the member side of the site over the last few days, particularly the Hub and Personal Galleries, with the goal of making AnimeHistory feel a little more social without trying to turn it into another social network.

The Member Hub

The Member Hub has been reorganized around the stuff you actually care about when you log back in. Reactions, activity from members you follow, followed discussions, and other things happening around your little corner of the site now have a much more natural home.

Already a member? Log in and open your Hub tab from your profile.

Personal Galleries Got a Lot More Personal

Member galleries have also had a pretty substantial makeover.
The image is now properly the star of the page, with a small vertical gallery navigator beside it so you can quickly browse nearby uploads without losing what you are looking at. A position track and count label show you where you are in the full gallery, handy when someone has been uploading for a while.
Comments now live right alongside the image instead of feeling like something bolted onto the bottom of the page. Replies, reactions, and @member mentions make those little gallery conversations much easier to follow.
We are also tying member uploads more closely into the actual AnimeHistory archive.
If you upload something from Dragon Ball, for example, characters in that image can be tagged using the same character-tagging system used elsewhere in the gallery. So a piece of member fanart is not just sitting isolated on somebody's profile, it can actually become another path into Bulma, Goku, Usagi, Naruto, or whoever happens to be in it.
That is the kind of social feature I like. It adds something to the community and something to the archive.
Browse member uploads from any profile's Gallery tab, or contribute your own from the Fan Art and Wallpapers upload panels.