This season's anime are full of high-profile titles, and as I was wondering which to watch first, there was one anime I'd completely failed to keep on my radar even though I could hear plenty of voices on social media saying how excited they were for it. That's this one, Ba Ban Ba Ban Ba Ban Vampire. It's apparently a manga serialized in Weekly Shonen Champion, and it's a famous enough work that it even had a live-action adaptation lined up for this February (though that got postponed due to the incident where lead actor Ryo Yoshizawa had a little trouble involving alcohol).
The original creator, Hiromasa Okushima, is apparently a fan of manga artist Usamaru Furuya's works (representative title: The Emperor of the Land, etc.), and once you hear that, it makes sense — there's the beautiful linework and aesthetic atmosphere, and the style of doing seriously stupid things, which may be a kind of common ground.
The protagonist vampire is named Ranmaru Mori, so I thought, "Ah, I see — maybe it's named after that famous page," but then Oda Nobunaga showed up in a flashback scene in Episode 1, and I understood that Ranmaru Mori himself is the vampire. His age checks out too, at 450 years old.
Basically, it's a story about that vampire and a high-school boy who serves as the deuteragonist. The vampire, who desperately wants to drink the blood of an 18-year-old virgin, keeps getting in the way of the schoolboy's love life. Wikipedia said "BL," but this isn't so-called Boys' Love — it's apparently an abbreviation for "Bloody Love Comedy." It's a fresh kind of world that people who get into it are definitely going to fall hard for.
So what about the soundtrack of this fresh new world, Ba Ban Ba Ban Ba Ban Vampire...?
In a word, it feels very nostalgic! Since it's set at a public bathhouse, and given the title, I figured a piece parodying the famous "Ii Yu Da Na" — the Duke Aces classic covered by the famous Drifters — might show up. But instead, it's a soundtrack for a fairly orthodox anime that goes back and forth between gags and seriousness, and I was surprised by the rich variety of pieces scattered throughout.
There are also many tracks where the guitar takes the lead, and the pieces that play during the gag parts in particular are heartwarming, with good rhythm and a pleasant, familiar feel. They have the air of music you'd hear in a nationally beloved anime.
In the serious parts, violin and cello come in to a degree that stokes a sense of dread without overdoing it, locking in perfectly with the anime's visuals. To put it in a deliberately negative way, you could say it's not very distinctive — but for a soundtrack, that's actually a wonderful quality. It's precisely because it suits the anime's world that it doesn't stand out, and yet it firmly expresses the characters' emotions in each scene, things the visuals alone can't fully convey.
I'm really looking forward to hearing new soundtrack pieces across all sorts of scenes from here on.
The composer is Jun Ichikawa. He's a composer who has created richly varied soundtracks for a great many works, and apparently also serves as a lecturer at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music. He himself has said on X (formerly Twitter) that he provided quite a lot of pieces starting from Episode 1, so it's safe to expect that even more tracks will be used as the anime continues. Among Jun Ichikawa's other representative soundtracks are Milky Holmes, True Cooking Master Boy, and the theatrical Sylvanian Families film.
Going further back, he's a heavyweight who has provided music even for works like Bokura no Nanokakan Sensou (this one isn't an anime, though...), and you can safely say the Ba Ban Ba Ban Ba Ban Vampire soundtrack is, of course, a masterpiece as well.
Ba Ban Ba Ban Ba Ban Vampire is already generating buzz on social media, and since it's only just begun, why not follow the anime along the way?
Cited from the official site https://bababa-anime.com/
