The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Baban Baban Ban Vampire

A 450-year-old vampire named Ranmaru works part-time at an old public bath. He desires the blood of an 18-year-old virgin and so watches over the growth of 15-year-old Rihito, the son of the bathhouse owners, and tries to prevent him from losing his virginity.

Baban Baban Ban Vampire is based on manga by Hiromasa Okujima. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Saturdays.

All purportedly funny vampire shows should be required to have fuzzy armadillos named John. That would have helped this episode immeasurably, because instead of focusing on the creepiness that is a 450-year-old vampire just waiting for a boy to turn eighteen so that he can “eat” him (yes, I'd say there's a double entendre at play), we could distract ourselves with armadillo antics. It certainly would have made me feel better.

But as the case stands, this is an armadillo-free episode, and also one free of johnsons, because instead of censoring the male nude scenes, they've simply taken a page out of Garzey's Wing's book and just not drawn any penises. This is particularly bizarre given that this show is also one of the few to feature male nipples. That's weird, but mostly because the story is very upfront about the lead character, Ranmaru Mori's desire to consume Rihito once the lad turns eighteen. Sure, he says it's because that's when male virgins are at their peak of deliciousness, but we can all read between the lines. It's not like vampire novels over the ages have been particularly subtle about how the penetration of fangs into flesh is meant to be a metaphor for something else.

That's my main problem, honestly – despite clearly being a comedy (and it does have some funny moments), this feels icky to me, especially since Ranmaru has been waiting for Rihito to be of age since the kid was five. His horror at the thought that Rihito may have fallen in love with a human girl on his way to his first day of high school is more than a little gross, and his plans to make Rihito fall out of love as quickly as possible are tainted by this. I'm almost certainly making more of the setup than the original manga creator intended, but I just found it more uncomfortable than entertaining.

Still, the revelation of who Ranmaru is in history (and if you think you recognize his name, look it up because I guarantee you've heard it before) got a laugh from me, as did Ranmaru's attempt to scare off the nameless girl Rihito is crushing on. The episode does a good job of making Ranmaru look other than human, as well. Although the character designs are distinctly old-fashioned, particularly the teens, they work with the plot, which tries to take on a few old romance tropes. This really feels like a “your mileage may vary” series, almost more so than any of the others this season. Still, if the idea of an adult (vampire) waiting for a kid to be legal isn't funny to you, even in a comedic setting, you could probably safely pass this by.

Hey everyone! Are you discomfited by fictional depictions of abusive or predatory relationships treated as humor? Do you cringe your way through molestation jokes? Do you run in the other direction when a heroine gets the dokidokis for a boy who insults and berates her? If the answer to these questions is “Yes,” then I recommend staying far away from Baban Baban Ban Vampire, a comedy about a 450-year-old vampire grooming a teenage boy.

Sure, Ranmaru is waiting until Rihito is 18 and thus of age, and it's technically to drink his blood and not have sex with him.However, the image of vampires drinking blood and sex are deeply linked. Even if they could be uncoupled, the number of times we see Ranmaru's erection bulging through his pants leaves little ambiguity. It's like if you took the Hisoka “schwing” scene and made a whole series about it, with him as the protagonist. And he's been around this kid since he was five, making it so much creepier.

I can't say for sure if this is a good series if you don't have fundamental issues with the concept, but I'm pretty sure it's not. The animation is detailed, but characters almost never move their bodies and mouths at the same time. Rather, they'll move a limb, freeze, and flap their lips. Ranmaru is sufficiently off-puttingly vampiric with his pale skin, too-red lips, and pointed ears and teeth, but we're supposed to believe that Rihito is handsome enough to be worth all this trouble, and it's just not coming through with this art style.

A quick internet search tells me this is actually pretty accurate to the manga, but here's where the stiff animation kills it: the humor. There's no stretch or squishiness to it, absolutely destroying any chance of decent physical comedy. The need to separate motion and dialogue throws off the comic timing as well, and the result just feels kind of soggy, like a book dropped in the bath. But then, it's probably not helped by the fact that I just don't see humor in the situation.

Now, here's a show I hardly know what to make of. Babanba Baban Vampire got some surprisingly solid production values, from the artwork itself to the often fluid animation, so I have to assume someone out there believes that there is going to be a sizeable audience waiting with baited breath to see the misadventures of a vampire and his underaged victim-to- be. It's also got a pretty stacked voice cast, too, featuring the likes of Daisuke Namikawa (NieR Automata Ver1.1a, Jujutsu Kaisen) and Yūsuke Kobayashi (Re:Zero, Dr. Stone). This all adds up to give me the impression that Babanba Baban Vampire is a relatively hot property, though based on its premiere, I can't really ascertain why.

I'm sure one of the first red flags that will stand out to newcomers like me will be the central thrust of the entire premise, which is that this dramatic and stereotypically gay-coded vampire is dedicating years of his life to prey on an underage boy. To be honest, I'm not against the concept of teen characters being involved with immortal beings and monsters, since a big part of the appeal lies in the taboo, dangerous nature of getting involved with someone ageless and alien to the human experience. The problem for me with Babanba Baban Vampire is that this is a very broad comedy, and nearly all of the jokes revolve around portraying Ranmaru as a scheming predator whose undying thirst for virgin-boy blood consumes his every waking moment. It's not just that this plays on tired old cliches of gay characters being innately predatory; the jokes just aren't that funny. I'm sorry, but I feel like What We Do in the Shadows already dropped the mic and closed the book on jokes about virgin blood, and any would-be competitors to its Undead Comedy Throne need to do a lot better than “Teehee, the vampire's super gay for an awkward teenager.” It isn't funny. It's just annoying.

To the show's credit, it does try to mine some laughs out of the usual vampire bits, like Ranmaru not being able to enter a house without an invitation, but none of them worked for me, either. This is one of those sitcoms where the show can't ever stop for one second and have the characters shut the hell up so we can try to appreciate a joke or get involved with the story. The attempts to be dramatic or mildly spooky fare just as poorly, too. Ranmaru is too much of a cartoonish dork to take particularly seriously as a genuine creature of the night, and none of the supporting cast members pull enough weight to make the script work, either.

Paradoxically, despite delivering a gatling gun barrage of nonstop bits and incessantly screaming punchlines, this premiere drags. I was convinced it was a double-length premiere for a long while, only to recoil with dismay when I learned that I really was only ten minutes into the episode, despite it feeling like almost an hour had passed. Like I said, I have to imagine that there are fans for Babanba Baban Vampire out there somewhere, but I am not one of them.