Review: Karin, the Anime (aka: Chibi Vampire)

   I bought this DVD set for myself from the manga store down the street a while back in June for my birthday. Before that, quite a while ago, I bought the first novel version of the graphic novel.
   This is a really silly anime. Much sillier than something like Chobits. Although like Chobits, it's randomly erotic and inappropriate, and I needed to know what happened in the end so I watched it all the way through.
   Karin Maaka is from a family of vampires, but she was born an unvampire; she makes blood instead, and can go in the sun and eat people food etc. Her blood increases and she has to inject it into someone.
   She discovers her blood increases an inconveniently frequent amount around the new guy at school, and goes from avoiding him to trying to understand why and fixing it. For whatever reason, he doesn't have big anime eyes like everyone else and they all make comments about it.
   Honestly the voice acting is pretty terrible in both languages, as is the dialogue. Karin repeats things like a parrot when confused, and everyone says really obvious things really slowly as though the shows is aimed towards kids. Contradicting that are pin up shots of Karin in the intro and lots and lots of jokes and references about her breast size.

   This is why it took me so long to watch the show. It was a lot of lighthearted cheesy hoo hah and Karin being embarrassed about everything and her family cleaning up her messes. But it actually got better. Eventually. Around episode sixteen out of the twenty four episodes.
   Then it actually got pretty serious. I was surprised. My favorite characters ended up being Karin's sister Anju, who went pretty far just to get Karin to do what made her happy, and Karin's grandmother, who had this whole sad back story to explain her blood crazed antics.
   My least favorite things about the show included the character Winner, an uber obnoxious teen "vampire hunter" who claims to be desperately in love with Karin and has no freaking clue about who/what she is, and Karin's relationship with her best friend. I don't know if it's Japanese culture, but Karin told a lot of things to that boy her blood increased around and was always lying to her best friend and I hated it.
   I don't want to spoil the end necessarily, but I was okay with it. I actually wouldn't have minded if it had ended in tragedy and made up for all the goofiness with some badassery, and it tried to do that but backpedaled out of it at the last minute. I couldn't decide if I would've been upset over either kind of ending, and in a way they attempted both. Shameless crowd pleasing, it's not for every show.
   Overall it was cute, and a good story that took a little long to tell. I'd give it a 6.5/10. Not horrible, worth sitting through, but maybe not for you if you really can't get into it. It also would've helped if whoever did the subtitles for the english dub hadn't left all of the lowercase 'k's out. That was a little weird and disappointing, but I couldn't find it online.

Tldr: Cute, but not for everyone.