Who designed the characters in Blood: The Last Vampire?

Blood: The Last Vampire, Production I.G's 2000 film, is set in 1966 Japan, where a girl named Saya hunts the chiropteran monsters hiding among the people of an American air base. The film is short, under an hour, but it landed like a manifesto: it was produced entirely digitally, inked and colored on computers at a moment when anime still ran on painted cels.

Kitakubo's key hire was not an anime industry character designer. He took the script to Katsuya Terada, the illustrator of the Zelda guides and the Jinguji covers, and asked him to design the film. Kitakubo's reasoning is on record: Terada's characters have a feel to them that is universal, the quality of a man who had drawn for games played all over the world. Kazuchika Kise, one of anime's great animators, then translated the designs into motion.

The result is why Saya does not look like other anime heroines of 2000: grounded proportions, real weight, a face that carries the story's age rather than its marketing. The film took the Grand Prize in the Animation Division at the 2000 Japan Media Arts Festival, and Terada's English-language art book biography still introduces him to America as, probably, best known there for this film.