Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

Ten thousand years in the future the world has been rebuilt by vampires and then partially reclaimed by humans, leaving a landscape that is simultaneously feudal and post-apocalyptic. D is a dhampir - half human, half vampire, hunting his father's kind for money. He is hired to retrieve a girl taken by a vampire lord. Four other hunters are hired by the girl's family for the same job.

Yoshiaki Kawajiri - the director of Ninja Scroll - working with a budget that Madhouse had never previously operated at, a Hollywood co-production that gave him resources and kept him out of his own way. The animation is the finest Madhouse produced for a theatrical feature: every frame of the creature design, the Gothic European environments, the movement of characters through space, built to a standard that hand-drawn feature animation rarely reached before or has reached since.

The story is classical. The execution is extraordinary. The fansub community had this before the official English release existed because the animation was the point and the animation did not require subtitles to communicate what it was doing. An argument for the visual medium as complete in itself.