Man, remember visual kei? It was all the rage among anime fans in the late 90's and 00's, back when I first got into the hobby. Fans discussed bands like Malice Mizer and Dir en grey right alongside their favorite series despite them not having any obvious connection, and the cross-dressing singer Mana, a major influence in the Gothic Lolita fashion movement, was just as popular to cosplay as pretty much any given anime character. Although the movement seems to be largely in decline these days, at least among U.S. fans, Visual Prison is here to remind us of its glory days.

For those not up to speed, it can be hard to get a handle on just what visual kei is. If you were to ask a dozen different people to describe it in terms of western musical genres, you'd get a dozen different answers. Personally, I'd call it something like a cross between goth rock and metal in terms of sound. The band members' appearances also are emphasized – hence the “visual” part of the name – and their ostentatious hair, makeup, and costume styles usually lie on a continuum between glam rock and, again, goth rock. Their lyrics tend toward florid expressions of angst, full of various metaphors for pain and heartbreak. It's all about big expressions of big emotions, filtered through big hair and elaborate makeup and costuming.

So, you can see why it's a perfect backdrop for what essentially boils down to an idol series featuring vampires.

Yes, I know that visual kei as a musical genre could not be more different from the glossy, overproduced world of idol music, though the two do share an emphasis on showmanship and spectacle. However, that doesn't change the fact that Visual Prison's plot structure bears a lot of similarities to the majority of idol series. You've got competing groups of pretty boys on a continuum from “fairly masculine” to “total androgyny;” inter-group rivalries and friendships, including a pair of twins because I've never seen a male idol series that doesn't have a set of twins; zero important female characters; and a plot structure that spends the first couple episodes setting up the stakes and introducing the different groups, settles into a mostly-episodic stretch that combines backstory and the ensembles goofing around, and finally reaching its climax as the cast meets some kind of obstacle right before the big concert.

I've been critical of male idol shows in the past, since they tend to operate at a level of hyperreality that I find alienating. The way the characters talk, think, and interact with one another is an abstraction of an abstraction, multiple levels away from anything resembling humanity. Turns out, however, that when the characters in question are vampires performing visual kei for a red moon only they can see, I find the strangeness delightful rather than alienating.

Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't necessarily call it “good,” but it's certainly fun. Ancient vampires singing rock music to the moon in heavy makeup and getting into queer-coded hijinx? That's camp, baby. Everyone's hanging out at a resort when Eve takes a bite of a burger and is possessed by the spirit of the original vampire Carmilla, who plays elaborate supernatural pranks? What else could that be but camp? The declaration that women can't become vampires, despite there being multiple femme-presenting characters? Well, that's maybe a touch misogynistic, but also, that's camp to me. There's a lot of charm in how the series shifts wildly between embracing its inherent silliness and then taking its absurdity oh-so-seriously, and I found myself chuckling more often than not.

To be honest, I can't speak for the quality of the music for visual kei fans – my tastes back in its heyday ran more toward L'Arc~en~Ciel and Do as Infinity – but as someone who was never deep into it, it's… fine. Each of the three groups has its own style, which ties in with their overall image. I'm glad Oz was the main band, since that meant they had the most musical numbers, and their ballad-oriented style worked better for me than Lost Eden's growly metal-inspired sound or Eclipse's theatricality. None of it is something I would listen to on my own, but I did find it overall more musically interesting than your average boppy idol number.

The visuals are, overall, as strong as expected for a series produced by A1-Pictures. It leans fully into the vampire/visual kei aesthetic, defining itself with a lighting palette mostly of stark black, red, and blue to create a moody, angsty atmosphere. The boys (maybe? There's not really any explanation given for Eve or Elizabeth's gender identities) are beautiful, both in and out of their stage makeup. In many of the episodes, diegetic singing transitions into a hand-animated non-diegetic music video, some or all of which are storyboarded by Naoko Yamada under the pseudonym “Ando Ryu.”

The stage performances, however, are a different story. I know that CG rigs have come a long way and many musical series have used them very effectively, but they simply do not work here. They can be great for highly-polished choreography, but one of the fundamental elements of visual kei performance is its raw angst, or at least the appearance of it. The computer graphics they use for the performances just can't express the full weight or motion of a human body, like when Ange bends backward to cry out at the moon. It's great in the OP, but the animators fail to replicate it within the show because of their tools.

Listen, I'm not going to pretend Visual Prison is for everyone; on the contrary, it's probably only going to appeal to a narrow subset of fans. But if you like musical anime that are unafraid to be weird and silly, or if you thought Hypnosis Mic was a raucous good time, then at least give Visual Prison a shot.