Tag: angel beats!

1576: Angel Beats: Gone Before Your Time

Looking back on recent entries, it occurs to me that I never summed up my final thoughts on the anime Angel Beats!, so let's rectify that right now, shall we?

Angel Beats! was an excellent show, tragically cut short by a not-insignificant degree: about 7 episodes, to be exact. What ended up as a 13-episode show was originally intended to be explored more fully across a larger number of episodes, but it never got the opportunity; there is supporting material in other forms of media, apparently, but the anime itself leaves a significant number of unanswered questions and rushes through its latter half at a disappointingly rapid clip.

Despite this aspect, however, it's still a great show, and shouldn't be passed up on just because it has stuff "missing". On the contrary, it has the feel of a great, unfinished work of art about it, and one can't help but wonder if, on a different worldline, the world was ever graced with a full 20-episode run of Angel Beats!

But enough about what the show doesn't have; what it does have is a whole lot of personality. Like Clannad, which a lot of the same people worked on, Angel Beats! features a combination of light-hearted humour and tearjerking scenes that will put your heart through a wringer. The juxtaposition of the two elements is, I feel, even more considerably pronounced than it was in Clannad; while Clannad had a few silly characters — Fuuko and, at times, Kotomi being probably the most obvious examples from the main cast — Angel Beats! has a lot more in the way of self-consciously silly, slapstick scenes. There's a beautiful sequence in one episode, for example, that sees the main cast attempting to create a distraction in class — a distraction that is achieved by, of all things, several cast members' chairs being equipped with small rocket engines that send them blasting off into the ceiling. The sheer unexpectedness of this sequence coupled with its deliberately melodramatic presentation — when they're blasting off, they do so in slow motion, accompanied by the heartfelt, tearjerking main ending theme to the series — makes it genuinely hilarious.

But then, often within the same episode where something ridiculous happened, there'll be at least one moment that will have all but the strongest souls in tears. These moments normally revolve around the series' central concept of the afterlife's inhabitants being "obliterated" and reborn as soon as they find true peace; rather than presenting a character's obliteration as the dramatic, over-the-top moment suggested by the word "obliterate", some excellent direction tends to mean that they just disappear — they're there in one frame, then the moment the camera angle changes, they're gone. Simple, beautiful — and often heartbreaking.

I know that some people aren't a big fan of how the whole series ends and while I agree to a certain extent — the last few episodes are very rushed, and the show both introduces and shows an antagonist the door with alarming rapidity — I found the actual finale to be a wonderful way to wrap up the whole series. Despite the obviously missing content — most notably, a number of main cast members lacking backstories — there was a satisfying sense of closure to the final scenes, and I was both impressed and surprised to note that the show didn't exactly end up in the place where I thought it was going to go when I first started watching.

And that's a real strength of the show as a whole. Most things about it start out as a mystery, and you're given a gradual drip-feed of information as the series progresses. By the end, you feel like you have a good understanding of at least the cast members positioned as the "main" characters; it's a shame that distinctive secondary characters such as TK (a blonde guy who speaks entirely in Engrish bastardisations of American clichés) remain completely unexplored, however.

I'd love to see a "director's cut" one day that features the "missing" episodes. I'm not sure it'll ever happen, even with the show's good reception and popularity, but it's certainly a nice possibility.

1555: Rebels Against the God

Having finished To Love-Ru a few days ago, I decided to jump into another show I'd heard of but didn't know much about: Angel Beats!, a show from P.A. Works and Aniplex, with a story and character design from two members of Key, the folks behind Clannad. (I mention this because the latter aspect is particularly noticeable; the show has the same gorgeous, well-animated style as Clannad, though thematically it's rather different.)

Angel_Beats_-_12_-_Large_17_7482

I'm only three episodes in so far but I'm very interested to see more already simply because the premise is so unusual. Unfolding in the afterlife, the show follows the exploits of a group who call themselves the SSS — a group of people who are attempting to resist a non-specific "god" to prevent themselves from being "obliterated" and subsequently reincarnated. Each of the characters clearly has their own story to tell about how they died and why they don't want to give up and accept their fate; three episodes in, we've already seen a couple of them, and I predict there will be quite a few tearjerking scenes before the end.

Like Clannad, though, Angel Beats! doesn't rely purely on wringing out your tear ducts until you can't cry any more. In fact, even more so than Clannad, there's a heavy dose of humour to the proceedings, and it's often rather black in nature. In the second episode, for example, the main cast are attempting to find their way to a hidden base from which they can procure weapons and supplies for their fight against what appears to be God's representative, an emotionless young girl called Angel who constantly thwarts them with her mysterious, seemingly supernatural powers. Along the way, it becomes apparent that the "anti-Angel traps" that had been set along the route have been activated, and one by one the group gets picked off in a series of gruesome manners. One guy gets crushed by a rock; another drowns; another is sliced to ribbons by being too big and muscular to duck under an arrangement of laser beams. In most shows, this sequence of events would be a horrifying tragedy, but since all the characters in Angel Beats! are inhabitants of the afterlife, we're quickly reminded that something that would kill you in reality will merely inconvenience you for a few minutes if you're already dead. I sense this is something that's going to come around again in the future.

One of the things I'm enjoying about the show so far is how it juxtaposes darkly humorous sections like the aforementioned — trust me, it is funny despite all the violence — with sections that are just plain dark. The sequence where leading lady Yuri explains her regrets from the latter days of her life is utterly heartbreaking, for example, as is the story of how songstress Iwasawa shuffled off the mortal coil and found herself in the afterlife. I'm pretty certain that the rest of the cast will have a similar tale to tell — with the final story undoubtedly being reserved for the currently amnesiac male protagonist, who is thoroughly confused by the whole situation he finds himself in.

The show's beautifully presented; aside from the aforementioned lovely art and glorious animation, the soundtrack is excellent, too. There's been heavy use of diegetic music in the episodes I've seen so far, with the lyrics often being relevant either to the specific situation the gang finds themselves in, or their overall situation in the afterlife. It can sometimes be a challenge to keep up with the two sets of subtitles running at once — one for the music, one for the dialogue — but it's worth attempting. (It's also nothing compared to the bizarre way the show handles teasers for the next episode: short clips from the episode of characters talking, all overlaid on top of each other at a more and more frantic pace until you can't possibly take any more.)

So that's that. At three episodes in I'm hesitant to say too much more at this juncture, but I've very much enjoyed what I've seen so far and am looking forward to watching more. I'm sure I'll have further thoughts when I have a few more episodes under my belt.