| 27 June 2010
Overview
A few years ago, I entered the world of Key storytelling through a door named Clannad. An anime series based on a visual novel of the same name, it told the story of Tomoya Ozaki, a boy on the verge of adulthood who was looking forward to his senior year of high school as a well-known delinquent. Not a bad kid, Tomoya, though certainly he'd gotten into his fair share of trouble, often alongside his best friend Sunohara. There was something… uncertain about Tomoya, tenuous, as though he wasn't quite certain what to do with himself. At least, not until he met a girl about his age at the base of the hill leading up to the school, heard her ask a question to nobody in particular, and decided to answer her. It's funny how so small, so simple an exchange can be the difference in everything – and it's a concept that Key excels at exploring, so when I heard that the next Key series was going to be one more fantasy flavored, I noted the name – Angel Beats – down on my to watch list.
| USA Info | Japanese Info | Image | |
| Title | Angel Beats |  | |
| Alternative | エンジェルビーツ | ||
| Dates | 2010.04.02 | ||
| Companies | D-Station, AIC, AIC PLUS+, Animation Planet, APPP, Asahi Production, C-Station, Dogakobo, Ekura Animal, GAINAX, Ginga-ya, Jumondo, M.S.C., Nakamura Production, Production Reed, Studio A.P.P.P, Studio Liberty, Studio Mark, Sunrise Animation Studio, Trans Arts Co., union CHO, Yuhodo, T2 Studio, P.A. Works, MSJ, Studio Road, AIM Entertainment, Daejin Animation, Aniplex, Visual Art's/Key | ||
| Creator | Jun Maeda | ||
| Director | Seiji Kishi | ||
| Genre | Fantasy, High School, Action, Mystery, Drama, Comedy | ||
| Related | |||
Review
What would you do if you woke up in the middle of the night, and found yourself laying on asphalt pavement with no idea where you were, or WHO you were? Unfortunately for our young protagonist, that's exactly where he's just found himself – laying alone in the middle of the night outside what appears to be a school building. Somebody asks him if he's awake, and when he sits up, he realizes that it's a girl about his age – one in the process of aiming a sniper rifle toward a sports field. She welcomes him to the "Like-hell-I'm-dead Battlefront" – they're still working on the name - and begins to explain a little about what's going on – like the fact that he's dead and that this is the afterlife. Oops. It's about this time that he realizes that she's aiming at a white haired girl down on the field. A few more choice words and the arrival of one of her other recruits later, and Otonashi decides that he'd be better off going down to talk to the white-haired girl if he wants to make anything resembling sense out of what's going on. Unfortunately for him, after a brief discussion in which she confirms that everybody there is already dead, he makes the mistake of asking her to prove it…
Angel Beats is a strange, STRANGE combination of drama, comedy, action and slice-of-life storytelling that centers around Otonashi, Yurippe – the leader of the Battlefront – and 'Angel', the Battlefront's main enemy. Otonashi's lost all his memory – he only just barely remembers his own family name, and not his given name. Angel suggests that it happens frequently that newly deceased have lost their memories, especially if they took head injuries when they died. The school that the series takes place in is sort of afterlife sandbox game, according to Yuri. There are others like herself and Otonashi that have died and wound up there, but the vast majority of the school's population, students and teachers both, are what she terms Non Player Characters, and work like the standard villagers in an RPG: they've got set responses and in general ignore what the afterlifers do, no matter how disruptive – unless, of course, they're supposed to respond.
Basically, the Battlefront is Yuri's way of fighting against God and the unfair, sudden, indiscriminate deaths that each of the characters had that landed them in the school. Without his own memory, he decides that it might be better to stick with them for awhile, at least until it comes back, especially because of the risk of being 'erased' if he does nothing. Seems that those that don't join the Battlefront, that just accept the school life, eventually just vanish from even the afterlife.
Ok, before I go any farther, lemmie get something out of the way. Chances are good that if you've heard about Angel Beats before, you've also heard it called a Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya clone. To be absolutely fair, there is some… maybe not truth, but validity to that statement, not least because Yuri and Haruhi could be each other's stunt doubles. While Yuri isn't nearly as eccentric and unstable as Haruhi is, she certainly has the charisma and force of will that Haruhi did. With that said, calling Yurippe a Haruhi clone is selling the character short and viewing her rather two-dimensionally. There are similarities, yes, but they fall short of making her a true clone versus a character in the same general archetype – or at least they do to my point of view. Your mileage may vary.
While we're on the subject of the characters, let's take a look at the other two major players. Otonashi, as I mentioned earlier, is the main series protagonist, and ends up joining the Battlefront to 'fight' against Angel. Despite his lack of memory, he quickly becomes an important member of the group – much to the displeasure of some of the older members. Something about him seems to bring out hidden bits and pieces of the other characters, and soon he finds himself learning some of their secrets, including the often deeply personal ways in which they died. He's also the only character that seems genuinely interested in what Angel really is early on – something the other members of the Battlefront never seemed to stop to consider.
Angel herself remains an enigma for the first half of the series. Quiet, seemingly emotionless, even robotic, she proves to be vastly more powerful than the members of the Battlefront, shrugging off hailstorms of bullets and not even noticing something so minor as a bullet wound to the abdomen. Eventually though, the stage is set for a gradual revealing of the truth behind Angel and her powers, and the greater secret of the world about them. I found that in some ways, Angel's development was similar in subtlety to that of Nagisa from Clannad – it's done slowly and with great care, using observation from both Otonashi and Yurippe's perspectives as well as very gradual direct interaction between her and Otonashi.
There's actually a surprisingly large cast of supporting characters in Angel Beats, large enough to be able to call it an ensemble, but unfortunately most of them are badly under-developed and flat, relying on annoying character ticks and personality flaws instead of actual personalization. For instance, one character is a hacker who repeatedly insists that the others all call him by his handle 'Christ' – nobody, of course, listens, with Yuri frequently cutting him off mid-request in some manner. Now, I wouldn't mind this… if it had only been used once or twice in the series. Instead, that character tick is his ENTIRE CHARACTER. 
Every single time he has screen time, they go through the motions of this one REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING bit. Most of the extended cast are just as shallow, unfortunately, which is a shame because a couple of the characters that did get even a minimal amount of extra characterization showed a lot of potential. I was also very displeased that they utterly wasted one of the few members of the cast that did get substantial development very, very early on in the series. I don't want to spoil, so I won't say who here, but it was a terrible, terrible decision on the part of Jun Maeda.
With that said, let's move onto the music and voice acting for Angel Beats. The voice acting talent for the series was great, which is something that I've really come to expect from Key titles, all things considered. Despite the lack of characterization for most of the cast, the VA's did a damn good job of injecting life into otherwise lifeless characters. For the characters that did receive development, Angel Beats' voice acting was a real treat. Angel's actress was especially good at that light, soft spoken monotone that really sounded empty but hinted at an actual person in there, somewhere.
The musical score for Angel Beats is probably the best soundtrack of the past year, not least because of the absolutely stellar My Soul, Your Beats! Op theme by Key veteran Lia. Just about any soundtrack she touches turns into pure gold, and My Soul, Your Beats!'s combination of beautiful piano, violin and upbeat tempo refrain is exceptionally good. Paired with the title animation, it becomes an almost ethereal experience to kick off an episode, which, of course, was the intent. Angel Beats also shines in the soundtrack because it comes complete with its own high school rock band, Girls Dead Monster, who are part of the Battlefront and take part in some of their operations by putting on full scale musical productions. There's a lot of great vocal songs to be found in this series.
The animation is pretty damn good, as I've come to expect from Key series, with exceptional production values on the Girls Dead Monster concerts and some of the later action scenes. There were some complaints poor quality animation in a couple of the early episodes – some of the particularly anal pointed out that Yuri's hands were poorly drawn, for example – but I really didn't pick up on these and overall I was very pleased with the animation. Character designs were a bit lacking, though – as I said above, Yuri could have been Haruhi's stunt double, and most of the extended cast were the usual suspects, though there were a couple stand outs, such as the break-dancing TK and Shiina, high school kunoichi with a fetish for cute things. Still, all in all I was pleased with what I saw, and the production values certainly went up for the scenes that deserved it. The concert at the end of the first episode was of similar quality to Macross Frontier and Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
Overall
For the most part, I greatly enjoyed Angel Beats. It did a good job of continuing what's growing to be a tradition of high-quality VisualArt's/Key storytelling. Unfortunately, the series does have a few problems that prevent me from giving it top marks. My biggest problem is that the vast majority of the cast are strictly filler, and wasted filler, at that. They're never properly developed, and toward the end of the series their stories are concluded with what amounts to a hand-wave magic trick. Even a couple of the characters that were given good development are really wasted because of how they're used and tossed aside. Jun Maeda might have been trying to inject extra drama to the plot, and unfortunately it was a big miss this time. That's not to say that there's not a lot of good storytelling to be found, only that the series could have been much more. I'm loathe to suggest that Angel Beats was rushed, but at times it certainly did feel that way.
Secondly, and far more glaring, there are a couple severe continuity gaffs and spots where, quite frankly, the story fell apart – badly. The first of these is about half-way through the series, and results in the addition of a poorly thought out, extraneous character that does nothing to add to the story and proves to be just shy of a Mary Sue. The second is pretty much the first sixteen and a half minutes of the last episode, which abandons any and all character development and general series feel for a truly crap-tastic filler session leading up to what was quite possibly the very best moment of the entire series. It's not the first time I've seen a series fall flat for the better part of the last episode before one last hurrah, but not often has it been as spectacularly bad as Angel Beats' was. I'll give credit where it's due – the series managed to recover from them. Maybe not completely, but well enough to keep me watching, but they shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Finally, and this is really mostly a pet peeve than anything else, but I think I'd have liked to learn more about the world that they found themselves in. There are some interesting concepts to be found, and unique ideas presented that are never really delved into. For instance, the Battlefront's weaponry is apparently all created from simple sand. They're not constructed in a factory (at least, not in the traditional sense), but literally created with plain old molded sand that somehow becomes fully functional weaponry and ammo. Also, from the way the NPC's are described, they shouldn't have been susceptible to the Girls Dead Monster concerts, or even very interested in them, yet they're shown to be outright supportive of them.
So, overall, we're left with a good series that, by all rights, should have been stellar, but was handicapped and hamstrung by inept character handling and a few very poorly written plot twists. Angel Beats could have been so much more, had it taken more time, developed the cast fully, and done a better job of handling some of the major events than it did. Instead it drives along on the strength of its three main characters and relies on haphazard character tics and sheer inertial power to plow through the rocky portions, and to the credit of the main characters, it mostly succeeds at this. With that said, despite the disappointing issues that the series does have, I do think it's worth at least a look. There's good material to be found here, you just have to dig unusually deep for it.
