Angel Beats! A Review

So I thought it was about time I did another anime review, since my last few have been mostly educational goodies about the otaku world.

It was a lot harder to choose an anime than I thought. I watch so many a year that when I try to pare it down to just a few...it's hard. So I decided to go with the one that impacted me the most, and hit me on a more personal level.

Angel Beats! Review
Written by Olivia S.

Angel Beats! was an anime that came into my life at the perfect time. I had just moved into the big city, and I felt like any kid fresh from the country: alienated, shell-shocked, culture-shocked, and overwhelmed on all levels. Angel Beats! deals with a lot of these feelings, in that it's about adapting, learning, and growing as an individual and coming into your own, as well as learning to move on.

Now I'll admit, Angel Beats! was an anime that originally put me off, and I was thoroughly convinced I'd have nothing to do with it. All the title screens I had seen involved school uniforms (also known as "seifuku"), which really turned me off. I have never liked much in the *Gakuen genre, as it is often juvenile and quite often, well, creepy. But Angel Beats! differs from this greatly, and here's how.

For starters, the entire cast of the series is dead.



What? Run that by me again? It's true, and it isn't a spoiler either. The story follows Otonashi Yuzuru, who awakens in the midst of a battlefield with no memory of how he got there. There he meets Yurippe, a girl armed with an automatic rifle, trying to shoot down what looks like a helpless (but calm) young girl about her own age. He learns that the girl she's aiming for is God's disciple, and as an act of rebellion, is trying to gun her down.

Yuzuru realizes that this is the afterlife, and that Yurippe and her ragtag team of dead teenagers all died before their time and are being kept in a sort of "purgatory" in this picture-perfect realm designed to look like a school. All the students in the school are merely illusions, going about their picture-perfect lives, while the souls of real kids are slowly forming a small but formidable army hidden within the school's blind spots. Following the story of their armed rebellion, they learn that what they're fighting against isn't necessarily God, but their acceptance of death and moving on from purgatory; fulfilling there what they could never fulfill in their unfairly short lives.



The story takes time to tell itself and unravel, yet wastes no time delivering hard-hitting episodes with deep philosophical overtones. You learn about each and every member of the rebellion, why they fight and how they died. You get to follow each one's growth as a person: who they were, who they are now, and who they want to be. Each character is unique, and lovable in their own way, differing from one another greatly.



For me, it stood apart from all the other anime I watched that year. It was creative, always changing, and threw you for a loop whenever you thought you knew where the story was going. The soundtrack was breathtaking, and needless to say, the animation was absolutely top-notch.

The soundtrack was composed and executed by Jun Maeda and Anant-Garde Eyes. At 37 years old, Jun Maeda is not only a composer, but a lyricist, author, and manga-ka. To say he is talented is an understatement. He wrote the light novel that the anime was based off of, and the manga adaptation that came before the anime, illustrated by Haruka Komowata, was written by him as well. His musical pieces have been featured in visual novels, anime, and video games.

Both the renowned light novel and the manga were run in Dengeki G's Magazine.

So this anime was a lesson in not judging a book by its cover, that's for sure. Oftentimes something is not at all what we assume it to be. I had seen the cover and assumed it was a brainless school drama, when in reality it was a beautiful story about life and death, and the possibility of rebirth; the questioning of what comes after death and everyone's uncertainty to accept whatever it may be.

I hope this inspires some of you to try something new, or something you had already made your mind up about before even trying it.
Remember, keeping an open mind is one of the most important virtues one can have! ...Not to sound preachy of course!

Angel Beats! is now available in both the English and Japanese languages, on Blu-ray and DVD.

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*Gakuen: A genre of anime and manga centering around school life. Many of these stories (but not all!) are aimed towards older men or women who fantasize about a teenage life. Fan-service is common in this genre, especially fan-service directed at older men.