Happy Boxing Day everybody! It’s time to talk about a favorite few topics this time of year: Heaven, “Feel Good” material, and Animes that I personally have some degree of spite towards. Every year, somewhere around the Winter Solstice and that other regional holiday I’m sure nobody celebrates, I take a look at at least one show that really grinds my gears. This year, that show is Angel Beats.
Now, I know what many more enfranchised readers are probably thinking: “Angel Beats? Isn’t that normally really well regarded?” And in answer to your question… yes. Yes it is. But first, I don’t always agree with majority opinions and general regards. Second, a lot like previous Hanukkah entry AnoHana, I will fully admit that it’s not one of the objectively worst shows I’ve watched. I do still have more grievance than affection and remember the show with frustration, but it’s not the same kind of bad as, say, Koi Koi Seven or In Another World With My Smartphone. I could have just found, watched, and reviewed another coprolite (that’s literally the name for a fossilized piece of fecal matter, for those who don’t remember that fun fact from when you were into dinosaurs as a kid), but for a Festivus review? You deserve better. You deserve my unvarnished thoughts on Angel Beats.
So, fairly off the bat we get the concept: the story takes place in a realm that is, essentially, purgatory. The main character is, like all the other characters, already dead by virtue of his presence in this setting. So even if he’s stabbed real good, he won’t die again, a fact that’s put on display right away. This comes from our introduction as said lead, Yuzuru Otonashi, hears it point blank from mysterious figure and student council president of this weird omnipresent high school Angel, who impales him to prove it.
This ends up with Yuzuru throwing in his lot with a quirky band called the SSS, led by the spunky and forceful girl Yuri Nakamura, and in which Yuzuru seems to be the only sane man. If this sounds oddly like the SOS Brigade, tone down those expectations. Seriously, tone them way down.
So, here’s the lay of the land: The SSS consists of a sort of “resistance” against the system in place in Purgatory School, while Angel, the Student Council, and the various “NPCs” that populate the dimension represent the orthodox elements. The orthodoxy wants the souls that find their way here to be Obliterated, which is a really scary word for a process that ultimately seems to be mostly giving up on their attachments and unfinished business, overcoming their grief, and moving on. The SSS doesn’t want to be Obliterated, so they don’t participate in school like good kids, fight Angel, and otherwise just sort of make nuisances of themselves. Yuzuru technically falls in with the SSS (in part because he doesn’t even remember his life), but he also feels a strange draw to the flat-affected white-haired borderline-loli that is Angel, and tries to reach out and understand her even when his friends are quite eager to remind him that’s a top tier bad idea.
Our introduction to most of these facts is by a number of humorous action-adjacent setups. The SSS runs through a secret labyrinth of traps (that they themselves set up, yet that still spatter most of their members), fight Angel with explosions and high-powered guns, and arrange guerrilla concerts to steal meal tickets from the NPCs.
And in this, we sort of get the crux of my problems with Angel Beats: it’s a show that works in the micro but falls apart in the macro. Some of the jokes, especially the slapstick violence (remember, these characters can’t die even if reduced to fine chutney, even if such does still sting) are beautifully timed and really well-executed. Later on, when we get emotional moments, there are a number of them that work in isolation. Nothing that really competes with the “Top 10 ‘Sad’ Moments” list, but they do function. Again, in isolation.
The problem is, this show is trying to be everything, and in doing so it largely ends up depriving itself of an identity. Sometimes it wants to be this Haruhi-esque school comedy, and sometimes it wants to be a kind of mean-spirited slapstick comedy like Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle and sometimes it feels like it wants to be a legit action show with clashes of gunplay and superpowers that did get enough budget to land, and sometimes it wants to be sweet and heartfelt and sometimes it wants to hit the same notes of pitch-black darkness that the most miserable parts of Fruit of Grisaia do. And I’m left flailing desperately for the tone and the point.
There are shows that manage to balance a lot of disparate elements well. Assassination Classroom has a DNA that’s almost as heterogeneous as that of Angel Beats. But Assassination Classroom was a rare triumph at that, and it benefited both from having around fifty episodes to really pace itself (Angel Beats has thirteen) and a skill in that it reliably knew exactly how to transition and between what. Angel Beats doesn’t have that skill, and because of that it ends up being, like Frankenstein’s Monster (and some other shows I’ve reviewed), this shambling thing that, while constructed of exemplary parts, can’t really represent their strengths in a full picture. It’s at war with itself; it should have picked one thing and gone all the way with it.
The macro-level problems with Angel Beats, though, aren’t limited to the tone. More on that when we start getting to them, but this is also a story that’s full of holes, which gives up its logical consistency (a macro element, and one that’s bloody important in supernatural fiction. Establish rules and then follow them, people!) for whatever contrived moment it wanted this time.
Since it’s the most natural comparison given the subject matter, I have to contrast Angel Beats with fellow “Dead kids in purgatory” show Haibane Renmei. And boy is that going to be a problem for Angel Beats.
You see, Purgatory stories are usually pretty hard sells. Hard, mind you, not impossible. While you don’t usually have traditional stakes (since the characters are already dead), there’s a baked in need for deep emotional stakes. It’s a setting that can’t, or at least doesn’t want to stay static. But in order to sell it, you have to play some things mysterious (Angel Beats doesn’t, or rather does with all the wrong things) in order to maintain the mystique and feel of the mythic supernatural, and you have to embrace the psychological side of what you’re doing and the depths of your characters (Which Angel Beats does, but not consistently).
Haibane Renmei is an excellent show and an excellent purgatory story. It presents with a similar starting point: a new person manifests in this world, not understanding its rules or nature and with no memory of their past, and has to make heads or tails of it all and find their place in this transitional realm. For Rakka, this involves spending half the show gradually getting to know the strange town she finds herself in, immersing in its rules and customs and gradually painting the picture of the walled town as something beyond the ordinary physical world. The viewer doesn’t ever actually need to be told what the Haibane are or how they come to be or where they’re going on the Day of Flight, because you come to understand it organically, really experiencing Rakka’s naive point of view. How does Yuzuru do it? “BTW, you are dead and this high school is your afterlife. Let me murder you to prove it.”
So we can cross off subtle, charming, mysterious, and organic…
And I know that Haibane Renmei is in some ways a very unfair comparison. It’s one of the shows that I legitimately consider a masterpiece, so nothing else needs to be held to those standards in order to be considered a success. But I’m not asking Angel Beats to equal or exceed Haibane Renmei, I’m asking it to learn some broad strokes general technique.
So, Yuzuru joins the SSS. They clean out the allied guild (with the traps and Angel getting members along the way) and generally make nuisances of themselves. We get a first hint of real obliteration when an SSS member with a vivid memory of failing to catch a fly ball in life has the opportunity to do it against Angel in a school tournament, but he’s prevented so we don’t really know what would have followed.
In the process, Yuzuru’s inexplicable interest does serve to help humanize Angel (she’s still a very blunt flat affect character, but okay), which means she has to get replaced as the main villain. This falls to the Student Council Vice President, who doesn’t seem to actually be an NPC but rather a kid with a really obnoxious god complex and some hypnotic powers.
His run is fairly short, ended when Yuzuru decides to friendship speech the guy into submission, learning that his self-aggrandizing persona is an over-correction for never having been acknowledged as himself in life. Sadly, he slides right back into the theatrics after joining the SSS, necessitating more random bull to fill time and provide conflict.
In this, we get some time dedicated time for hypnosis retrieving Yuzuru’s memories, sandwiching an odd episode in which a bunch of evil clones of Angel cause trouble. Overall, we find that Yuzuru wanted to attend medical school to save lives thanks to personal tragedy, but that he became trapped in a collapsed subway tunnel one fateful day. He rallied most of the survivors to haul together and make it through, but expired himself just before rescue came. Not before, however, marking himself as an organ donor and convincing many other survivors (or near survivors) to do the same.
Now, I am going to give this little instance of message fiction a pass, since I happen to know that Japan has a huge issue with not having enough organ donors, and just address what it does for or to the fiction when the situation calls for it. For the time being, the whole memory recovery and psycho angel clone process results in Yuzuru getting closer with Angel and accepting her goal to help others overcome their grief and pass on.
We get one legitimately good long episode at this, where we spend a ton of time with the spunky little girl of the SSS, who it turns out was paralyzed in life and couldn’t do a lot of things. Yuzuru helps her achieve the physical feats she never could, and salving her last regret a nice SSS boy says he’d have married her, disability or no. So she disappears, and the boy decides to press on with Yuzuru.
Now, while this one episode is decently executed, it is really overwrought in a way that makes me glad that the show largely drops the angle of delving into each and every person who needs to pass on. Yeah, we never really do it again, at least not like we do here. Most of the SSS members are ultimately freed from their burdens off screen, which could be seen as a pretty lame resolve… but lame or no I kind of prefer it to the “feel good” cycle.
The “feel good” cycle is a manipulative little storytelling structure that’s endemic in what usually self-describe as “feel good” media. These pieces of media thrive on a basic sequence: show as much horrible misery as possible for the character, so that when you finally throw them a bone, however small, the audience will “feel good”.
These things seem to ‘get’ people quite easily, but for my part I regard them as nearly predatory brain-hacks, and usually consider the excess of suffering that they need to indulge in to be a cheap trick. Common problems involve characters having little agency and just sort of being cosmic chew toys, as well as the eventual thrown bone not really equaling the suffering inflicted in any sort of way. It’s a genre to which I have a good deal of antipathy, and Angel Beats… flirts with it.
A core difference, I suppose, is that Angel Beats puts all the trauma in the past, and spends more time actually addressing the issues than creating them. The other difference is that Angel Beats, as I’ve said, sort of ditches the idea as its core episode loop after one go, on which I have such mixed feelings. I would have hated the show going all the way with “feel good” material, but it would have been more intellectually honest and fitting than introducing it with a whole episode and then just sort of shoving it into the background.
Instead, shadow monsters start attacking! Introduced only at the end of episode 10 and only really addressed in 11 and 12, the shadows are yet another previously unstated rule of this convoluted afterlife, with the original NPCs essentially turning hostile and even potentially de-souling and NPC-ifying humans that they manage to catch.
So, let me go on another aside, and this one about The Rules.
When you’re dealing with speculative material, anything not grounded in reality as we know it, you have a terrifying amount of freedom. You can make up any old thing and there’s no real way for the audience to say “That’s not how that works!” Because nobody knows or it’s explicitly fictional. Stepping away from Angel Beats and the afterlife for a moment, we can see this effect in place with magic-users. Some settings, a magic user has to be born with power, and wave a wand around and talk in Latin to use it. In a different setting, magic could be learned by anybody smart enough, like a science, and magic users do their thing by drawing intricate seals. In another setting, magic users could have magic circuits in their body that encode for spells, which they could even transfer to someone else who would then be able to use it.
These are all equally valid. There’s no intrinsic factor that makes Harry Potter or Fullmetal Alchemist or Fate more “correct”, because those supernatural powers don’t actually exist. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that anything goes within a particular work. Readers would probably reject it if Rin Tohsaka showed up at Hogwarts with her magic thighs and Gandr finger guns. No one would accept Harry’s wand-waving casually breaking the Law of Equivalent Exchange if he tried to get involved in Amestris. And homunculi in common or no, I don’t think anyone would take seriously Edward Elric trying to transmute himself a Servant to take part in the Fuyuki Holy Grail War.
This is because all three settings establish their versions of The Rules, which arbitrate what supernatural bull is possible in that particular story, excluding all others. The Rules can be anything you want, anything at all, but once you set them it takes a very careful touch to amend them. These things, once defined, are more solid than the laws of physics as we know them. People will accept breaks from reality. If you want to break The Rules or change them late in the game, there’s going to be a price.
Bringing it back, Let’s look again at Haibane Renmei. Haibane Renmei is an ontological mystery – because of that, The Rules start off obfuscated and learning The Rules is a big part of the show. We understand quickly how Haibane come into being and more gradually how they live in their world. Eventually, we’re introduced to complications – the Day of Flight and the sin-bound – and much of the rest of the show involves getting answers about how those details work.
Now, for the first, Angel Beats doesn’t really operate like an Ontological Mystery. It’s wearing far too many hats and lays its cards on the table too openly to actually pull off the sustained atmosphere needed to land an Ontological Mystery, which means that we expect The Rules to be upfront more than they are in Haibane Renmei. That already means the show is going to have a harder time changing things or introducing new elements.
But, even setting that aside, in Haibane Renmei there’s a consistent theme, and ultimately one picture that fits together well about how their world works and what things mean. In Angel Beats’ asinine afterlife, there is none of that. It looks like there is at the start of the show: Dead kids go here, physical damage is meaningless since the dead can’t exactly die again, and Angel is a special existence with powers that acts as a dog of the system.
Understanding more about Angel and her humanity is the part I’ll accept. She’s an exception from the outset, so getting her background is one thing. What’s another is this constant barrage of new elements that aren’t germane and don’t fit. Like the vice president and his hypnosis powers… what’s up with that? It doesn’t seem to be the same deal as Angel. The psycho Angel clones? They’re pretty random. There seems to be something about a magic computer program that grants Angel her abilities but this isn’t If Her Flag Breaks, so that ultimately connects to nothing. And now after most of the show of the only way out being Obliteration and the afterlife seemingly tuned to help poor sad kids achieve catharsis, we get this arc about the system seeming to spit out soul-eating abominations. None of this feels like it belongs with the rest of the mess. It’s afterlife-and-powers casserole and The Rules have been diced up and mixed in without regard for the structure they should bring.
In any case, with the threat of the Shadows, folks are a lot more OK with Obliteration. Yuri gets on the case, narrowly avoids turning into an NPC (like that was a threat of stagnation the whole time?) and encounters some weird maybe-god that tries to tempt her with power and gets properly rejected.
This clears up the Shadows, and between the penultimate and final episodes, everybody but the main characters passes on. Main Character Squad decides to have a graduation party to encourage themselves to shoo, resulting in Vice President, the one boy who started helping Yuzuru, and Yuri ultimately shuffling off to whatever comes next. Angel and Yuzuru briefly remain. Yuzuru suggests that they stick around to continue to shepherd people, but Angel reveals what her unfinished business was.
You see, Angel was, it seems the recipient of Yuzuru’s donated heart, and as long as she lived her regret was not being able to thank the boy who gave her a new lease on life. So as much as he may profess he loves her despite their non-existent chemistry, she’s fundamentally done now that she’s been able to square with him.
This is yet another scenario where this afterlife abandons any sort of logic or sense. If you’re going to turn time into a pretzel, establish that this is a possible thing. Otherwise, it’s shocking that Angel should have died after Yuzuru, possibly way after him with a very different body than the one she manifests in this realm with, and yet she’s been in the afterlife for a good long while by the time he shows up. Further, she’s not really a kid who didn’t get a good first chance, so why is she in the High School Afterlife at all? Okay, I guess she kind of has to encounter Yuzuru in her purgatory, but I think there might be other ways to arrange that. And why make him amnesiac at first to draw this mess out?
Haruhi must have been absolutely plastered when she came up with these afterlife mechanics. That’s the only way this makes sense.
Oh, and the stinger? After Yuzuru and Angel pass on, there’s one more scene, where Obvious Yuzuru Reincarnation hears Obvious Angel Reincarnation humming one of the songs the SSS band came up with and reaches out to her and… no resolution, that’s it. I guess it’s supposed to be like Kimi no Na wa (aka Your Name) where we know and like the characters enough to get that everything’s going to work out now that they’ve found each other, but the characters in that movie had actual chemistry. Really, really good chemistry so that the audience could actually feel for them and understand 100% how things would work out from there. Yuzuru’s connection to Angel can only be explained by her literally having his meat heart, because there’s not really much of an emotional spark between them. Honestly, he resonated better with Yuri, despite her prickly side.
In all this. Angel Beats gets a C from me. It’s got some really nice micro scenes but they’re part of a badly broken macro production, so it levels out to being an effort that’s watchable, but that I can’t exactly recommend. I guess there’s no harm in it, and if you haven’t seen it you’ll probably be entertained enough, but for myself, I’d rather look elsewhere for anything that Angel Beats is peddling.