Angel Beats!

Where were you in 2010?

CLANNAD creator Jun Maeda was making Angel Beats!. It was one of the first true hit anime of the new decade. With its Haruhi-influenced setting, and an absolutely golden sensibility that combined a modern structure with a purehearted sentimentality at its core, it would’ve been weirder if Angel Beats! wasn’t popular. This one’s for the emo kids, in the best way possible.

Of course, a few months later (and as pointed out in this column, which inspired me to watch the show, and consequently, write this one), Madoka Magica hit the western anime fan community like a hurricane, and proceeded to influence much of the next decade while eclipsing that first year pretty hard. If you got into anime during or after 2011, it is entirely reasonable that you’ve never even heard of Angel Beats!

Indeed, in all ways--visually, thematically, in terms of writing and characters--Angel Beats! strikes more as the last 2000s Anime than the first hit 2010s Anime. It has left no obvious influence on any other popular or well-acclaimed shows. It was the endpoint of a zeitgeist--not the beginning of one, and it was the last hit its creator had before life, as it often does, got in the way. Angel Beats! is a full stop in anime form, despite its enduring (if often quiet) popularity.

The premise is simple, if completely bonkers. Otonoshi, our protagonist, awakes in the courtyard of a nameless highschool next to a purple-haired girl (Yuri) wielding a sniper rifle. The high school is purgatory, the girl the founder and leader of The Afterlife Battlefront, a group of rebels who fight against the white-haired “Angel”, a girl with superpowers who wants them to all behave and live ordinary high school lives so they’ll eventually move on to the next world. Yuri finds this objectionable, mostly because of her tragic backstory that we learn a few episodes in. Hence the "rebels against the God" mantra, yeah?

Fittingly, given the “supernatural high school” genre it is something of a capstone to, Angel Beats! is wildly ambitious. It’s one of those; a show that crams 3 or 4 whole genres’ worth of tropes into a blender and sees what the resulting smoothie tastes like. Yet, here’s the thing. That approach, at its best, can yield moments of shocking brilliance, both overt and subtle, and Angel Beats! is pretty damn close to “the best”.

The character arc of Iwasawa, early in the series, is one such example. The leader of GirlDeMo, the high school club band (who are, again, a clear riff on Haruhi Suzumiya’s ENOZ), Iwasawa’s earthly life was defined by having to cope with a pair of abusive parents. As one might expect, she turned to music--the band named is a pretty clear pastiche of early 2000s emo-rock, something that’s quite fitting--before having it all cut short by a head injury suffered at the hands of her father. As part of GirlDeMo, she premieres a ballad at the climax of the third episode, finally singing a song that she knows will mean as much to others as that band did to her, and suddenly, at the song’s conclusion, she quietly vanishes.

This moment is mentioned in many reviews of Angel Beats!, and there’s a very simple reason for that; it is devastating. I knew about it beforehand and it still struck me. Not only is it one of the iconic tropes of 2000s high school life anime--the climactic school band concert--being simultaneously turned on its head and laid to rest, it’s tied to the character’s own passing on. It is a eulogy for itself, and a beautiful one at that. The image of the unheld guitar, sitting on the floor, is still quietly moving ten years later, and I suspect it still will be in 2030, 2050, and 2100 too.

It’s hard not to get meta with Angel Beats!, because we again have to remember, this artistic movement largely ended here. That guitar could just as easily have been a paintbrush. Iwasawa finally saying what she wanted to say and moving on is reflected in the entire work itself, because in many ways, Angel Beats! is that “thing you want to say” before moving on, and that’s what makes it work on a deeper, more human level. Iwasawa vanishes in a moment of earned inner peace and contentment, we would all be lucky to go out that way.

By the 9th episode, it becomes clear that this is in fact Angel Beats! core thesis. There is a running theme about giving of yourself to save someone else. Students “graduate” from the high school when they finally have no regrets. The setting itself is a prescient interpretation of the endless everyday cycle that defines high school life anime reinterpreted as a literal purgatory for those deprived of a happy youth. All of those “Azumanga Daioh takes place in Limbo” theories that used to float around the internet? Angel Beats! takes that idea and puts it into the text itself.

The show, from then on, builds on what it means to help save someone who perhaps does not necessarily want to be saved. Yuri, in particular, holds out ‘til near the show’s very end, as her own life--rocked by a senseless, violent tragedy--has left her bitter and misotheistic, not without reason. As a sidenote, making a character who initially appears to be a Haruhi Suzumiya xerox into someone who blames the divine for her fate is impressively clever.

All of this might give the impression that Angel Beats! is a bit dour. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The series has a strong comedic sensibility--sometimes slapstick or running gags, sometimes marginally more subtle character humor--that helps counterbalance its heavier moments. The fourth episode actually directly parodies the “graduation” mechanism, proving that AB isn’t afraid to even skewer itself a little bit. This is a hard thing to juggle, and it doesn’t always pull it off. There is, for instance, a running gag about our lead thinking another character is gay. Something which would, rightly, probably not fly today, but by and large, the series balances itself well here.

Other kinks in the rope come from Angel Beats! exploring the consequences of its own worldbuilding. Iwasawa vanishes on her own terms, but just a few episodes later, we’re introduced to Ayato Naoi, who for the duration of his arc takes over the school as a dictator. His plot to hypnotize other students into an un-earned inner peace, and have them disappear that way, is the result of an evident god complex, and it’s rightly presented as horrifying.

Here though is where the show’s single-cour structure fails it a bit. Ayato is introduced, becomes the school dictator, pseudo-massacres (they can’t actually die, given that they’re already dead) The Afterlife Battlefront, explains his motivations and backstory, has his plan foiled, and his character redeemed all in only about 40 realtime minutes of footage. By the next episode, he’s just part of the main cast. It’s a lot of weight for such a small segment of the show to carry, and in that unfortunate sense, Angel Beats! is very much an anime of the 2010s, as this kind of hyper-compressed storytelling has only more become the norm over time.

But at the end of it all, Angel Beats! goes out with the kind of wonderfully melodramatic finale that is, maybe, the most fitting sendoff its era of anime could possibly have had. The final two episodes see Yuri conquer her inner demons with her love of her friends, and see Otonashi and Kanade resolve their relationship. The final scene, with Otonashi scrambling to hug a just-disappeared Kanade, should not work as well as it does. It’s cheesy, it’s corny, it’s cloying, and it’s astoundingly sincere in its simple belief in the power of love, in all its many forms. And with a wide shot of the high school, an era ends.

Indeed, if Angel Beats! understands one thing very well, it’s that everything--friendships, stories, lives--comes to an end.

That’s a theme that is so universally applicable that it almost feels like cheating at writing. More importantly, the sheer amount of sincerity really sells the whole thing. You can forgive its flaws because it’s strengths are so strong. It’s true that It’s probably not quite long enough, and the pacing is at times awkward such that even moments that work (such as the end of episode 10) are still working against it. There are a few unfortunate jokes (as mentioned) and some iffy elements in character backstories, but these are all more quibbles than major flaws.

More than most, when I talked about how I was watching Angel Beats! for the first time, I got supportive comments--some from total strangers--here on Anilist and elsewhere around the internet, hoping that I’d enjoy it and telling me to buckle up for the emotional rollercoaster. And it’s easy to see why that cult fanbase has endured. Angel Beats!, warts and all, speaks to people. If you listen closely enough, you can still hear it singing.

And if you liked this review, why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?