WARNING: Contains spoilers.

I'll be upfront: I don't like crybait anime. It's not that I don't feel emotional responses to works of fiction, and yes, some anime have even gotten me to tear up a bit, but there's a certain kind of work of fiction that tells you how to feel rather than merely expressing itself. While billing itself as a supernatural comedy about teenagers duking it out in the afterlife, Angel Beats is ultimately infamous, along with original anime like Anohana or Your Lie in April, for making people cry buckets. Despite everything else going on in this anime--and there's a lot of disparate elements--almost any mention of Angel Beats will involve how damn sad it is. Still, Angel Beats is undeniably an ambitious passion project. Helmed by Jun Maeda, founder of the Key visual novel brand known for titles such as Kanon, Clannad, and Little Busters, Angel Beats would be his first original anime project. Even before its airing in the Spring 2010 anime season, however, Angel Beats encountered problems in its production process. Despite Maeda's desire for a 2-cour (24-26 episodes aired over two seasons) anime, Angel Beats would only receive 13 episodes, which producer Hironori Toba admitted in a 2009 interview published in Dengeki G's Magazine was not enough to tell the full story as Maeda imagined it. This is an unfortunate and fairly common pitfall of original anime--ambition that the studio is not willing or able to fully support, resulting in a compromised product. Some original anime overcome this or are able to tell a cohesive story in one cour; Angel Beats does not. And in a way, a work which strives for greatness and flops badly is, while not necessarily worse, certainly a more spectacular failure than something which is just plain mediocre.

Thus, in 13 episodes, Angel Beats attempts to a lot at once, creating some awkward juxtapositions at best and a total disconnect from its audience at worst. For the first six or so episodes, it is primarily a light-hearted comedy with passable, if very repetitive, gag humor. Yet in the second episode, the tone abruptly and awkwardly shifts to an incredibly bleak one, as the club leader Yuri (who is definitely not a bargain bin Haruhi Suzumiya) divulges her backstory to the protagonist Yuzuru (who receives, admittedly the best development of the series, but ultimately isn't particularly interesting either), as the brutal murder of her three younger siblings by armed burglars who act like trained professionals in a country with next to no gun crime. No prior indication is given, either in this episode or the prior one, that something like this is coming up, other than the fact that everyone is in the afterlife. Compared to a much better purgatory-themed anime like Haibane Renmei, the execution is clunky and heavy-handed. Angel Beats' worldbuilding is also quite lazy and scattered--while we get some information on the backstory of Tenshi and the nature of their afterlife in later episodes, it all feels quite artificial and too-perfect to appeal to the otaku audience that prior Key visual novels had been so successful with, and the way Yuzuru interacts with the rest of the cast makes it feel like almost nothing was going on prior to his arrival.

What suffers most of all, however, is Angel Beats' ultimate emotional impact in its final few episodes. The way Angel Beats wants you to cry is simple--the character has found a satisfying way to cope with the trauma they faced during their lives and, now in peace, is able to pass on into reincarnaiton. This could have worked with an extra dozen episodes and better writers, but when Angel Beats tried to be a quirky gag comedy, it failed to properly develop the bulk of its ensemble cast. Most of these characters are two-dimensional comic relief and/or exist to check off an archetype, and without more time for proper development beyond these rules, the impact of the climax is heavily muted. The strongest episode in the series, specifically the third episode, offers only a single full episode of fleshing-out to a character before sending her off into the next life. Thus, after dealing with awkward mood shifts and a narrative that cuts corners, Angel Beats falls apart as all of its ambition dies with a whimper. Certainly the anime has its strong points, particularly in its above-average animation, solid shot compositon (which peaks during the first episode during the concert), and several good songs from its sadly under-explored rock band. But despite its budget and despite its massive popularity and relatively positive critical reception (which I only partly understand), Angel Beats is a sad monument to what could have been and an anime that, when it fails, does spectacularly.

P.S. holy shit stop shooting at her, you know your bullets do nothing.