DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Front of House Our Community Review Film TV There is no God, Buddha or Angel

I was watching Netflix today, and the series I was binging came to an end. So I hit what's new and there it was.

Angel Beats

Yes, it's anime. And it's one of the very best. It starts out strange, very easily crossing the border from silly to plain goofy. It is internally consistent and fun, but slowly you get the bits and pieces of what is really going on and who is on whose side so by the time you start to learn just what this place is and why it's there ...

... if you can hold back the tears, it's quite simple.

You don't have a heart.

I remember this anime. I watched it years ago and it is indeed a real tear-jerker. Interesting story though and I remember loving the characters. I'll always remember the music - very evocative.

nodnods! Lia is absolutely amazing - and she does many of Jun Maeda's (story + music) opening themes ... the themes from Angel Beats, Air and Charlotte are three of my favorite openings. On a complete sidenote, there's a video of Lia and Ia doing the Angel Beats opening and since Ia's voice is based on Lia's vocal library ... she's doing the cyberpunk equivalent of singing a duet with herself!

But yah ... despite the fact that it got arbitrarily shortened just after production started PA Works|Aniplex|Key Visual and Seiji Kishi (director) managed to still make the characters strong and memorable.

Having watched it several times I can't help but sniff a bit just from the opening ... or when I notice the hints of things to come that and the pieces falling in place. And yet, and yet, when you really, really think about it, the tears don't come from tragedy.

They are the cost of happy endings.

Wow, I didn't know that much about the people behind the anime but I should check out the other work that Maeda has done. I completely agree about the tragedy of it all; like the characters' histories are sad but the "happy" ending though is the true tragedy and it speaks to the strength of the characterization that I wanted them to not move on at the end.

Well let's talk a bit about Jun Maede ...

Where to start? He's co-founder of Key Visual arts, writes most of the studios work. What is Key Viusal arts? They develop Visual Novels, specializing in the Romance genre. If that sounds a little sketchy, well, uhm, ah, uhm, ah, uhm you are probably right. Especially in their earlier work, they were, for lack of a better phrase, "that" kind of visual novel.

On one hand, this is all from reading about Key Visual and Jun Maede, my personal tastes don't run that way. In fact they tend to run away from that way, especially in my recreational entertainment.

What happens, however, is that there usually are light novels that follow the visual novels, where most of the less than seemly scenes are excised and by the time they reach anime its pretty much gone. All in all this is a very good thing; it refocuses the story on the characters and plot and you get a much, much better result, because when it comes down to the bottom line, June Maede doesn't want to titillate you ...

... he wants to make you cry.

And he's very very good at it.

Now many of the anime based on his works are adaptations of the visual novels in style. The visual novels allow you to make choices and follow the through to the good, or far more likely, bad ends. What the anime does, because it can't do that, is compress the alternatives so you end up following a path that eventually takes you to the "good" ending. All the stories have some manner of supernatural/paranormal/magic in them. It's usually not explained how or why, it's just part of the world.

Now just so you know, I am a major tragedy junkie, so, well, I tend to like his work quite a bit.

Kanon - Do you know the trope "sad girl in the snow"? This is where it comes from. A young boy returns to his home town after being away for several years. The whys and wherefores are not known, our hero doesn't remember much of it at all. The pieces slowly jigsaw together over the length of the stories, with parts filled in by the people he meets. He finds his days intercepted by various girls, each with their own clues to the overall stories yet each with their own unique tale to tell.

And the girl who runs into our semi-amnesiac him? Well the first time I saw it and noticed the angel wings on her back pack, I realized that she was very important.

Kanon is a story set in winter, about the cost of miracles.

There are two versions of Kanon out there. A first 13 episode series and a second 26 episode series; they tell the same story, the longer version is the better one with significant;y improved animation - by Kyoto Animation. The theme song was written by Maede and performed by Ayana. It's gorgeous.

Air - This is one of my favorite anime; though it doesn't have the following the others do. Perhaps because it's the mixture of magic and the real world, perhaps because its a story far larger than the summer vacation during which it takes place. Is it the story of a street performer and his telekinetic puppet? Is it a story about a strange girl who cannot feel love? Is it a story about a thousand year old curse and this is the one thousand-st summer?

Listening to Lia sing the opening as I type, my eyes are watering because I believe that, at its heart, Air is about a mother learning to care for her daughter.

Clannad - one of anime's most famous tragedies. I admit I haven't been able to watch it all; it's a bit too soap opera-ish for me.

Angel Beats - as previously noted: fun, goofy and heartbreaking. Interestingly, it was an Anime First - that is, an anime that doesn't have its roots in a light novel, visual novel, game or manga.

Charlotte - another Anime first. This is a more straightforward tale. The interesting thing about Charlotte is that the hero is a jerk. The foundation of the story (revealed in episode 1, so not really a spoiler) is that certain teenagers, for a certain period of time, develop superpowers. Our hero - or better main character - uses his to ... well ... cheat at school and get the prettiest girl in his class.

He gets caught.

Charlotte is the story of his, well, not really redemption, but his development from a jerk to a hero; even if it means becoming a monster and losing everything.

But it's better than the alternative ...

Lia sings the opening, and it's great. If you can find an English translation of the lyrics, the song fits perfectly.

Little Busters and Planetarian are on my current list of shows to watch.