Columnist Andrew Osmond discusses the insane afterlife anime series and some of its relatives from creators Jun Maeda and Key.
Oh, you’re awake. Lie there on the ground for a moment and listen to me. Welcome to the Afterlife Battlefront. You’ve died, you see. Everyone here has; deal with it. Now, this place may look like the grounds of a high school, but it’s really the afterlife. If you don’t do anything, God will erase you. We in the Battlefront are fighting back, and we’d like you to enlist… Hold on, where are you going? DON’T TALK TO THAT GIRL!
In the first minutes of the tragi-comic-loony-weepy fantasy series Angel Beats!—available on Crunchyroll—the bewildered, amnesiac and deceased boy Otonashi is greeted by the gun-toting Yuri. A schoolgirl, she’s the formidable commander of the afterlife rebels, whose attitude suggests a sailor-suited Dirty Harry: “Call me cute, make my day.”
Otonashi decides he can’t be having any of her talk of an afterlife and rebellion. So, he goes to talk to Angel, the petite white-haired girl who Yuri’s covering with her gun. Angel is one of those anime girls who speaks in soft, detached tones, a la Rei from Evangelion, but unfortunately, she doesn’t make any more sense than Yuri. Even less fortunately, Angel extrudes a blade from her hand like a Terminator and skewers the boy. Game over.
But only for a bit. Otonashi soon wakes up again and gradually learns more about this daft-seeming world. He gets killed some more along the way, but it doesn’t matter. Death here is a mere annoyance, though the rebels warn him against imitating the background students who act like this is a normal school. If he does that, our hero is told, he will vanish. The only way to endure is to fight the system, in the Afterlife Battlefront or whatever its name is that day—the teens’ arguments about what to call themselves are straight from Life of Brian. Otonashi signs up, but his fearful fascination with the unearthly Angel will take the story in wild ways.
The show’s wild enough anyway, stampeding between low comedy and extreme tragedy. The second part has a hilarious Indiana Jones pastiche where the Battlefront team goes down an underground tunnel of death-traps, getting sliced or splatted while the survivors brush past (because death doesn’t matter, remember). Then with just Yuri and Otonashi left, she tells him a ghastly story about her past, involving child murder, to explain why she fights God.
It’s like that Gremlins scene where Phoebe Cates punctured the muppet slapstick with a monologue about her Santa-suited dad breaking his neck in a chimney. That, though, at least had an underlying sick comedy. Yuri’s story in Angel Beats! is just too nasty, though you could take it as a very black meta-joke about the extremes of audience manipulation in heartrending Japanese cartoons like this one.
Angel Beats! was first broadcast in 2010. It was one of the first series by the P.A. Works studio, later responsible for titles as diverse as the gently fantastical The Eccentric Family, the wonderfully ludicrous Akiba Maid War and Mari Okada’s feature film Maquia. I saw Angel Beats! not long after its debut. What captivated me was how it shifted blithely between emotions and between different kinds of story, making no effort to hide its manipulations from the viewer; and yet it’s still charming, touching and heart-rending.
It celebrates life’s authenticity and preciousness while flattering diametrically opposed views on thornier subjects: the existence of an afterlife, social non-conformity, even gender roles. This fence-sitting could be accused of play-safe pandering, but it comes across rather as good-humored tolerance.
It feels wholly appropriate that Angel Beats! is motored along by catchy pop songs, courtesy of the Battlefront’s “diversionary” (!) girl musicians, who confirm this is an anime that’ll throw in anything. More than once, Angel Beats! seems to be going nowhere, only to pay off random characters and unfinished strands in increasingly satisfying ways.
On first viewing, it’s an inconsistent watch, with captivatingly good episodes (especially the first three) followed by slacker-seeming instalments. However, the show repays repeat views to admire its twisty shape. Like Lost, it packs in “real”-world mini-stories: from misery memoirs to disaster dramas. It’s also a multiple-ender—its later episodes are full of “final” battles and revelations. However, the real last part is a leisurely, valedictory wind-down that Prof. Tolkien would approve.
As a fantasy, it’s in the vicinity of A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Groundhog Day, whose protagonists get magically yanked outside life only to peer back in, with the possibility of second chances and resets. Throughout Angel Beats!, the Afterlife Battlefront is (mostly) wiped out several times over but still comes back for more.
The Western titles had adult heroes, but of course the anime substitutes teenagers. Anime’s most famous director, Hayao Miyazaki, remarked that youngsters experience nostalgia as keenly as grown-ups. That especially applies to adolescents nearing the end of school; their world still seems open and boundless, yet a part of their lives is closing off before they’ve really understood it. Angel Beats! tugs these strings with ruthless efficiency, especially in its last episode.
An older afterlife anime, the charming Haibane Renmei, which I covered last year, had barely any conflict at all. In contrast, Angel Beats! establishes the conflict from the start—the Afterlife Battlefront versus the pint-sized Angel—then leaves us wondering if the fight is just invented to give the cast something to do. The series continually mucks with our expectations, confronting the Battlefront with overtly artificial monsters and threats which might have an ulterior purpose.
Angel Beats! may revolve around a boy (Otonashi) and two pretty girls (Yuri and Angel), but not as you’d expect. While the story’s largely from Otonashi’s viewpoint, Yuri is the true hero, seeing Otonashi as a friend and ally but no more. Meanwhile, Angel may seem a calm doll, but her story-arc is lively and surprising, with a Kick-Ass frisson to a tiny girl with Terminator reflexes and a bomber’s firepower.
Otonashi cowers from her as a monster (she killed him!) but still has protective male stirrings (because she’s so little). There’s a reason for that, as we learn when he recalls his past. It’s a perverse reason, but Angel Beats! makes it seem real; certainly more real than the other members of the Afterlife Battlefront, who are introduced by Yuri as ciphers and one-jokes. “He has no specialty… He’s a mysterious guy speaking in nonsense song lyrics…” But even they’re given humor or poignancy when needed, when they’re not fueling lunatic humor (rocket chairs!) or homoerotic gags.
Like Yuri’s killer backstory, Angel Beats!’s emotional peaks play up the absurdly contrived scenarios with gusto. One flashback has a character die fulfilled at the perfect moment of heroic sacrifice. The (final) climax seemingly pastiches the infamous “Architect” scene from The Matrix Reloaded, switching a gutsier anime girl for Keanu. The show’s last scene turns on a jaw-dropping sting revelation that was staring us in the face all along, and a simple goodbye segues into an eternal scream of teen anguish. Darn it but it works, outrageous, bittersweet and among the best endings in anime.
Strawberry-scented acid
Angel Beats! can be watched as a stand-alone. However, as some readers will know, it’s linked to a strand of media in Japan that goes beyond anime. The show was conceived and scripted by Jun Maeda, one of the main members of the Key studio. This isn’t an anime studio; rather it makes story-driven computer games called Visual Novels, where players traverse a branching narrative with anime-style visuals. The Steins;Gate anime, which I covered in January, was based on a Visual Novel, though it wasn’t by Key.
Angel Beats! was an anime original, not based on a Visual Novel itself. However, the anime was later adapted as a Visual Novel by Key in 2015 (trailer above). It was reportedly a massive hit in Japan, though an Anglophone version was never released. By then, several of Key’s earlier Visual Novels had become anime. Most famously, Key’s first three titles, Kanon, Air and Clannad, each received rival adaptations in the 2000s, animated in different versions by the venerable Toei Animation studio and the much younger Kyoto Animation.
In each case, the Kyoto Animation versions were more celebrated. However, I’ll put the opening for Toei’s version of Kanon below. It was a 13-part TV series in 2002, while Toei’s Air (2005) and Clannad were both feature films.
For comparison, here’s what Kanon looked like when it was adapted by Kyoto Animation only four years later.
Maeda was involved in the writing of all three of the source Key games, in collaboration with other staff. All the Kyoto Animation adaptations were scripted by Fumihiko Shimo, whose other credits include writing the film The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. There’s one more notable point that tends to be swept under the carpet. The original game versions of Kanon and Air—though not Clannad—were adult games, including sex scenes. However, the games were later reissued without the sex, and the anime reflect those versions—no X-rated material here.
I’m still learning about this territory. I haven’t played Key’s Visual Novels, nor have I seen Clannad, which is enormously popular in Anglophone fandom. (Kyoto Animation’s TV version can be watched on HiDive.) It’s uncontentious to say, though, that Key and Maeda are known for not so much tugging heartstrings as dousing them in strawberry-scented acid. Their stories lull you with comedy and cuteness; then they open trapdoors into tragedy, or hurtle you around ludicrous story turns invoking everything from time travel to transformed animals.
I’ve seen Kyoto Animation’s versions of Air (broadcast in 2005, the same year as Toei’s film) and Kanon (2006). They’re TV series, with 12 and 24 episodes respectively. Air seems to be only available on second-hand US DVDs at present. (You may also come across DVDs of Air: The Motion Picture, which is the version by Toei.) Kyoto Animation’s Kanon series is available on Crunchyroll.
Air and Kanon have different characters and settings, yet in many ways they’re the same series. Both feature a boy travelling to a town and encountering a bevy of girls, with supernatural problems and cutesy idiosyncrasies. (If you played a drinking game with either series, taking a shot each time a girl makes a sound like “Gow” or “Uguu,” you’d be insensible very fast.) It’s the most primitive male otaku fantasy, entering a crowd of girls who depend on you. But the fantasy is elaborated in addictively fascinating and entertaining ways.
Air is set in a coastal town in blazing summer. The boy is Yukito, a grumpy wanderer trying vainly to earn money by animating a doll with his magic. Well, it looks like magic to us, though the bored passers-by think it’s a cheap trick. Then a golden-tressed girl, Misuzu, finds Yukito sleeping by the sea, and soon he’s staying with her and her aunt, who seems an alarmingly irresponsible guardian. With this unexpected home base, Yukito encounters the show’s various other girls.
This is the “easier” of the two series, though it’s far from straightforward. At one point, Air even becomes a different story for a while, in a different century with different characters (or are they?). This particular section of the series was given an extended retelling in a two-part DTV spinoff, “Air in Summer,” included on some home editions of the series.
Even in the “ordinary” coastal town, everyone acts like they’re in Alice in Wonderland. They’re all quirks and puzzles and riddles with no answers, or no sane ones. The overarching story involves legendary girls with wings, with echoes of Japan’s “Princess Kaguya” tale about a girl from the heavens. There are lovely little motifs, like a girl struggling to learn to juggle as if it’s the most important thing in the world – and in this world, it might be.
Kanon’s setting is Air’s opposite; it’s a city in snow, ringed by mountains. The boy this time is Yuichi, arriving to stay with his own aunt and cousin – a cute girl, naturally. But he’s bombarded with other girls from the start, like the most absurd harem. The magic is slower to emerge than in Air, though Kanon’s snow-covered scenery gives the show a pervasive fairy-tale feel, especially in the mysterious wooded slopes above the city.
The portrait of girls in Kanon is outrageous. Not just because they’re portrayed as puzzles for a boy to solve, or because they’re so dependent on Yuichi to help them. No, it’s because of their upfront infantilization. One girl ends up like a mewling infant, unable to speak, but she clings desperately to the boy even so. You watch agog, imagining viewer “hate watch” videos ripping Kanon apart for its crimes against the most basic feminism.
What can I say? Once again, the crazy mix works. Even as the viewer may cackle and groan at something as obvious as the “infantilized girl” story, it still makes us feel sad, and we should admire its skill in making us sad. Both shows’ animation lacks KyoAni’s full beauty, but it holds up impeccably. Kanon, especially, often makes the girls’ gestures into delicately-drawn grace notes. Many anime insist that mundane life is magic, to be treasured in its passing. But Air and Kanon sing that tune loud and long enough to crack determined sneers.
The shows also work because Yukito and Yuichi are solid straight men, perplexed male Alices in dream-girl Wonderlands. The boys are incorrigible paternalists, patting the girls on the top of their heads like puppies. But they’re not the harem leads we hate; they never preen or leer, or else vanish whining into wallpaper. And as the boys embark on their hero’s journeys – from their start points as bemused outsiders, to realizing they’re at the heart of the story and they always have been – so we’re compelled along with them, entranced and entertained.
Charlotte and Guardian Angels
The last related series I want to touch on is Charlotte, a 13-part series broadcast in 2015 and available on Crunchyroll. Like Angel Beats!, it was animated by P.A. Works rather than Kyoto Animation, and it was written as an anime-original story by Jun Maeda. (Unlike Angel Beats!, Charlotte wouldn’t be adapted as a Visual Novel.)
Charlotte starts with a great idea—a teenage boy in contemporary Japan called Yu who uses his secret superpowers just to cheat his way through life. The show is goofy and seemingly formulaic for much of its first half, before taking a hard turn into darkness at the midpoint. There’s an appalling tragedy that’s nominally caused by superpowers going wrong, but the agony the hero suffers could be from any real-world drama.
From there, the rollercoaster continues with whiplash twists, but neither the protagonists nor viewers are overwhelmed. Instead, Charlotte finds a balance between those characters we’re already invested in and newcomers with their own loved ones. It keeps the heroes central without suggesting they’re the only ones who matter. The villains become hardcore and use violence accordingly, but it feels dramatically justified. Charlotte’s terrific last episode feels like an epic in itself, covering more countries than Phileas Fogg.
While some reviewers found the series shapeless, and Charlotte’s certainly not as good as Angel Beats!, it circles cleverly around a pair of soul-shredding journeys which mirror each other, resolving the series into a strange but powerful shape. Twice, the hero is set on a horribly lonely, seemingly endless journey… yet behind the darkness is an invisible presence, someone who cares for this lost soul, who might yet save him. You could see it as romantic longing or as an honest-to-god religious fable; in anime, they can be the same thing.
