Angel Beats #13 — Character Rape

June 25th, 2010

 

Right up to the very end.

Impressions:

If you were hoping for an ending that had anything at all to do with Yuri or explaining all the dangling threads, tough tiddles. Instead, you’re getting a corny graduation ceremony (expected), with plenty of shots of scenery as Otonoashi recaps the story thus far, Yuri blushing and getting flustered for the first time in the show, and Kanade skipping, humming, dancing, giggling, and cowering like the writers grabbed from the wrong personality archetype pile. Oh yes, and then after everybody else has said good bye and poofed, Otonoashi confesses his undying love for Kanade and how he wants to always be with her, so, of coure, she disappears, and Otonashi breaks down in tears. Run credits. Oh yeah, and in case that wasn’t out of nowhere enough for you. Kanade was apparently Otonashi’s organ recipient, and her regret was being unable to thank him for it. I… wait… what? Was that whole thing just to make an excuse for an overblown "We share the same heart" line? I’m pretty sure it was.

Apparently he came to terms after that or something because the post-ED has a short sequence of Kanade in another world humming the same song while a stalker another Otonashi chases after her, so yeah, sure. Why not? Otonashi in anguish followed by a cheap corny reincarnation tagline is more or less appropriate given everything that’s come so far. Because this whole thing was… a touching love story between Otonashi and Kanade. I feel like I missed a memo somewhere. It wasn’t all outright horrible though. Kanade’s tofu song was cute, and despite the confession scene making absolutely zero sense, at least it had very touching music. They also did an okay job with the graduation ceremony, although like always, the bad slapstick interrupted moments about two seconds after they started getting emotional.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

The phrase "Train wreck" comes to mind, but it’s really not accurate. Trains have momentum and direction. This does not. A better analogy would be a pack of feral chihuauas in heat. With grenades taped to their backs. Entertaining and destructive, maybe even cute and tragic at times, but ultimately a waste of explosives and snake food. I don’t think having more episodes would have helped at all either. The problem wasn’t the pacing, it was that from start to finish, the show had absolutely no idea what it wanted to do, where it was going, or what its endgame was. It would do slapstick for ten minutes, then suddenly turn deadly serious, and then it tossed in romance literally five minutes from the end. Then they would compare someone missing a fly ball to someone else having their entire family murdered like they were events of the same importance. That certainly made it interesting to talk about, but I’d say the same thing about Maburaho or Princess Lover.

Production was mostly pretty good, so if you just want to completely turn off your brain and see some people shooting guns with wildly inappropriate J Pop, or pretty sunsets, you could do worse, but there were a lot of extremely obvious lapses that even Imagin would have been embarrassed to put out. The characters were also extremely undeveloped, particularly Kanade. Only Otonashi and maybe Hinata showed any kind of growth or development, the rest of the time, flashbacks were just spit out to show that the characters had developed. The active story should never be subordinate to character background. Passive versus active. English 101, baby. Most of the characters didn’t even get that much. They were just archetypes tossed in there to fill space as gag characters. The girl who died in episode three (two? I forget) had more development, and maybe more screen time, than characters that were around for nearly the entire run.

In the end, there’s really not a whole lot to recommend here outside the visuals and the occasional funny gag between bouts of overblown melodrama. Besides, I really cannot even begin to imagine what watching multiple episodes of this in one sitting would be like. Now that it’s over (well, aside from one DVD extra episode), there’s really nothing else left to say other than to point out all the ways that the show could have developed if it had just picked one direction and stuck with it.

My only hope is that the DVD extra episode is twenty straight minutes of TK ranting.

Posted in Angel Beats! | 98 Comments »

98 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • cutemi2 says:

    where the heck is Angel Beats TV special with a High Tension Meter