Angel Beats!(2010)
13 EPs

Angel Beats!

This picture above aptly states the overriding theme of Angel Beats! Not all your circumstances in life are of your own making.  Good and Evil seem to find their victims in an haphazard manner a serendipity of profound and cosmic dimensions.

We all must come to terms with the situation we find ourselves in at this moment. What else is there to do but “Rage against the dying of the light”.

Angel Beats! Is a purgatory of sorts, where one ends up after death due to unresolved issues in your life. And this afterlife is a High School. Young people must wonder that being stuck in High School for all eternity is more Hell than Heaven, but be that as it remains, that is where these young people end up, and they must work out their own personal salvation.

  Yuzuru Otonashi (音無 結弦 Otonashi Yuzuru) wakes up in this world with no memory, or any knowledge of the world he is in, only to find  Yuri Nakamura (仲村 ゆり Nakamura Yuri) attempting to assassinate a young girl called  Angel (天使 Tenshi) who we later find out is named Kanade Tachibana (立華 かなで Tachibana Kanade). Yuri created and leads the SSS, The Afterlife Battlefront, and who are waging war against God, and all his agent angels. The idea of struggling with God goes back a long ways, as the story of Jacob will tell in the Torah.

All the young people in this world come from unhappy events, or traumatic evils, and until they come to understand their own pasts, and forgive, they must eternally struggle on fighting with Angel who has been given supernatural powers. The Afterlife Battlefront formed by Yuri to protest their very difficult and evil pasts, is a wild bunch indeed, of loners, misfits, deamaged personalities, and other assorted nuts and bolts. So the SSS is at war with God, and while they can be killed and suffer the pain of their deaths, they immediately wake up back at this High School no matter how they die, something like Groundhog Day.

While Angel seems to have been especially appointed by God and given supernatural powers, she is also a young girl Kanade Tachibana  stuck in the Afterlife waiting for Otonashi to arrive because she has a very special message for him.

 Girls Dead Monster is an all girls rock band, another group similar to the SSS, while most of the other students and professors at this school are NPCs, non-player characters who are just background, and they basically ignore the hijinks of the SSS.

This is the world of Angel Beats! Seems prosaic and according to formula, but how Mr. Maeda plays out the story is beyond phenomenal.

“Angel Beats!” creates a mood and emotional atmosphere, of wacky fun, and extreme serious personal pain and hurt, and all of this must be resolved and cured so that the principals can move on to their next lives. The anime does something few others can do, in that, it creates a deep emotional mood in the audience which is difficult to name or even specify. It is a very odd set of feels, both intense and light bearing on the soul, yet one grasps for words or meaning, and nothing comes out. The emotion is exceedingly difficult to explain.  The closest this reviewer can come to terms with, is that of an exceedingly sad and lonely nostalgia, and yet that is not exactly it. The sense of being utterly alone traverses this anime from beginning to end, where in its ending, the nature of loneliness is analyzed and shown in the animation itself. Many come to tears at this point, and yet it’s hard to explain why. Nobody dies at the end which is the usual way sadness enters a story. They are all dead already. So why the tears, and yet tears come and will not stop, a very strange story response.

And when Kanade confesses to Otonashi at the very end, and we realize the issue that must be resolved, Katy bar the door because you will lose it all right there and then as Mr. Maede drives a stake straight through your heart.

Highly enjoyable, and deeply moving. Don’t miss this one if you want to feel truly human.

But be prepared to be eaten alive by a feels monster. Even hard-hearted guys cannot stonewall against these deep emotions.