Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Crying With Angel Beats 10 Years Later
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Probablytomorrow
Posts: 164 |
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Time to rewatch everything to confirm. |
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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Hot damn...same story here, but you've got a few years on me. It was around 2011 or 2012 for me, and I was 10/11. 
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 501 Location: Poland |
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I remember I disliked this for similar reason I disliked "Signs" movie - they made a movie with main character rejecting God/religion for a good reason and then completely reversing it without any good explanation that would "defeat" the original reason. While I also thought Yurippe's backstory was too forced, but if we take it seriously, making her go through "normal high school life" as a therapy/fix IS a complete BS. We later also discover spoiler[that there can be no love in Limbo High], so the whole "complete childhood experience" is also bunch of BS.
I started fast-forwarding later episodes, but from what I've seen the show never recovered from betraying the premise it had for completely and blandly embracing traditional Japanese view on afterlife. "Haibane Renmei" treated the subject of dead souls moving on so much better, even if it may be a bit unfair to compare them. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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I've always thought of Angel Beats as more like a music video than a traditional TV show. By usual storytelling standards, music videos--and songs themselves, usually--are far too fast-paced and nonsensical to work. But, when you're actually experiencing them, they do work, entirely because of the fast-paced earnestness, weird incongruousness, and whatever else that might seem illogical on paper. There's a strong impulse in fans of almost anything to want more of that thing, especially in a case like this where (supposedly) the creators also wanted more screentime. If Angel Beats had been twice as long, though, I think it would have just made the wackiness seem dumber, and the emotional drama more overbearing. The unsubtlety of it only works because it's so gung-ho and rapid-fire that you don't have time to overthink it. Sometimes less really is more.
That show, meanwhile, seemed like a case of going way too far in the opposite direction. Maybe it would have worked better as a movie; as it was, I can only remember two or three notable events in it, somehow dragged out over 13 episodes. And it kinda bugged me how the creators insisted the characters weren't angels and weren't in something like purgatory, when they so obviously were. They have wings and halos, for cripe's sake. Last edited by kotomikun on Tue Dec 17, 2019 10:50 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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zrdb
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I rewatched this last year and enjoyed it more than when I watched it the first time. It really has a strong emotional gut punch.
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AzureHoly
Posts: 1 |
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Yes. Otonashi lived a fulfilled life thats why he didn't enter the world when he died. He only entered to the after school world because kanade's regret was not being able to thank her donor in person. Hence otonashi was called back to help fulfil her regret. |
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D-Rock
Posts: 135 |
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Meh. Anime was OK at best. I figured everybody loved it because of the music. Many of the songs, especially the opening, are what immediately caught me.
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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That's one reason to "shed a tear". Others, for me, are that it's not looking like we're going to be getting more of Heaven's Door. Seven Seas released volume 1...has been years since it came out. And, since we're not going to be getting the prequel, I highly doubt that we are going to be getting the series that is going to contain the material that was cut from the anime. |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2442 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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Agreed. In fact, the two OVAs (“Stairway to Heaven”, which was on Sentai’s physical release, and “Hell’s Kitchen”, which came years later as a strange cross-promo for Charlotte) are only about the wackiness, and severely undercut the pathos of the series. This is particularly true of “Hell’s Kitchen”, which all but mocks Iwasawa’s backstory before she even gets a chance to retell it. I’ve always thought that with the solid core of songs, Angel Beats! would make a solid stage musical, and that would require cutting the story even further, down to about two hours. I totally think you could do it, trimming out the meandering bits and subcharacters that go nowhere, and the parts that repeat themselves (is the reason for having both the Clone Angels and then the Shadows is that we need more antagonists once the group accepts Kanade?) |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1113 Location: Puget Sound |
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It's late 2013 and I've been starting to dip my toes into anime via Netflix's DVD rental service. (Mostly fanservice comedies.) We're also aware of streaming media and we've just picked up a Roku box and a Netflix streaming subscription. Somehow my eye lands on this show called Angel Beats... I watch the first episode, go back to my housework and other stuff. The next day, two episodes. The next day, three. The next day... I marathon the entire balance of the show.
My wife gets home from work that evening, and after dinner we sit down to watch a little TV and I convince her she should watch this show... And I sit right there beside her and across three nights marathon the show I'd just finished watching! I can count the number of immediate rewatches I've done on the fingers (but not the thumb) of one hand. (The most recent was Laid Back Camp - nearly two years ago.) Angel Beats literally changed my life. It was the show that convinced that there just might be something more to this 'anime' thing. If I hadn't watched it... Well, I might not be here (on ANN) today.
So much truth here... At its core, Angel Beats is a pretty simple story and having two cour would likely have required padding out what's already a fairly limited range of material. Would it be remembered as fondly as we do today? I doubt it. Instead it would likely be remembered as the show that did the same dang thing - over and over. |
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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I watched the show going through a very tough time in life. I just had to pick up a second job to keep kicking. But Angel Beats helped me find a level of peace. The show has many flaws, but I think of it like another favorite of mine, Evangelion. These are flawed shows, but shows that said enough that I actually listened. Many shows check the box for entertainment or fanservice, but AB sticks with me on that extra special level.
Even if the world deals me an incredibly bad hand, there is a way to move on and find acceptance with what happened. |
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Phrunicus
Posts: 34 |
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So, I think I'd heard of this show off and on, but I finally watched it several years ago after seeing an AMV contest entry at a convention that took the audio from the trailer for "Edge of Tomorrow" and matched it up with video from Angel Beats.
I've felt for a while that Angel Beats needed say another half cour at most, like say another 4-6 OVA episodes, or a mini-arc run or two, to help fill out the middle, maybe pick up on a few more characters. A crazy(?) theory I had at one point was that perhaps, spoiler[Otonashi himself was supposed to be a reincarnation of the original "God" who made this afterlife - this was based on the idea that IIRC this God found himself falling in love, and then gave up his Godhood, or something like that?] And the sucker for happy endings in me wants about 2 more minutes for that final post-credits sequence to see "what happens next"... |
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Juno016
 Posts: 2381 |
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My mother gave me a form that asked me if I wanted to donate my organs after death THE DAY after I watched that episode (I watched it as it aired).
No, but seriously, before Angel Beats! came out, the only perfect 5-star anime on my personal rating list was Dennou Coil. An anime doesn't have to be perfect to be 5-star, but it does have to have a profound effect on me and make me think about it constantly in ways I don't usually think of anime (on top of at least being easy to recommend to others). Angel Beats! became the second... and I've only since lowered that to 4.5-stars because I cannot escape the reality that the plot and story are a mess and the cast is barely fleshed out. Usually, that'd notch it down to at least a 4 or 3.5, but again, the "profound effect" was too hard to bypass. It's just a HUGE shame that any additional fleshing out has been hampered by things behind the scenes. The anime serves as a great start to a bigger set of stories we just never get to hear. Then Madoka Magica happened and became my final 5-star-rated anime up to now. So many great anime have released in the years since 2010/11, but I still have to say that Angel Beats! and Madoka Magica are of a kind unseen elsewhere in the industry. Well, I guess Angel Beats! more or less feels like rapid-fire Maeda writing, but that in itself sets itself apart from Maeda's other works. As much as I love Air and Kanon and CLANNAD, they didn't hit me so hard as Angel Beats! did (possibly because I read the VNs for those first and I don't really see the anime adaptions as the definitive versions). |
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