Review: Angel Beats

Key Visual Arts is a Japanese video game developer best known for its work in the genre known as 'visual novel' (aka The Only Type Of Video Game That Nathan Can Or Will Sit Through). Visual novels are, basically, works that are written as if they were conventional (in form, not necessarily subject matter) Japanese literature and then transferred into text files that are mixed up with pictures and music and some (typically low) degree of interactivity, essentially creating the equivalent of those Choose Your Own Adventure books that I devoured when I was a kid. [This is a little hard for me to explain so here is a random section of one of the most famous and influential visual novels, Tsukihime ('Lunar Princess'; by the author of Kara no Kyoukai, Nasu Kinoko). And here is the beginning of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni ('When the Higurashi [a type of cicada] Cry'), a more recent and extremely groundbreaking horror story by a younger writer who Nasu discovered.]

Key's visual novels are typically romantic, fluffy, yet rather sad, sort of like a cross between Latin American soap opera and Henry James. They are almost all set in very traditional, often somewhat bland (from a Japanese perspective), but oddly narratologically self-aware environments. They are known for their heartbreaking stories and subtle treatment of the odd supernatural element (as opposed to Nasu or the pseudonymous Naku Koro ni author, who are explicitly fantasy-horror writers from the get-go).

In 2009, somebody working at Key decided to start work on a non-video game project, which was to be fairly multimedia, incorporating a television anime, a manga series, and a series of actual bound text novels. This series, which started to be rolled out later that year and continued through 2010, is Angel Beats.

Angel Beats tells the story of Otonashi, a young man who has a horrible life, dies, and is reborn in an odd complex similar to a Japanese high school but larger and with enough amenities to be self-sufficient. He has spotty memories--which is apparently unusual among the denizens of this purgatorial universe--and is unhappy with the situation. Otonashi meets a girl called Yuri (that's her with the assault rifle in the picture) who press-gangs him into an outfit called SSS, a paramilitary group that commits terrorist attacks and industrial sabotage against the student council and faculty of the high school in an attempt to provoke the intervention of God.

One unfortunate part of this is that, other than the SSS, the student body president Tenshi ('Angel', the...well, the angelic girl in the picture, obviously), and a few other key players, nobody in the entire world (that they can access) seems to have free will or even be self-aware. Yuri refers to everybody else as NPCs, non-player characters, in an example of Key's aforementioned self-referential narratology. There are many, many NPCs and they can be easily mobilised from their normal 'lives' to attack people, seemingly at Tenshi's discretion. The main saving graces of this setup are that the NPCs are easily distracted and--key to the entire plot and theme of the text--Tenshi does not actually seem to be using them in a way that plays along with SSS's war games...

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Of course, no such series involving an afterlife--the genre called 'Bangsian fantasy' in the West--can come out of Japan without bringing the masterpiece Haibane-Renmei to mind. If you haven't seen Haibane-Renmei, and have any interest in this sort of story at all, you as a matter of course eventually will. Angel Beats is no Haibane-Renmei, mainly because nobody at Key Visual Arts is ABe Yoshitoshi, but too its credit it does not try to be. The main things that Angel Beats has to recommend itself are that it is emotionally real despite the ersatz Philip José Farmer premise (Tenshi, at least in the early parts of the story, brings to mind not so much a Christian angel as an Ethical from the Riverworld series), it takes life and death seriously without making any potentially alienating grand religious proclamations (although it does not pull this off as masterfully as Haibane-Renmei, mainly because nothing perhaps ever can), it allows individual characters to have their own beliefs and agendas and values in the context of its purgatorial environment (thus eliminating part of what makes Dante's Commedia sometimes difficult to read), and the very things that sometimes make it hard for the series to hold itself together also set it apart from Key's earlier body of work as something that brings the production company outside of its comfort zone in a genuinely interesting way.

I would not recommend Angel Beats to everybody. It is, as I keep saying, not Haibane-Renmei with its timeless genius. What it is, however, is a full-throated, good-hearted, smartly-executed addition to an odd little fantasy subgenre that sometimes struggles to find its place in the world of modern fition.