ANIME REVIEW - Angel Beats

 

My husband is absolutely in love with the opening for this show, and I gotta admit, I love it too.  So after months of belting out "My Soul, Your Beats," in the car, I finally sat down and watched all of Angel Beats!

First, I want to clarify that Angel Beats is written by a man named Jun Maeda.  He is known for writing a variety of popular anime such as Kanon, Air, and Clannad. all of which are personal favourites of mine.  So I was pretty excited going into Angel Beats.

Angel Beats begins with our main character, a high-school aged fellow named Otonashi, suddenly waking up in a high school meant to house dead students with a heavy case of amnesia.  He meets a girl in a headband named Yurippe who is hiding behind a bush attempting to snipe a silver-haired girl.  Yurippe explains to Otonashi the nature of the school, and that she is a part of a battlefront group that wishes to fight against God due to the unfair nature of their lives on earth.  She explains that the silver-haired girl is an, "Angel,"sent by God to fight against them at the school and asks that Otonashi join them.

The rest of Angel Beats is spent exploring the rules and nature of the school and the battlefront, exploring the backstory of the unfair lives of the battlefront members, recovering Otonashi's memories, finding Angel's true purpose, and disrupting school activities with amazing concerts (Seriously, this anime has an awesome soundtrack!).  Which gets into my first and main complaint of Angel Beats:  at only 13 episodes, this is a lot of material to cover in a short period of time.  A lot of things regarding the nature of the world, the time it takes to build relationships between the characters, and the tragic backstories of these characters feel at times very rushed through or like some things were left out.  I feel like Angel Beats would have been better served having a few more episodes.

However, the few times the episode could go through a character's backstory at a decent pace were times that were very emotionally poignant.  Overall, I ended up liking a majority of the characters.  Also compared to the previous anime created by Maeda that I listed earlier, Angel Beats has a lot more humour, which I really enjoyed.  I also really liked the set up of the high school world for dead students between their life and the afterlife, I just wish that there could have been more explanation of the world's purpose, creation, and exploration of its rules than time allowed.

Ultimately, Angel Beats is an emotionally poignant anime with likeable, tragic characters, an interesting setting, plenty of action, and a lot of humour.  If you don't mind a few loose ends and unexplained parts, and if you keep your expectations in check, then I believe that Angel Beats! at 13 episodes is a short enough investment to be worth it to practically anyone who is a fan of anime.  At least, give it a go for the sake of that amazing soundtrack!

At the time of this review, Angel Beats is available on hulu.  There is also a complete Blu-Ray disc set, and you can support me by purchasing that set off of amazon: 

ANIME REVIEW - Yo-Kai Watch

In April of 2015, I went to Japan with my husband.  A lot of awesome stuff happened on that trip, but one thing I noticed was this new anime franchise that was super popular and positively everywhere:  in the gachapon, in the arcades, in the kids' clothing section, in train station advertisements, and even in the Nintendo 3DS Streetpasses.  Yo-Kai Watch was, and is, Japan's latest fad, and it looks like it might grow to be just as big as Pokemon.

Needless to say, when Yo-Kai Watch was made available to American audiences via Netflix, I was super stoked!  I couldn't wait to see what all the fuss was about, and I was really excited to hear that adorable theme song ("Gera gera po!  Gera gera po!")!

Unfortunately, the Netflix USA edition only has English voice acting as an option, but rest assured, it is a very nicely done adaption, and the "Gera gera po!" theme song is unscathed (though let's not talk about that second opening...).  Yo-Kai Watch turns out to be one of those really nicely written kids' shows with plenty of humour that even an older audience can get a lot of enjoyment from.

Yo-Kai Watch starts Nate, a perfectly average elementary student, who is looking for an above-average bug in the woods to show off to his friends.  Instead, he stumbles across an ancient and mysterious gachapon machine, and out of Nate's gachapon comes the ghost Yo-Kai, Whisper.  Whisper declares himself Nate's faithful Yo-Kai butler and gives Nate a Yo-Kai Watch, so that he can see and interact with other Yo-Kai.

From then on, Yo-Kai Watch follows the formula of something strange happening in his everyday life (such as everyone in his class falling asleep, a friend suddenly becoming a huge blabbermouth, all the boys in class having to go pee at the same time, etc.), and Nate having to use the watch to find out which Yo-Kai is causing the bizarre behaviour.  Whisper helps him out by providing him additional information about the Yo-Kai, which he knows off the top of his head (Just kidding!  It's a running gag that Whisper always forgets information about the various Yo-Kai and tries to hide this by secretly looking it up on the Yo-Kai Wiki on a tablet he hides behind his back.).  Then Nate summons a Yo-Kai that he has made friends with (represented by a Yo-Kai medal) using his Yo-Kai watch, and then the Yo-Kai hilariously negotiate the benefits of giving up their mischief and leaving the poor humans alone.  Usually this results in Nate gaining another Yo-Kai friend (and medal) to add to his collection, and so on and so forth.

Yo-Kai Watch clearly has an easy-to-follow formula, but I find the scenarios, the designs, and the powers of the Yo-Kai to be very humourous and creative!  Many of the Yo-Kai are based off of actual Japanese legends, like the baku.  Also the formula is broken up by having multiple-part segments from the perspective of the Yo-Kai; for example, country-born Yo-Kai Komasan tries to journey around the city without getting lost.

Ultimately, Yo-Kai Watch is like a funnier cousin to the Pokemon franchise.  If you are in the mood for a clever, funny, monster-collecting show, then I can't recommend it enough.  As of the date of this review, there are no DVD releases for Yo-Kai Watch in the USA, but the first 26 episodes are available on Netflix streaming.