All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Rebels against the God inscription on the Afterlife Battlefronts membership patches Where were you in 2010? CLANNAD creator Jun Maeda was making Angel Beats. It was one of the first true hit anime of the new decade. With its Haruhiinfluenced setting and an absolutely golden sensibility that combined a modern structure with a purehearted sentimentality at its core it wouldve been weirder if Angel Beats wasnt popular. This ones for the emo kids in the best way possible. 880https://i.ur.com/sDOHfgt.png Of course a few months later and as pointed out in thishttps://www.animenewsnetwork.com/thisweekinanime/20191217/.154470 column which inspired me to watch the show and consequently write this one Madoka Magica hit the western anime fan community like a hurricane and proceeded to influence much of the next decade while eclipsing that first year pretty hard. If you got into anime during or after 2011 it is entirely reasonable that youve never even heard of Angel Beats Indeed in all waysvisually thematically in terms of writing and charactersAngel Beats strikes more as the last 2000s Anime than the first hit 2010s Anime. It has left no obvious influence on any other popular or wellacclaimed shows. It was the endpoint of a zeitgeistnot the beginning of one and it was the last hit its creator had before life as it often does got in the way. Angel Beats is a full stop in anime form despite its enduring if often quiet popularity. The premise is simple if completely bonkers. Otonoshi our protagonist awakes in the courtyard of a nameless highschool next to a purplehaired girl Yuri wielding a sniper rifle. The high school is purgatory the girl the founder and leader of The Afterlife Battlefront a group of rebels who fight against the whitehaired Angel a girl with superpowers who wants them to all behave and live ordinary high school lives so theyll eventually move on to the next world. Yuri finds this objectionable mostly because of her tragic backstory that we learn a few episodes in. Hence the rebels against the God mantra yeah? 880https://i.ur.com/zsOVEzg.png Fittingly given the supernatural high school genre it is something of a capstone to Angel Beats is wildly ambitious. Its one of those a show that crams 3 or 4 whole genres worth of tropes into a blender and sees what the resulting smoothie tastes like. Yet heres the thing. That approach at its best can yield moments of shocking brilliance both overt and subtle and Angel Beats is pretty damn close to the best. The character arc of Iwasawa early in the series is one such example. The leader of GirlDeMo the high school club band who are again a clear riff on Haruhi Suzumiyas ENOZ Iwasawas earthly life was defined by having to cope with a pair of abusive parents. As one might expect she turned to musicthe band named is a pretty clear pastiche of early 2000s emorock something thats quite fittingbefore having it all cut short by a head injury suffered at the hands of her father. As part of GirlDeMo she premieres a ballad at the climax of the third episode finally singing a song that she knows will mean as much to others as that band did to her and suddenly at the songs conclusion she quietly vanishes. 880https://i.ur.com/FQdh3bq.png This moment is mentioned in many reviews of Angel Beats and theres a very simple reason for that it is devastating. I knew about it beforehand and it still struck me. Not only is it one of the iconic tropes of 2000s high school life animethe climactic school band concertbeing simultaneously turned on its head and laid to rest its tied to the characters own passing on. It is a eulogy for itself and a beautiful one at that. The image of the unheld guitar sitting on the floor is still quietly moving ten years later and I suspect it still will be in 2030 2050 and 2100 too. 880https://i.ur.com/ThJvJ5n.png Its hard not to get meta with Angel Beats because we again have to remember this artistic movement largely ended here. That guitar could just as easily have been a paintbrush. Iwasawa finally saying what she wanted to say and moving on is reflected in the entire work itself because in many ways Angel Beats is that thing you want to say before moving on and thats what makes it work on a deeper more human level. Iwasawa vanishes in a moment of earned inner peace and contentment we would all be lucky to go out that way. By the 9th episode it becomes clear that this is in fact Angel Beats core thesis. There is a running theme about giving of yourself to save someone else. Students graduate from the high school when they finally have no regrets. The setting itself is a prescient interpretation of the endless everyday cycle that defines high school life anime reinterpreted as a literal purgatory for those deprived of a happy youth. All of those Azumanga Daioh takes place in Limbo theories that used to float around the internet? Angel Beats takes that idea and puts it into the text itself. 880https://i.ur.com/ZYKuZtO.png With a lovely lack of subtlety it must be noted. The show from then on builds on what it means to help save someone who perhaps does not necessarily want to be saved. Yuri in particular holds out til near the shows very end as her own liferocked by a senseless violent tragedyhas left her bitter and misotheistic not without reason. As a sidenote making a character who initially appears to be a Haruhi Suzumiya xerox into someone who blames the divine for her fate is impressively clever. All of this might give the impression that Angel Beats is a bit dour. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. The series has a strong comedic sensibilitysometimes slapstick or running gags sometimes marginally more subtle character humorthat helps counterbalance its heavier moments. The fourth episode actually directly parodies the graduation mechanism proving that AB isnt afraid to even skewer itself a little bit. This is a hard thing to juggle and it doesnt always pull it off. There is for instance a running gag about our lead thinking another character is gay. Something which would rightly probably not fly today but by and large the series balances itself well here. 880https://i.ur.com/6rToLTM.png This happens in an episode that will also make you cry your eyes out. Other kinks in the rope come from Angel Beats exploring the consequences of its own worldbuilding. Iwasawa vanishes on her own terms but just a few episodes later were introduced to Ayato Naoi who for the duration of his arc takes over the school as a dictator. His plot to hypnotize other students into an unearned inner peace and have them disappear that way is the result of an evident god complex and its rightly presented as horrifying. Here though is where the shows singlecour structure fails it a bit. Ayato is introduced becomes the school dictator pseudomassacres they cant actually die given that theyre already dead The Afterlife Battlefront explains his motivations and backstory has his plan foiled and his character redeemed all in only about 40 realtime minutes of footage. By the next episode hes just part of the main cast. Its a lot of weight for such a small segment of the show to carry and in that unfortunate sense Angel Beats is very much an anime of the 2010s as this kind of hypercompressed storytelling has only more become the norm over time. 880https://i.ur.com/8Hd0CfX.png 880https://i.ur.com/2LgcsV8.png Get you a guy who can do both? But at the end of it all Angel Beats goes out with the kind of wonderfully melodramatic finale that is maybe the most fitting sendoff its era of anime could possibly have had. The final two episodes see Yuri conquer her inner demons with her love of her friends and see Otonashi and Kanade resolve their relationship. The final scene with Otonashi scrambling to hug a justdisappeared Kanade should not work as well as it does. Its cheesy its corny its cloying and its astoundingly sincere in its simple belief in the power of love in all its many forms. And with a wide shot of the high school an era ends. 880https://i.ur.com/m7vMz5n.png Indeed if Angel Beats understands one thing very well its that everythingfriendships stories livescomes to an end. Thats a theme that is so universally applicable that it almost feels like cheating at writing. More importantly the sheer amount of sincerity really sells the whole thing. You can forgive its flaws because its strengths are so strong. Its true that Its probably not quite long enough and the pacing is at times awkward such that even moments that work such as the end of episode 10 are still working against it. There are a few unfortunate jokes as mentioned and some iffy elements in character backstories but these are all more quibbles than major flaws. More than most when I talked about how I was watching Angel Beats for the first time I got supportive commentssome from total strangershere on Anilist and elsewhere around the internet hoping that Id enjoy it and telling me to buckle up for the emotional rollercoaster. And its easy to see why that cult fanbase has endured. Angel Beats warts and all speaks to people. If you listen closely enough you can still hear it singing. And if you liked this review why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?https://anilist.co/user/planetJane/reviews