Angel Beats! Complete Collection   Starring (voice): Harumi Sakurai, Hiroshi Kamiya and Kana Hanazawa Manga Entertainment RRP: £29.99 MANG5260 Certificate: 15 Available 25 June 2012

In a world after death, angels fight for their fate and their future. Yuri, the leader of the Shinda Sekai Sensen (Afterlife Battlefront), rebels against the god who destined her to have an unreasonable life. On the other hand, Angel, the chairperson of the student council for the world after death, battles against the SSS members. SSS members utilize armed weaponry to battle it out against the angels harnessing supernatural powers.

Angel Beats! is a 2010 series devised by members of Key, the visual novel production company that created Kanon, Air and Clannad, all highly successful titles that were equally popular in anime adaptation. While Angel Beats! is an original work, it shares many of the qualities familiar from those titles - an odd blend of silly comedy and mawkish melodrama, infused with supernatural elements, all bound up in a pastoral evocation of Japanese high school life. It's a formula by no means confined to Key-derived titles and easily mocked for its apparent pandering to lonely fans yearning for a never-experienced nostalgic youth, but Angel Beats! still has its own merits.

With the amnesiac viewpoint character Otonashi awakening in the stylised high school environment that represents the afterlife, bossy class leader Yuri wastes no time bringing him up to speed on the rules that govern this world - most important being to be wary of tangling with the enigmatic girl called Angel, a lesson Otonashi learns the hard way when Angel stabs him in the chest moments after they meet. As this is the afterlife, though, injury and death are minor inconveniences at best, and Angel Beats! quickly sends its cast through a series of slapstick Tex Avery setpieces as they brave all manner of deathtraps and obstacles in their ongoing attempts to neutralise Angel.

The central cast themselves are a diverse bunch - a laconic girl ninja, a breakdancing dude who speaks in nonsensical English phrases (played by an American actor among the Japanese cast, unusually), and an all-girl rock band who provide 'diversions' during missions - while the rest of the school and faculty are made up of 'NPCs', automatons who lack souls and can only repeat rote dialogue. While this makes sense in the overtly game-like world of Angel Beats!' afterlife, it veers close to spiritual elitism as only the 'real' people and their problems are seen to matter; fortunately, a couple of narrative twists allow the show to skirt away from this problematic element.

The show is certainly a gorgeous-looking work, with the Arcadian high school given an additional air of unreality by the heavily computer-rendered backgrounds, and the character animation is beautifully done throughout - action sequences and crowd scenes alike showing a level of attention to detail rarely seen in TV anime. Where Angel Beats! fares less well is in the writing. The storylines involving the various characters' past traumas tend to be melodramatic and thinly conceived, and resolved in a pat manner designed to usher them out of the way to make room for the next story; Yuri's self-declared defiance of God, even given her brutal backstory, lacks conviction. Many elements designed to appeal to anime fans - the ubiquitous high school setting, the cutesy rock band, the presence of firearms and computers as plot devices – are bundled together haphazardly, while the overt borrowing from other series - afterlife drama Haibane Renmei, the Haruhi Suzumiya and Shin Megami Tensei: Persona franchises, and perhaps inevitably, Evangelion all feature in the mix - feels cynical and committee-led. The lack of artistic vision or skillful writing mean Angel Beats!, despite its lavish production, never really engages the heart.

I found myself wanting to like Angel Beats! more than I did, as it's a beautifully produced series with some fine moments of comedy and action, and makes full use of its resources to create a perfectly enjoyable, if rather slight 13-episode show. The weak writing counts against it, though, and makes it hard to recommend as anything other than a pleasant diversion.

6

Richard Hunt