“Angel Beats!” anime series will be rebroadcasted on television in July

Popular 2010 P.A. Works/Aniplex anime series “Angel Beats!” will be rebroadcasted on television in July.

7月1日24:30からTOKYO MX、BS11、群馬テレビ、とちぎテレビ、

7月4日27:08からMBSで放送されます。

7月1日24:30からTOKYO MX、BS11、群馬テレビ、とちぎテレビ、7月4日27:08からMBSで放送されます。

One day you woke up and found out that you are dead and in another world with others who have passed on.

But to survive each day, you have to fight an angel.

This is the concept of “Angel Beats!”, a 13-episode anime series (which aired in Japan from April-June 2010) created by Maeda Jun and character designer Na-Ga, both from the visual novel brand Key (known for “Kanon”, “Air” and “Clannad”).

Produced by P.A. Works and Aniplex, the series is directed by Kishi Seiji  (“Tentai Senshi Sunred”, “My Bride is a Mermaid”, “Persona 4 the Animation”) and a screenplay by Jun Maeda.

Because of the popularity of previous Key-related anime series, “Angel Beats!” was a success in Japan via the weekly Blu-ray sales charts constantly making the top 3 in sales.  The series was also seen as recommended work by the awards jury of the 14th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2010.

Also, to show how popular the series became, the opening and ending theme “My Soul, Your Beats!/Brave Song” debuted at No. 3 on Japan’s music charts “Oricon Weekly Singles” and also being awarded by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) for shipping over 100,000 copies.

The second single “Crow Song” by the band Girl Dead Monster’s (a band in the anime series) debuted in the top 10 of the singles charts, followed by another successful single titled “Thousand Enemies” and “Little Braver”.

“Angel Beats!” is an anime series about a young man named Otonashi Yuzuru.  He has amnesia and has no memory of why he is caught up in the world of the dead.  How did he die?   And why is he being recruited by the Afterlife Battlefront (Shinda Sekai Sensen-SSS) to fight against the angel?

According to the battlefront leader Nakamura Yuri,  every day they must fight against the Angel in order to survive.  Of course, Otonashi can’t believe any of this and thinks that maybe its all a dream, so he goes to encounter Angel himself.  He asks her if she is an Angel and she replies that she is not.  He thinks its a joke that everyone is fighting her and that she would kill them and wants her to prove it, so she uses her knife and stabs him in the heart.

Otonashi wakes up in the school infirmary and instead of dying, he is alive?  Thinking that it’s all a dream, he is shocked to find his shirt covered in blood and then to see other members of the Battlefront who confirm that he is not dreaming.

It appears that Otonashi is among the afterlife and the world is separated by those who have died (lived a bad life) and are now caught up in the world.

The world which is pretty much a high school and a few locations.  In this world, there are those who fight the angel known as the Battlefront, then there are the NPC’s which are like non-essential characters of a video game…just a character in the world that are programmed to act like normal high school students that are programmed to study and do school-based activities and then there is the angel, the person who makes sure those in the afterlife follow the rules of being students, going to school and not breaking any rules.

Otonashi tries to understand why the Battlefront is fighting the angel and with each member of the Battlefront, he gets to learn more about their lives and how many of them had bad lives in their reality but something led to their deaths and now not having lived a complete life.

In the afterlife, the world or purgatory that they live now, they can choose to live together and create their own destiny or be obliterated which means, satisfying their lives in purgatory and being reincarnated.  But when they fight in the world and get murdered or hurt, they will return back to life in a short-time to continue living in that world.

But the more time Otonashi spends in the world, he starts to learn that maybe people satisfying their lives in this new world may not be a bad thing.  But can he convince the members of the Battlefront?

Meanwhile, is Angel even a threat?  Perhaps there is someone more sinister in the world that is pulling the strings of how things should be?

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