“Death note” – (Anime series, Japan 2006, NR)
I always enjoyed serialized sci-fi and horror shows broadcast late at night, re-runs of “Star Trek: Voyager” or “Friday the 13th: the series”.
If you do as well, I recommend watching “death note”, a Japanese
animated series about a student, Light Yagami, who finds a notebook with special powers, the Death Note. The titular notebook is the artifact of Light’s doom, something he could have bought from Louis Vendredi’s shop in “Friday the 13th: the series“. The note, dropped on purpose into the human world by Ryuk, a demon-like Shinigami (death deity), has the following rules written in it, which Light attempts to refine and perhaps even circumvent: “the human who uses the note can neither go to heaven nor hell. If the time of death is written within 40 seconds after writing the cause of death as a heart attack, the time of death can go into effect within 40 seconds after writing the name”.
Light uses the note to rid the world of criminals, thereby creating what he hopes will be a utopia in which he will be god.
He writes their name in it, they die. Ultimately, though, Ryuk tells him that the name of the human who finds and uses the note will be written in by the Shinigami who “lost” it in the first place.
There is a sense of tragedy about “death note“, not simply because Light’s fate is sealed once he finds it, but also because his own father is part of the team tasked with unmasking “Kira”, the “unknown subject” name given to his son, derived from the Japanese pronunciation of “killer”.
Watch the trailer:
Interestingly, reviewers seem split on Light’s actions and motives, qualifying him as either altruistic or demented. While I’ll be waiting to see how the series progresses, I sense that Light’s detachment is antisocial and that if the investigators do close in, only then will he show any kind of emotion.
In researching the series, I found that Warner Bros has attached two writers to adapt “death note” into a motion picture, which makes sense since Warner Japan did the film versions for their market. The first disc introduces the characters and seems to focus on their development, at a slower pace than most anime series with which I am familiar.
I prefer watching movies in their original language with subtitles, but it should be said that the American director and voice talents did a better job than usual, especially with material which must have been complex to translate. Once I got past the lame-o title song, I found that “death note” does require paying attention and offers much to research in terms of symbols and design choices.
“Death note” gets four jellybeans.
