My gosh I couldn't have been more wrong.
Why did I start this in the first place? I was looking for a decently looking comedy with some action so that I could pass a couple of days without thinking about anything. Something light. And pretty and at least a little intelligent so I don't end up falling asleep. I ended with Angel Beats! almost cursing my luck for having to meet up with such a silly looking anime, and yes, I went for it totally because of the high ranking. I mean how bad could it be?
The fact that it only has 13 episodes was a plus, I didn't feel like spending half a week with a high school bunch of teens fighting angels.
I did also regret my anime choice after the first 2 episodes and decided to watch something else. The premise of the anime was okay, with a boy ending up on the other side and all, surprisingly the background and the characters were A LOT to VERY appealing to me, although from pictures around here I wasn't really expecting that. I was expecting something "big" to happen, to make me want to watch the next episode, but it just didn't. Not in the first couple episodes.
You are wrong to assume, like I did, that it will turn into a very linear comedy/action silly type of anime. I thought I will have to endure 13 episodes each depicting some sort of fight versus who knows what purgatory entities. Because you get to grow tired of those repetitive fighting scenes anime, where the plot doesn't really look like going anywhere.
The change came to about episode 4-5, where you get some better insight to the characters and you get to actually like them. From the first concert you start to wonder what is it actually all about? The concert's atmosphere, with quite nice music, the action going on outside the concert room...the thrills of it... it's quite entertaining. And here's where you realize what this is all about: all the teenagers here are in some sort of purgatory.
About the purgatory. People around here tend to take things very...literally? As in they start criticizing that and that because they know purgatory wasn't really what it looks like here... why is purgatory a highschool? why are in purgatory only young people? why are some of them extremely violent (there are couple of VERY bloody scenes somewhere) when we know those kinds of people go to hell not purgatory.
My explanation is: nobody had returned from purgatory so first of all nobody knows. If you can't open your mind to some creative points of view then there's no point arguing over it.
The reason is actually explained in the anime. So you don't have to bear with just another anime that deals with just teenagers for some poor of excuse reason.
This show is a lot of things. Now, as quite some time had passed since i actually finished watching it (and i've been completing other series since) I can clearly see one thing: the best thing about this show is that it manages gracefully to deal with this many themes and to bring together different genres: it's a comedy while being a drama, it's a slice of life while dealing with supernatural and it's silly and serious both, dealing with actually a pretty difficult phylosophical debate. I have difficulty understanding what kind of target public they were aiming at as it has something for everyone, from good music, to drama, action, story and smooth art.
Although I had a lot of fun with the action scenes which somehow managed to make me laugh quite a lot (I'm not a very big fan of japanese humor) I was very very surprised at the more dramatic scenes. Each character's story is touching and gets you thinking.
As the show advances, the backgrounds become more and more bright, along with very lively colors they give a so very wonderful feeling every time one of the characters comes to a resolution.
The last 3-4 episodes are very intense nd definitely what makes the contrast i was talking about. There are literally two sides of this show, the bright and the dark, as we also have reality and "the other side". The last scenes are nothing you would expect from a "funny silly show".
I'll have to point it out though how important it is to wait for the final ED and watch after it.
I had a great deal of fun watching this. And the best thing of all is the feeling I got in the end. It's the first ever TV show I watch that has this sort of impact over me, although I've watched some others that were supposed to actually have this effect (at the recommendation of various people) I never quite got it: what was it to cry at some cartoons.
And that's why I'm giving this a 10: totally worth the time
