Death Note Relight 2: L's Successors

This is it. The last of the animated Death Note movies, and the last piece of animated material out of the franchise. (For now at least)
Last week, I covered Visions of a God. While it wasn't totally awful, there was too much bringing it down for it to be actually good. However, there were a few good pieces of original animation holding the whole thing together. The pacing sucked, and they cut the plot down beyond what could possibly be called "the bare minimum", but it was still somewhat entertaining to see how they'd arranged the whole thing. Plus, they didn't waste much in the way of screentime. At the very least, they included almost everything you needed to know to understand the plot.
Spoiler warnings for the last half of Death Note, as well as the entire film.
After the apparent popularity of Visions of a God, Mad House decided to make another TV movie to finish out the series. Unfortunately, they dropped the ball on this one spectacularly. Some of the issues come from the way the last movie ended, since Visions of a God prematurely discarded the really cool framing-device at the end. I suppose they weren't expecting to make a second movie. So, what have they replaced it with? L, (who at this point in the series is supposed to be dead) starts out the movie talking to the audience. Directly to the audience, stating what the purpose of the movie is. L states that this movie was created for people who had never seen Death Note before, even though that literally doesn't make a lick of sense. If you haven't seen Death Note, why would you be watching a Death Note movie? For that matter, why would you be watching the second Death Note animated movie? If you're not familiar with the series, why would you bother watching one of the sequels?
L then proceeds to spend the next nine and a half minutes recapping the events of the series up until then. I know they did this in the series after L died, but there was a reason for it! Their entire database had been deleted, and they had to go back over everything they knew had happened so they could have some kind of record of what happened. Plus, since it was narrated from L's perspective, it helped compound his recent death. Another thing to mention was that the recap that took up half of Episode 26: Renewal was both much more complete than the recap they made for this movie. Possibly because they weren't trying to recap an already butchered plot. Plus, they didn't just replay the last scene from Episode 25: Silence verbatim.
Then we come to the runtime. The last movie was almost three hours long, and that was barely enough time for everything they were trying to sum up. This movie isn't even two hours long, and it spends almost ten minutes of the runtime recapping the last movie. Seriously, I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at the clock and saw that I was almost ten minutes into the film without a single piece of footage that didn't come from the last movie. At all. Off to a flying start, and it only gets worse from here.
Let's have a quick rundown of what's been changed, shall we?
The biggest change that's been made is that the Mafia subplot has been completely removed. Yeah, they cut out one of the most important arcs of the series. Not all of what happens overtly afffects the plot immediately, but there are so many important things that happen in the Mafia arc that directly affect how the series ends that I'd think that's the last thing you'd cut. But on that subject, Soichiro Yagami has been completely written out of the story. The Japanese version makes an offhand reference to him retiring after Light joined the task-force, but the English version doesn't even mention it. This brings up some fairly significant questions. Since Soichiro's heart-attack was written out of the first movie, so for all we know, he was in perfect health. What would your first thought be there? Maybe he retired to take care of his daughter, who's obviously suffering from PTSD. But that can't be the case, since the mafia have been written out of the story.
Later on in the movie Mello shows up at the SPK headquarters with a massive scar on his face and absolutely no explanation as to why. He then proceeds to do nothing until the very end of the movie. Removing the mafia means that everything Mello did has been erased, which basically makes him a pointless character in this movie. Maybe if they hadn't had a ten minute recap at the beginning, they'd have had the time to adapt some of the mafia arc.Or maybe if they'd had thirty minutes or more of extra screentime, they could have adapted it, and had time for some of the other things they cut. Or maybe if they had another hour and cut that ten minute recap, then they could have done something resembling a decent job.
You see, without the mafia arc, no SPK members are killed, Light never learns Mello's name, Mello never gets his scar, Soichiro never dies, Light never has to give up one of his Death Notes to get rid of the Shinigami Sidoh, and most importantly, since Light doesn't know Mello's real name, he has no way of telling Takeda who Mello is in the event she has to kill him, ergo Mello never dies.
Certain things have been changed to accommodate the mafia's erasure, but the recovery is utterly incomplete to say the very least.
For instance, one of the compensating factors is that rather than Mello and the mafia killing off most of Near's team, Kiyomi Takeda and Teru Mikami are the ones responsible. Even though they cut out the scenes of the United States turning the relevant information over to... Literally anyone. At that point in time, the SPK had never even shown their faces to anyone at that point. Since the SPK wasn't involved with the mafia investigation, that means Light had no reason to know of their existence to kill any of them.
Mikami's origin has been completely removed. Oh, and since most of the FBI arc was cut out of the first movie, we have no explanation as to who Takeda is. She was Light's girlfriend in High-school. She was on the Spaceland bus when he set up his plan to kill all the FBI agents. In the actual series we actually knew who she was. In this, she's not mentioned at all until she just shows up in this film.
Takeda feeds information to Mikami over the phone. This scene is comprised of recut stock-footage of Mikami writing names in the Death Note with original footage of Takeda feeding him the information.
Another thing I should mention before I forget is that rather than having Mikami kill off a bunch of guys from the Sakura TV Kira Worship Service, he instead kills off a group of people who dislike Kira on a Pro-Kira vs Anti-Kira debate. Something Light wouldn't have supported or allowed at this point in the series. What the hell was this about? Why didn't they just re-use the footage from the show?
Anyways, in addition to all of the stock footage from the series that they use in the SPK massacre, they also use pieces of original footage for some reason. One shot shows one of the SPK members head twisting around a hundred and eighty degrees. EVEN THOUGH THAT'S NOT POSSIBLE!
Let's go back to the first season of Death Note, where Light experimented with the limitations of the power. Something which is not physically possible cannot be made to occur by writing it in the Death Note. You can't make someone from a prison in America die by jumping off of the Eiffel Tower. By the rules of the Death Note, that guy should have died of a heart-attack, plain and freaking simple. But, since they cut all of the specifics of that experimentation, as well as literally all of the rules of the Death Note, I suppose that's all up in the air! Even though setting up all those rules was critical to the Death Note not being incredibly overpowered.
Speaking of Death Note rules, they only ever mention one of the fake rules in the Death Note, carrying on from what they were doing in the first movie as well. Even though that second rule was critical to them not just flat out destroying the Death Note. You know, the rule that said that destruction of the Death Note would kill literally everyone who touched it? That rule? That incredibly critical rule?
Anyways, almost all of Light's plotting around the Kira task-force to keep in contact with Takeda and Mikami has been removed.
The whole movie is basically a rush to the last episode, which plays out almost in its entirety, with a little bit of abridging thrown in to make it a little shorter. There's also the dinner between Misa and Takeda, which ultimately seems pointless when Misa and Takeda alike have had an incredibly small amount of screentime in this movie.
Long story short, Mello kidnaps Takeda, she kills him (Even though she doesn't have any way to do that. She doesn't own a Death Note, ergo she can't bargain for the Shinigami eyes.) and Light kills her. Mikami's entire routine and most of the SPK's surveillance of him has been cut, as well as him retrieving the Death Note from the bank (at least until Near tells Light this at the end of the movie) so we don't even have any hint that Mikami was trying to kill Takeda until the end. We also don't get any kind of communication between Mikami and Light, so they never establish that Light wasn't able to move freely, ergo Mikami just seems like an idiot working on his own, rather than applying a bit of logic to the situation like he did in the comics and animated series.
They then speed to Light's death at the hands (or more to the point, the pen) of Ryuk. They skip the symbolism, the mirage of L looking over the dying Light, everything that made that a powerful moment.
Something I found particularly strange is the extensive use of original animation in areas where stock footage would have worked just as well, if not better. Most of the original footage centers around Near and the SPK, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. They had plenty of footage of Near and the SPK from the series, and get this, most of the new footage is Near screwing around with puzzles and games and whatnot. Stuff he did plenty of in the show.
The only noteworthy piece of original footage is a flashback to L talking to the Whammy House kids and answering their questions. That's literally it. No other piece of original footage serves to do anything unique. Even then, that little clip was adapted from a one-shot tie-in to the comics.
All in all, this movie is loaded with plot-holes, it's terribly paced, and above all, it's way too short.
The plot lurches around without much care for coherency, moving too fast for its own good at some points and then grinding to a halt at others. The comics and the animated series alike knew how pacing worked, bringing things down slowly and then slowly building back up to the intensity they needed.
Then we come to the voice-acting. In Visions of a God, the newly recorded-lines, while not on-par at a writing level matched the original lines in performance quality. In L's Successors, there are a few of Light's new lines that sound just off enough that I wonder if this special was rushed to completion. The same goes for some of Near's new lines. It's almost as if they didn't have enough time to do multiple takes. I'd say this goes for the Japanese as well as English voice-tracks, but Light and Near's Japanese VA's didn't really have far to sink.
What I'm trying to say is, this movie is bad. Incredibly bad. It's even worse because it came from something good. In that regard, it's incredibly similar to the first Hunger Games movie. In fact, that's the best comparison I can draw. So many things have been cut from the source material that the final product literally doesn't make a lick of sense. Even Visions of a God had a bit of redeeming value to it, what with the original footage in the beginning, middle and end of the movie. This film on the other hand just butchers the plot of the show without giving any significant reason why you should watch it if you've already seen the animated series, and if you're a first-time viewer, you should just watch the animated series.
In the end, I give it a 1.1* rating. I didn't enjoy this film either as a critic or a fan of the series.
Next week, we'll either be tackling a videogame, or the first live-action Death Note movie. We'll see what happens.

Image from walmart.com

Death Note: The Animated Series

Way back in 2013 I reviewed the original Death Note comics if you'll recall. I meant to get around to reviewing the animated series, but I either forgot, or never really had the time. Either way, I didn't get around to it, or any of the five Death Note movies. Then, straight out of nowhere, there was a Death Note Live-Action series that aired earlier this year. I'm not anywhere near being done with The Consuming Shadow or any of the other twenty games I'm trying to get reviewed before the end of the year, and I'd finally finished up all thirty-seven episodes of the animated series, so I figured I'd just sit down and type out a review of the animated series before possibly getting around to watching the five movies and the TV show in between all of my deaths in The Consuming Shadow. Then maybe I'll get around to reviewing the biggest film of the year if I can find the cash, who knows.
So, what is Death Note about? Well, I'm glad I asked that question! Death Note is a story that asks a question. How would good people handle being given the power to kill bad people, and how far would they go when faced with the possibility of being caught?
Death Note is quite possibly one of the greatest drama stories of all time, which is backed up by some amazing artwork. Since I've already covered everything that makes Death Note good in my review of the comics, but I'll try and give a quick rundown.
The characters are incredibly well-written, interesting, and well-developed. The story is paced perfectly, and all of the plots come together perfectly in the end. The art was great, the writing was utterly superb, and Death Note is still one of my favorite series of comics to this very day.
Fortunately all of that carries over into the animated series and more. Among many positives, there's the obvious addition of color, motion and music. The use of color in this show is just astounding, and the general quality of the artwork is leaps and bounds above that of most animated products, either from Japan itself or other places in the world. It's a quality of animation I've rarely seen, and it looks amazing. I'm always irritated by the tendency in certain pieces of animation to make hair almost transparent, leaving eyes, eyeglasses and eyebrows visible beneath what would in real life be totally obscured by locks of hair. Fortunately, Death Note doesn't have that issue. Nor does it have many of the typical issues that tend to affect a lot of animated series. You're not likely to see any re-used animation, miscolored characters or clothing, or sloppy artwork in this show. This is pretty much the series that the term "precision animation" was coined to describe. And as I said before, the use of color is absolutely astounding. The way they shift colors occasionally in some scenes to display contrast is just masterful, and it gets even better towards the end of the series, when the contrast of colors becomes even more vibrant, and somewhat demented to match the tone of the show.
Speaking of tone, the sound design is amazing. The sound-effects, the voice-acting, and the music especially sets the scene to make some of the most awesome moments in the series even better. I cannot give enough praise to the music team, and the music supervisor Fumiko Harada. The other composers listed on IMDd are the bands Nightmare and Maximum The Hormone, who wrote the opening and ending songs for the first and second seasons respectively. Personally, I prefer Nightmare's music as opposed to Maximum The Hormone's. If we can get over Maximum The Hormone's incredibly stupid name for a second, I'll break down the difference. The two opening songs are called "The World" and "What's Up, People?!" composed by Nightmare and Maximum The Hormone respectively. "The World" is made up of intricate metaphors, some awesome guitar riffs, and accompanies some awesome visuals in the opening, which act as visual metaphor for the entire series. It's a really good song accompanying an amazing opening sequence, and it only gets better when you listen to the full-length version, which I still have. Then we come to "What's Up, People?!", which is loud, obnoxious, and seems to be comprised entirely of nonsense lyrics intended to confuse and assault the senses. Then there's the accompanying animation, which doesn't really make any sense. Gone are the subtle depictions of things that are actually from the show with the intricate color direction from the show itself, the second intro just assaults you with splashes of color which don't seem to have much logic to their placement. Sure, the color shifting in the show itself got crazier as time went on, but they were still extremely careful with how they used it. Personally, I just skipped the intros after watching them all the way through once anyways.
That brings us to the ending songs, "Alumina" and "Desperate Billy", by the same bands as before respectively. While "The World" sounds like the song that plays in Light Yagami's head while writing down names, "Alumina" sounds like the kind of song that you expect to play during the decay of a persons soul. It's sad, it's great to listen to, and I freaking loved it.
"Desperate Billy" seems to be yet another nonsense song, but fortunately it's tolerable and coherent, as opposed to "What's Up People?!" which was just a big ball of noise. It's got some good guitar pieces, and when the clean vocals are playing, but the speed-vocals are playing I can't pick out a single word, and they just seem out of place. As I've said before, I don't know a whole lot of Japanese, but it doesn't matter what language the vocalist is speaking in when they're talking that fast, and when they're growling like that. This song is pretty good, but it's brought down by the growling vocals. It's pretty good, but it could be better.
As for the rest of the soundtrack, it's great. It enhances the atmosphere of the show, and it's possibly one of the most memorable soundtracks of all time.
Then we come to the voice-acting, and I'd like to get this out of the way right off the bat. The Japanese voice-acting sucks. I tried watching a few key episodes in Japanese and I couldn't get into it. Mamoru Miyano, the Japanese voice-actor for Light Yagami sounds like he's bored out of his mind throughout his entire performance, even when he's supposed to be sounding demented and crazy, whereas Brad Swaile, the English voice-actor manages to rock the role for all it's worth. He brings across all of Light's demented passion, his wide-eyed innocent persona, and all of the vibrant, disturbing aspects of Light's personality.
Then we get to the voices of Ryuk. Shidô Nakamura is the Japanese voice of Ryuk, and he's got essentially the same problem as Miyano does, he just doesn't seem at all interested in his performance. I get that both of the characters were bored, but neither of them seem to be able to come up with anything else. Nakamura's performance in this show is mostly defined by him sounding slightly confused and attempting to be intimidating. I don't know much about his career outside of Death Note, but I hope this just comes down to an issue of direction, because he sounds like he'd be right for the role otherwise. Fortunately, Brian Drummond nails the role. There's not mush about the English acting which doesn't trump the Japanese acting. If it's not boring, bored, or outright bad, it's usually just bland, and that's when the actors aren't completely mis-cast. That brings us to Noriko Hidaka's performance as Near. Noriko played Akane in Ranma 1/2, which I haven't seen. Kikyo in InuYasha, a franchise that I really like, but have never watched. Reiko Hinamoto in Metal Gear Solid 3, which I've never played in Japanese. Masumi Sera in Case Closed, which I've never seen in Japanese. She also apparently had a recurring role in Ressha Sentai ToQger, a series I've been meaning to watch, but haven't gotten around to yet due to my insane work schedule and the fact that I haven't been able to get into Super Sentai as much as I have Kamen Rider.
It tends to be common practice to cast women in the roles of young boys so that their voices don't change over the course of filming. Under most circumstances, this works perfectly fine, but under some circumstances they either wind up sounding too feminine, too much like little girls, or too much like grown women. An obvious example of the last one would be Masako Nozawa, the Japanese voice of Goku. Noriko seems to fall into fall into the first category, bleeding over into the third a bit. I don't know if she's just not cut out for the role, or if this is yet again another failing of the Japanese voice direction.
Then we get to the Cathy Weseluck, the English voice of Near. She starts out a little shaky, and her voice for Near wasn't one I would have expected, but she just nails it. At first I thought they could have done slightly better, but at the end of the series I wouldn't have replaced her with anyone else. Cathy's other voice credits include Mirai Yashima from Mobile Suit Gundam, Shampoo in Ranma, Chiaotzu, Piiza and Puar in the Ocean and Canadian versions of Dragon Ball Z (Which are really the same version since Ocean never stopped producing the series in Canada, just in America when Funimation wrangled the American rights away) Ayumi and Kagome's mother in InuYasha, and a crapload of voices in My Little Pony over the years.
Wait, Brian Drummond? Cathy Weseluck? Both of them were involved with the Ocean/Canadian dub of Dragon Ball Z. And guess what company produced the English version of Death Note? That's right, Ocean Studios! It's funny how Ocean is mostly known for producing underacted shows these days. I think their current biggest show is probably Cardfight!! Vanguard, a sub-par Yu-Gi-Oh! ripoff with some of the blandest character design I've ever seen. It could just be the material they were working with, since it is admittedly a pretty weak show, but everyone sounds uninvested in their actions. Every. Single. One.
I bring this up because I was genuinely surprised when I saw Ocean Studios listed in the credits, since this show has legitimately some of the best voice-acting I've ever heard.
Unfortunately this brings us to a fairly major issue with the show. It might just be that I was watching this on my massive computer monitor, or the amount of Dragon Ball Z Abridged I watch, but the characters lips almost never match up with their voices. I know what you're thinking, and it doesn't matter which audio track you're listening to, the lip-movements only match up part of the time, if at all. It definitely could have done with someone cueing up the lips to the actual voices in post-production. This seems to be an issue all around in animation, no matter where it comes from, and one that Death Note unfortunately doesn't subvert, which is a shame, since it subverts so many other animation issues. But that doesn't really take away from the experience, since it's usually something only visual-effects and animation nerds like myself would notice.
There's literally only one scene in the show that was actually lesser than its counterpart in the comics, mostly due to the fact that they cut down one of the pivotal scenes of the show. Fans of Death Note (And people who have read the comics) will know what scene I'm talking about. Otherwise, I don't really have any complaints, except for the fact that the last episode ends too quickly, rather than showing the fallout of what happened at the end like the comics did. I liked how the comics showed what effect the actions of the characters had on the world itself. However! I can see why they ended the show where they did, because it's very emotional, and quite possibly one of the greatest moments in any television series. Ever. No, I'm not kidding. Death Note is to animated television what The Godfather is to cinema, and it deserves a 10.1*. I'm hoping to see you next week with a review of The Consuming Shadow, and maybe a midweek review or two of the two Death Note animated films. I'm also tempted to drop a midweek, midseason review of Supergirl at some point, but I'm not sure I want to relive the last eight, miserable Mondays.