Early Impressions of Death Note

Finally got around to watching this!

To be perfectly honest I have avoided watching this for a very long time even though I knew nothing about it, what can I say? I’m a natural born hipster, Death Note is so mainstream. Oh well. Read on for my early opinion.

One of the greatest and most genius things about this anime is its premise, most anime’s I watch I don’t really want to watch until a few episodes in, it always takes a while to get interesting, but Death note was interesting right off the bat and kept me hooked from the first episode. In the first episode a teenage boy finds a notebook dropped from the heavens (or wherever you want to call it) and discovers that if he writes a name in the pages, his target will die. He has a power to kill anybody, all her needs is their name and their face.

It was such a fantastic premise, I think I actually gasped at the end of episode 1 between a mixture of surprise and anticipation. The protagonist, Light, is a brilliant character, he feels very real to me, he comes up with the idea that he will kill all the criminals in the world and create a paradise for only good people, bringing himself to the level of god, this makes the viewer ask themselves all sorts of questions about the morality of what he is doing. It’s hard to label him, I don’t know whether to call him demented, because in a way I don’t think what he is trying to do is so hard to understand and I think there are a lot of teenage boys out there who would do the same thing. The anime itself recognises that this isn’t a black and white case of good or bad, many civilians in the anime thank Light (through his alias ‘Kira’) for his doings, but the government and the general public refer to it as an act of evil. It’s interesting.

Some scenes are hard to watch, particularly the one where he leads an innocent girl to her death via the Death Note after tricking her and gaining her trust. He killed her because she was getting in his way of his “Divine Plan”, he shows no remorse for this at all and you can tell what he’s thinking “The end justifies the means”.

His nemesis “L” is an incredibly smart individual who is out to kill Light, he too uses questionable methods to achieve what he thinks is right. This anime has a clever way of secretly involving the audience, it’s almost like its designed so that we can judge the characters as they go about their activities. I feel like I’m in my Philosophy and Ethics class.

I love the art style, it’s striking, scary and creepy all at the same time.

I’m looking forward to watching the rest of this anime, as soon as I’m done (maybe 3 weeks or something?) I’ll be posting a full, much more detailed and much more organised, review.

Thanks for reading.