DistantStar

To say the truth, I was not going to watch Death Note – I like more bright & colorful stories, and it did not seem like one of them. But everyone around me was so excited, saying “Wow, Death Note anime, I want to see this”, “ New anime by Madhouse, it must be as good as Monster was” etc. that I got interested. I have not read Death Note manga, and Monster is still waiting for it’s turn on my shelf, but I think I have to be able to answer a question “Hey, what of you think of 10th episode of Death Note?” by something better than “What? There is 10 episodes already???” … So, even before writing about Kanon 2006 & Negima!? I am making sure that my answer will sound like “I wrote about 10th episode in my blog, why have not you read it???”, or something like this.
Ok, now to the main part…

Opening. “The World” by Nightmare. Not the type of music I would listen apart from video, but it was quite good. I can say, I can’t imagine this song without video, and video without this song.

Ending. “Alumina”, also by Nightmare. To my surprise, I liked it more than OP. It’s strange, I almost never like endings, but… It’s animation is not as good as in opening, but “Old Movie” stylization was good, and song also was better. IMHO of course.

Story begins by showing us Shinigami world, where we can see very, very bored Shinigami Ryuk, who even refuses to play a game with his colleagues (I can’t imagine how must I be bored to refuse to watch anime for example..). Camera fades in his red eye, and view shifts to red eye of a guy named Yagami Light, and who seems to be the main character… He is in school, also very bored and is not even listening to the teacher, but answers his question without any problem On his way home, while listening to crime reports on the radio, he thinks to himself that “this world is rotten” (I do not believe it, he just realized this, what a slow guy…). On the other day, looking in the window during classes, he notices a falling notebook, and when he picks it up after school, he sees a word written on the cover – “Death Note”. On the first page of a notebook he sees the “user manual”:

-The human whose name is written in this note shall die.
-This Note will not take effect unless the writer has the person’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
-If the cause of death is written within 40 seconds of writing the person’s name, it will happen.
-If the cause of death is not specified, the person will simply die of a heart attack.
-After writing the cause of death, details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

At first he leaves the notebook on the ground, but then returns, picks it up and walks home. At home, he compliments prank’s author, but after hearing on TV about hostage taking incident, decides to try to write criminals name in the notebook and see what happens. After doing that, he waits for some time and is about to turn of TV in disappointment, but suddenly hears that criminal has collapsed. He is surprised and decides to test it one more time. In the evening, during his prep course, he thinks about killing his classmate, but wisely decides that he can’t kill anyone who he actually knows. While going home, he sees some thugs trying to… hmm… let’s call it “invite women to spend some time with them” (And I thought that living on my country is dangerous… But at least here nobody rapes people on the main street.). He enters nearby store and writes in Death Note some variations of the name of one of the thugs who was idiot enough to introduce himself to the victim. As a death cause he writes “Death by Accident” and in some time “poor” Shibuinaru Takuo is hit by the truck. Meanwhile, Ryuk tells his colleagues that he lost his Death Note in human world and that he is going there to look for it.

We see how Light returns home and shows his mother the national practice exam results where he was first (He is genius, is not he?). He walks to his room and opens Death Note already filled with many names. When mother asks him if there is anything he needs, he answers negatively and thinks to himself that he already has everything that he needs. Suddenly someone tells him, that “He seems to like it” and when he turns he sees Ryuk standing in his room. From their conversation, we study, that Ryuk is a former owner of this Death Note, and that in the past, there already was some incidents when Death Notes were found by human, but no one of them managed to do so much in 5 days, and also that Ryuk is not going to do something “bad” to Light (What a pity, as a Shinigami he must have a good imagination and I hoped he can think of something interesting :( ) because when Death Note lands in human world, it becomes part of the human world and so now it belongs to Light. The only thing is that after Light’s death, Ryuk will write his name in his own Death Note, and that human who used Death Note can’t go either to hell or heaven. Suddenly Light’s mother knocks at the door and brings him some apples. Light is surprised that she can’t see Ryuk, but Ryuk tells him, that he is only visible to the new owner of his Death Note. Light asks him why did he choose him, and while chewing apples, Ryuk tells Light, that he did not choose him, he just dropped Death Note and it could be found by anyone else. On a question of why he dropped it, he explains, that he was just bored. On his part he asks Light, why has not he written any death cause in the Death Note, and gets the explanation, that in this case, victim dies of a heart attack, and so someone sooner or later will notice, that many criminals die form hear attacks and soon the whole world will know that there is someone who is “passing righteous judgment” on “bad guys”. The reason for this is that Light was bored too (what a surprise, heh…) and so decided to clean the world and become the God of a new, clean world for good people. Ryuk tells him, that in this case, only bad guy left will be Light, but gets the answer, that Light is not a bad guy, he is a “serious, straight-A student, possibly the best in Japan”. Ryuk likes it, and says that human are fun.

Impression: Well, well, well… To my great surprise, I liked this series. The animation is good, the music is just right in the right scenes, and characters are voice very good. The plot seems to be interesting too, and by this time, there was only one thing that surprised me - Why this genius, “possibly the best in Japan” student, who knows English much better than me writes all this kanji name variations in the Death Note??? I do not think Note is language-dependent and would not it be much faster to write “Shibuinaru Takuo” in English, than to try to guess how it is written in Japanese? Anyway, maybe it’s just me, used to Georgian, were all word are written exactly as pronounced :).