If you’re going to review Death Note, you may as well accept two inevitable outcomes. First, someone will tell you it’s the greatest anime ever made. Second, someone else will threaten your bloodline for disagreeing. Such is the burden of tackling a series that hands a moody teenager the power of God and then asks the audience whether that’s a brilliant thought experiment or the ultimate edgelord fantasy.
Based on the manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Death Note takes a deliciously simple premise – write a name in a notebook and that person dies – and stretches it across 37 episodes of moral grandstanding, psychological warfare, and increasingly baroque mind games. It’s part crime thriller, part supernatural horror, part philosophy seminar conducted by hormonally unstable geniuses. And somehow, despite (or because of) its excesses, it became one of the defining gateway drugs for a generation of Western anime fans.
This is a show that wants to interrogate justice, divinity, corruption, and the human condition. It also wants to show you a demon with a permanent grin dropping apples and cackling at all the horrible deaths. Whether that cocktail produces high art or high cringe is exactly what makes it worth dragging back into the light.
We follow high school student Light Yagami (fucking hell), whose world is changed when a mysterious book, the eponymous Death Note, is suddenly plonked in front of him. That’s also the term I give to all the passive-aggressive notes my wife leaves me around the house. This book has the ‘Rules of Death’ written inside, outlining that it can be used for murder if the user writes the victim’s name inside of the book whilst imagining their face.
As Light discovers the book’s power and decides to use it to cleanse the world of evil – like a murderous Barry Scott armed with weaponised Cillit Bang – he also meets the ancient forces behind this deft manipulation over the mortal realm. What’s that? Ryuk, a God of Death, gave Light the notebook for shits and giggles because he was bored? Never fucking mind then.
If you think that the concept sounds like Dexter for the neckbeard generation then you’re quite right. Dexter Morgan’s vigilante murder spree may have been a power fantasy but at least it showed you needed to be hard as nails, loaded, and crazy prepared in order to pull it off. Death Note, in comparison, is the ultimate power fantasy because you don’t even need any of that.
You can practically become a God with power over life and death whilst sat down on your arse and writing down a few angry words. No wonder the weeaboos love this series: just replace the Death Note with the internet, and criminals with film directors and you get a good idea of the sort of nightmarish dystopian world we’d have if weeaboos had this sort of power.
Think about it. Remember all that weeaboo saltiness a few years back when Adam Wingard did a live action version of Death Note? It was alright. Nothing special and ultimately forgettable. But consider the source material: Wingard was adapting a manga, it’s hardly Ulysses. A reasonable stance, but one which did nothing to stem the tide of angry neckbeards and their love pillows as they sent death threats to Wingard.
Ask a weeaboo what he thinks the worst thing America has ever done to Japan is, and he’ll probably respond that it was casting the white Scarlett Johansson in that live action Ghost in the Shell movie.
Death Note is a strange beast. On the one hand you have the usual inappropriately upbeat J-Rock intros (if you watch anime this, like herpes, is just something you’ve got to live with), everyone’s a teenager but making sweeping changes to the world, there’re convoluted ‘highly intelligent’ plots, and an emphasis on high school. But on the other hand we’re dealing with good vs evil, the morality of killing ‘those who deserve it’, power, ambition, the human condition, and an examination of what makes a God.
It’s almost childish the way Death Note explores its larger themes: which I suppose is the actual point considering Ryuk deliberately gave the book to a minor knowing what chaos it would cause. But the main themes, complex as they are, are definitely presented in a pluralistic good versus evil manner. This isn’t helped by the fact that whilst the evil is represented by the morally complicated Light, the good is represented by L: a character who embodies the worst excesses of anime. He’s a thumb sucking, teenage ponce who just so happens to be the world’s foremost criminal investigator. Armed with nothing but weaponised autism.
The series is 37 episodes long, and wears its heart on its sleeve from the very moment Light decides to use the notebook. There’s no getting round the fact that Light is going to get caught. Light’s capture is presented as an inevitability – from episode 2 the series largely revolves around how far Light is willing to go to avoid capture by L, an investigator who makes Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Sherlock Holmes look normal. And boy are there some magnificent schemes on display – one brutal scheme in particular involves Light’s missus in a manner which makes the plot of the Saw films look reasonable in comparison.
If anything, the scheming and the general plot get a little convoluted. What starts as a simple morality tale about a teenaged boy playing god, turns into an international thriller with multiple Death Notes and several different Gods of Death. Which I admit must be crushing: it’s like being told in a MMO that “only you can save the world”. You know full that other random Johnnies are doing the same, but you can’t help but feel a little sad knowing that pubescent Japanese girls are just as effective as you.
Most of the horror comes from the fact this baby-faced murderer is all too willing to kill, provided he has time for his home work. Granted most of the people he kills are the sort of people who are beyond deserving it, but it’s still a little disconcerting how eager he is for murder.
Of course there are the Shinigami, Gods of Death, which bring the creepier aspects of Japanese spiritualism into the mix; they look absolutely terrifying, as monstrous demons which inhabit a Gothic realm. But even that can’t beat the horror of a Japanese schoolkid writing passive-aggressive messages in his notebook.
As far as serious anime goes (so no Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z), Death Note is up there with Berserk, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Ghost in the Shell, as ones even non-anime fans should know. By serious anime I of course mean that the actors chew over every piece of dialogue as though they’re being asked if they’d rather fuck their mom or their dad.
Death Note remains one of the most intellectually intense anime series ever made. The cat-and-mouse dynamic between Light and L is the kind of writing that makes you question the very nature of justice and who gets to define it. Yagami’s descent from idealistic vigilante to something far darker is handled with a subtlety that still rewards rewatching all these years later. The series really pioneered a certain kind of psychological thriller in anime that still influenses a lot of what comes out today. A great pick for a review!