Death Note Relight: Visions Of A God (Review)
Friday, 15th January 2010, 17:20

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Extras
You get an 11-minute featurette with the Japanese cast and crew, talking about converting the series into a feature film, and how they attempted to make it more than just a re-edit. There are 4 minutes worth of promos for the feature film, and there are trailers for the Death Note live action movie, Bleach and Naruto.

Conclusion
It’s bloody pus! The recap movie is such a well-established phenomenon in anime that there are movies that do buck the trend and become more than the sum of their parts. At one extreme you have the Adolescence of Utena movie, which threw the series into the bin, and started again from scratch, and the Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex movies lie somewhere in the middle, using the existing footage to tell the same story, but from a different perspective, and with the use of creative editing offering something new for fans to appreciate. The first Death Note anime feature lies at the other extreme. This is Death Note: The Highlights Package.

I was also overoptimistic when I said that the live action movies managed to tell the story, so this anime version should manage it as well. The live action movies told the L arc of the manga storyline in 2 features. This anime adaptation tries to do it in half the length, and fails completely. Cramming 24 episodes of narrative into just over 2 hours needed more creativity and ingenuity than was applied here. Simply book-ending the notable moments of the anime with a monologue from Ryuk is no great innovation. The thing about Death Note is that it’s all focused on character and motivation. You need to get inside the heads of these people, understand their thinking, why Light picks up the Death Note and embarks on his mission to reshape the world, why Misa helps him, and why the battle of wits between L and Light becomes so compelling. Just showing the highlights of the anime and shaving the character arcs to a bare minimum, leaves you with a story that is wholly unpalatable. Light goes straight into psychopath mode in the movie, there’s no explanation as to why the investigation goes from Interpol, to the Tokyo Police, to five men in a skyscraper, indeed much of the essential exposition is dropped, leaving gaping plot holes where a story used to be.

So what is the point of this exercise then? I suppose this feature is of use to people who don’t read novels and just scan the blurb on the back of the book. I must admit that some of the new animation looks remarkably pretty. But really, this feature is just a waste of time. The second feature may have a better time of it, squeezing as it does just 13 episodes into its runtime, but really, you should just invest in, and make time for the series instead. That is the best way to experience the story.

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