… but they condensed this from a manga with 10+ plus volumes to a mere 3 episodes. Artwork is stunning as Kaori Yuki could be. Without her imagery, one cannot see how angels, usually depicted as the kindest of creatures, could ever be vain and vengeful and yet still beautiful. Stunning irony, isn’t it?

But wait. Before you see this anime, you have to understand that this one is dark. If you’re expecting holiness, you’ll see instead — genocide, wars and incest — things that are sacrilege even! To understand this anime, you must think in the same way some anime are created where some people exist in different worlds or dimensions with their own rules and problems. That is the concept of Angel Sanctuary. Angels here belong to a separate dimension. It is based on Christian concepts but it’s as though some anime took Norse Mythology and used that as a foundation. So the angels and “God” you know here are not the same as the Christian ones. The philosophical stuff may shake your beliefs but given this premise, that should not be the case. It’s simple as taking off from the human realm to the realm of these angels. Take note of that. Not the real angels or the real God.

Character design is very well done. You have a hodge-podge of characters where all of them are just DARK. Yet, there is variety in the darkness, if you will. If you’ve seen one twisted one, you’ll see another one who’s more twisted. And the villains you expect are not the evil ones you thought. Setsuna Mudou, as a character, is someone you’ll feel compassion for. Greatly! Though he’s done completely sacrilegeous things, he is your hero. That’s how good and unpredictable this is.

But why, why why did they have to put something good in just 3 episodes? The things has been condensed so bad, it’s just like getting 3 episodes and they ran out of money to produce the rest, that’s all they showed. That’s how hanging it is. So if I were you, I’d rather read the manga. Unless you want to see for yourself how it will look with the sequences of course.

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NOTE: This review was written sometime in 2001 and was recorded in the classic Otaku Fridge as ??.??.2001. Unfortunately the database would not accept non-numerical values, so this review is now dated January 01, 2001 by default.

Individual Rating: Art/Animation 10; Story 5; Characters 9; Sounds 8

This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2001 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Angel Sanctuary, Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.