Enduring more trials to prove their love and duty to Goro is true, the angels find themselves dealing with some unpleasant situations.
What They Say
Angel Tales is a variation on the popular formula of multiple magical babes pursuing an unlikely nerd. In this case, the nerd is Goro Mutsumi. As a mysterious fortune teller discerns, he’s never had a girlfriend, has no job, and is two months behind on the rent. “The Goddess” dispatches multiple guardian angels to break his string of bad luck, all of whom are the spirits of pets he once owned: Kurumi (hamster), Ran (parakeet), Tsubasa (goldfish), Tamami (cat), Mika (rabbit), Nana (dog), Akane (fox), and Ayumi (turtle). (Goro apparently kept a small menagerie as a boy.) In their eagerness to repay his former kindness, the angels squabble over who gets to protect him. Goro’s luck doesn’t change, and a mysterious gray-haired man with supernatural powers begins stalking him. This featherweight comedy will appeal primarily to adolescent girls. (Rated 13 and older: minor risqué humor and cartoon violence) –Charles Solomon
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this series brings us the original Japanese language in stereo along with the English dub. The show gets a stereo mix here that does a good job of working through the material since it’s all pretty dialogue-oriented but with some moments where it gets to stand out a bit more. The mix is good though and utilizes the forward soundstage well as the dialogue plays out and you get more characters on screen as it progresses. Dialogue is also well placed when appropriate though it’s not quite as noticeable. Overall, the dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
Video:
Originally airing back in 2001, the transfer for the first four episodes of this twelve-episode series looks very good. With as many characters as there are in here with the varying uniforms, the color palette is richly filled and there’s a great depth and solidity to them. Cross coloration is very minimal, creeping into only a few areas and aliasing is minimal in general. There isn’t a lot of action in the show and mostly just mildly moving characters so the transfer doesn’t run into many issues with the encoding. Backgrounds look great and maintain a very solid look and avoid pixelating.
Packaging:
Similar to the first cover in more than a couple of ways, this volume has three more of the angels getting some time on the cover with some nice clean and simple artwork set against a pale blue backdrop. The character designs are pretty decent and likely catch a few eyes if it’s sideways. The back cover has only one small area of shots from the show but manages to squeeze in half a dozen images. The back cover is pretty full with a two-paragraph summary and a large section of small print production credits. The episode numbers and titles are clearly listed though (along with volume numbering on the spine and front cover) and the disc extras and basic features are prominently listed. The insert replicates the artwork from the front cover and opens to a two-panel image in the same style but with a mix of some of the characters from the front cover and from later episodes. The back of the insert has a surprisingly clean and open-spaced listing of the main staff of the show and a bilingual cast list with full English credits for the actors.
Menu:
The menu layout is very simple with just a shot of Tsubasa and Kurumi together on one side with selections in using halo icons, all of which is set against a blue background and to some instrumental piece from the show. Selections are quick and easy to navigate with immediate episode jumping and fast access times.
Extras:
There are only a couple of extras on this volume. The first is another set of character profiles for the newer angels that appear in this volume. There’s a screen worth of basic data and then a few screens that talk about how they met their master. The other extra is a brief five-minute video piece that does some super-deformed comedy looks at how the series starts out and some musical numbers to it. Unfortunately, the extra isn’t dubbed and is in Japanese only with soft subtitles. It’s a mildly amusing piece but nothing terribly critical to the show as it’s basically the four-panel comics done to minimal animation.
Angel Tales continues to be a show that on some levels is really creepy. Ok, on several levels it almost hits that really creepy level but there’s just something about a guy who ends up losing so many pets over the years that he still keeps getting pets. People should be all over him if they knew about him. The other creepy level is that all of these girls, who had good experiences with him, are still fixated on him in one way or another since they died, sometimes related to how he dealt with them.
Their fixation as evidenced in the last volume led to a massive recall of these guardians back to the spirit world so that the head goddess could properly chastise them for their behavior. Goro is left without any of them there and the cell phone that he has that was used to bring them in is cracked. Separated by worlds essentially now, each of them wants to get back to the others but the girls haven’t really earned their right to be there considering how they fought against each other about who loved him the best or who was his favorite. And now, even though they claim that they’re able to work together and not fight, the goddess still can’t send them back since they can no longer transmigrate.
The end result is that when everyone is back together because it wouldn’t be a series without them together, the group has been enlarged by a few more goddesses, this time three in-training ones that are the size of grade school kids. These three aren’t as overly fond of Goro as the others are and they’re interested in playing games and doing things other than fawning over his every wish so they provide something of a break from the overly loving nature of the older angels. But they also end up bringing in a lot of childish things such as wanting to go to school, dealing with bullies, and in general just dealing with being you. It becomes all very After School Special oriented fairly quickly with these three girls and their inclusion really weighs down heavily on the show, even with a number of the angels in Doll mode for a while and out of everyone else’s hair.
A fair amount of time is spent dealing with the new angels so it’s not too much of a surprise but I really didn’t care for the three young ones at all. The older one barely made a dent in my memory, which says plenty right there. These four episodes have less of a focus on the “darker” side of their past lives and how they died than the first volume, especially since the three young angels turn the focus elsewhere and on wanting to do things, but there’s just something that feels really odd about this show that I can’t place my finger on. The cast is too big, even when they shift out at least four of the angels per episode, and Goro continues to be a fairly uninteresting character. Their attachment to his is obvious to understand and that doesn’t bother me, but I still can’t see how any of them are doing him any good. I found myself checking the countdown timer on this volume more than anything else in recent memory.
In Summary:
Angel Tales struggles to get past the events they set themselves up for in the first volume right from the start and then goes into the usual growth issues. The volume is overall much lighter in tone and less focused on the animal-pasts of each of them but more on the present, but still with just themselves and less with Goro and what they really need to do to help him out in his life. There are some good moments throughout, particularly the “fox and hound” noodles stuff and just trying to cope with dealing with humanity, but the bulk of it just really seems to fall flat to me without much life or energy to it. It’s just too laid-back even for me.
Features
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles, Text/Photo Galleries, Illustration Gallery, SD Comedy Bonus Video
Content Grade: B
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B+
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B
Released By: Bandai Entertainment
Release Date: June 8th, 2004
MSRP: $29.95
Running Time: 75 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
