Disaster Report: Angel Tales
There are many reasons behind what shows I choose to cover for Disaster Report. Sometimes it may be due to its distasteful, even controversial content. Perhaps it's because the show is poorly produced or adapted. Occasionally it's because a show has a reputation for badness.
Sometimes, though, you just randomly come across a show with a premise that demands you watch it, if simply to verify that such a thing actually exists. That's the situation I found myself in when Anime Herald editor and bad anime connoisseur Samantha Ferreria brought up a long-forgotten harem series from 2001. From the moment I heard the premise and saw its immensely cheap and shoddy opening, I knew I had to review it.
After all, how could I resist a show about a hapless loser who gets a harem of girls who are both guardian angels and reincarnations of his dead pets with a dopey, childish title like Angel Tales?
The peak of Mutsuki's career just so happened to coincide with a boom in harem anime. While they had seen an uptick in popularity after the success of Tenchi Muyo, they got a major boost in the late 1990s once dating sim games like Tokimeki Memorial and Sakura Wars became big hits on popular gaming consoles. Compared to something like Tenchi, they tended to be more high-concept and supernatural, as well as more soothing and nurturing in nature. By the end of the 90s, more and more of them were getting adapted into anime, so it's only natural that someone would try to make this process work in reverse.
Mutsuki would take all of these trends and combine them with a lot of cliches and one weird central premise for a single thirteen-episode series, ready to air in the cursed fall season of 2001. He had every reason to believe that Angel Tales would continue his streak of successes, as well as serve as the beginning of a proper multimedia franchise. They were already hard at work on a dating sim adaptation for the PlayStation, and during the show's release they would heavily advertise the show's website and the gag manga hosted upon it. Looking back, I wonder if all the focus on building that franchise took away effort that should have gone into the show it revolved around.
Right away, Angel Tales makes a poor case for itself by blasting you with what may be the cheapest anime opening I have ever seen. It consists of nothing but reused show clips and pans over promo art, which are set to the tune of cheap, chintzy synths as the cast chirps out some of the most thuddeningly literal lyrics this side of an 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. The rest of the show doesn't look much better than this, thanks to the fact that Mutsuki and Wonder Farm chose a studio called Tokyo Kids to animate it. Tokyo Kids was primarily known for doing in-betweens, and as we've seen before it's often a bad sign when those kind of studios try to move up in the world.
The show's animation doesn't improve much from there, despite the fact that the director had years of experience as an animator and storyboard artist. This show struggles with seemingly basic things like perspective or walk cycles. Motion is minimal and characters might appear or disappear from the frame suddenly. This was also made in the early days of digital animation, so on top of everything else there is garish digipaint and overlays for effects like rain or ripples that appear to be taken straight from After Effects. There's also the matter of the character designs, caught in the awkward stage between the harsh angles and giant widespread eyes of late 90s anime and the squishy noseless moeblobs of the 2000s. Each girl's design is mean to evoke their animal form, which some do more literally than others. None of these designs are exceptionally complex, but as the show goes on the more it struggles to keep them all on model.
Of course, people might have overlooked the lackluster animation if the story was any good, but once again Angel Tales fails on this front. It's about Goro, your standard hapless, hopeless harem lead who is as kindly as he is bland. His only distinguishing characteristics are his fondness for the harmonica and a tendency towards the worst luck possible. This changes after a chance encounter with a fortune-teller who magically alters Goro's flip phone to allow twelve pretty young angels to cross over into this world. All of them were once pets who died due to Goro's unnatural bad luck but now that they returned they all swear to protect and care for their beloved Master, so long as "protect and care" is defined as "do all the domestic work and fuss over him." I can't place all the blame on Mutsuki, though. His ideas were adapted to the screen by a young Mari Okada, who had worked on only one anime series previous to this, and she had not yet cultivated her knack for tragic character-driven dramas.
By now you may have already noticed an obvious flaw in this premise: there are too many damn girls in this harem. It takes half of the show's run to introduce all twelve of them, which leaves little room for backstory or personality beyond a single quirk. The initial wave of angels have to rediscover their memories of Goro and overcome fears from their past with his help, but as the show goes on this concept is swiftly dropped to make room for more scenes where the girls fight over who loves their Master more. Perhaps that's for the best, as their full backstories are included as extras on the DVDs. They are all comically maudlin, with each new pet dying in increasingly convoluted and tragic ways. There's also the fact that it was too hard for Okada and the animation staff to find things for all twelve girls to do at any one time. That's likely why they start having half the girls randomly transform into dolls so they can be literally put on the shelf halfway through the show.
The excess of girls and lack of style would be less of a problem if there was any sort of proper plot for them to follow. Alas, this show is so dull and toothless than it can't muster up any sort of dramatic momentum. Most conflicts are resolved within a single episode, and the rest are simply handwaved away without any sort of resolution. You might presume that since this is a harem show, the space where the plot might be would be filled instead with fanservice. You would be wrong around this as well. Despite the fact that the show shoves in both a pool episode and a hot springs episode, Angel Tales is as chaste as a grandmother's kiss. Goro seems to have no concept of sex or romance, and the girls' feelings for Goro are born more from devotion than passion. Hell, half of them are so young that they regard him more like a father than anything else, since this was made before the concept of sexualizing little sisters in anime became popular.
The only relief from the tedium comes in the form of the Saint Beasts. They are our ostensible villains, four grumpy bishonen in vaguely Chinese garb who serve as animal guardians. So much effort is put into building them up as a threat to Goro's cozy little harem, which makes it all the more ridiculous when the whole thing is solved after a brief, poorly animated fight and an extended conversation about how nice Goro is. They even briefly join Goro's harem, even if such a concept made me weep for the wacky same-sex harem show we could have been watching instead of this. They're also the only effective form of comic relief this show has. This is most evident in Episode 7, where they try to resurrect one of their members by trying to kill Goro through a fake construction job. That sounds grim, but the entire scheme is treated with the same zaniness as your average Team Rocket scheme, and when combined with some energetic direction, a stronger than average face game, and the world's lamest attempt at a crow's caw becomes the best episode in the entire series.
Even if Angel Tales had been competently made at any level, it wouldn't have been enough to save it from the scrap heap of history. It was trying to capitalize on trends that were already in flux before its premiere. Its fate had already been sealed twice: once the year before, the other in the season just before it.
It's hard for younger anime fans to comprehend how much Love Hina changed the face of harem anime. It was a sensation from the moment it premiered in the spring of 2000 thanks to the combination of Ken Akamatsu's character designs and its heavy reliance on madcap slapstick and fanservice. For years afterwards it was the show that most harem anime tried to copy, much to the detriment of the genre. Angel Tales was its opposite in every way: sleepy, sexless, and sentimental. By the time Angel Tales went to air, it was already out of fashion with the otaku.
In truth, it would have done better had it aired towards the end of the decade, when the popularity of shows like Air, Clannad, and Kanon briefly created a space once more for high-concept, melodramatic, supernatural harem shows. That's also around the same time that Mari Okada started to come in to her own as a writer, having paid her dues on everything from Hamtaro to Kodomo No Jikan. Alas, neither Wonder Farm nor Tokyo Kids lasted long enough to get to that point. Wonder Farm had gone broke in the mid 2000s after a Hand Maid May spinoff failed to take off. Tokyo Kids would shut their doors in 2008. Not even Juzo Mutsuki managed to stick around, as his last writing credits were in 2003 for Angel Tales's second season and the equally forgettable Wandaba Style.
That said, even if you were in the mood for a sappy supernatural harem series featuring people who were also animals, there was already a far better option available. The first adaptation of the popular shojo manga Fruits Basket started airing in the summer of 2001, and it succeeded in every way that Angel Tales failed. It had more distinct characters, better comedy, more complex and sincere drama, better animation (if not by a huge stretch), better music, and a far more talented director at the helm. It was an instant success both in Japan and abroad, and remained a landmark in shojo anime for the better part of two decades until it was unseated by its own full-length remake.
As for Angel Tales, it managed to sell just well enough to merit a sequel but both seasons ended up getting overshadowed by the unintended franchise that sprung from it. The Saint Beasts accidentally became the break-out stars of Angel Tales, as their good looks and the popular seiyuu voicing them gave them instant fujoshi appeal. Wonder Farm would cash in on their popularity with a six-episode OVA series in 2003, followed by two short sequels and a smattering of audio dramas. Notably, all of those Saint Beast stories distanced themselves as much as possible from their source material, complete with drastic character redesigns and stories that made no reference to characters or concepts from Angel Tales. Two years after its release, it was almost as if the show had never existed.
Angel Tales's last attempt at relevance came in 2004, when it licensed in the US by Bandai Entertainment. It's clear that Bandai didn't have much faith in it, as the dub is an amateur-sounding effort from a director best known for the legendarily awful Ikki Tousen dub. While there are a few well-known LA-based actresses in it, the rest of the cast are no-name actors whose flatness make it apparent why they remained no-names. The only person in the dub who doesn't embarrass themselves is Wendee Lee, whose energy is the perfect match for bratty bunny girl Mika. This stands in stark comparison to the Japanese voice cast, which included many soon-to-be-superstar seiyuu such as Rie Tanaka and Aya Hirano. To the surprise of no one, Angel Tales didn't sell any better in the US than it did in Japan, and the show quietly went out of print after 2006.
Angel Tales is one of those shows where the history and talent behind it is far more interesting than the show itself. It tried so hard to capitalize on trends, yet it was out of fashion before the first episode aired and has only grown more irrelevant with time. Yet it's also a curious intersection in the careers of some rising and falling stars, all of them brought together by one of the goofiest premises in anime history. It's amazing to think that I would have never known about it if not for an offhand remark from a mutual and a morbid sense of curiosity.
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