{Lighty Lively}

Death Note Episode 1: Rebirth

October 7, 2006 on 1:15 am | In Anime Review, Death Note |

Opening Sequence
Theme: the WORLD
Vocals: Nightmare

Awesome opening sequence; it’s like X all over again. The lack of color continues into the episode, which I suppose is appropriate for such a title. It looked as if the camera was rattling throughout. The animation depicted a red-eyed Light, upping his Creepy Factor™ entirely, and a blue-eyed L for contrast. I like how the classical painting of The Creation of Adam was turned into Ryuk passing the apple of temptation to Light.

The Shinigami Ryuk grows bored of the dreary Shinigami world, so he drops one of his Death Note[book]s in the human world…
Yagami Light is a seventeen-year-old high school student and also bored of the corrupted world he lives in. He resents the fact that the world is going to ruin while all he can do is stand by and watch.
One day, he sees a black notebook falling from nowhere outside of his school building. He goes out and retrieves it after school and finds ‘Death Note’ written on the cover. Within the notebook, instructions on how to use it are written in English. Light scoffs at the absurdity of the first rule, “The human whose name is written in this note shall die”, but he ends up taking the notebook home.

Light translates the rules of the Death Note one by one in disbelief.
“This note will not take effect unless the writer has the subject’s face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.”
“If the cause of death is written within 40 seconds of writing the subject’s name, it will happen.”
“If the cause of death is not specified, the subject will simply die of heart attack.”
“After writing the cause of death, the details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds.”
Light sees a live report on a preschool hostage crisis on TV and decides to test out the Death Note by writing down the hostage-taker’s name, Otoharada Kuro. Forty seconds later, the criminal drops dead and people come rushing out of the school. The news reporter goes ballistic over the sudden turnabout of events, and Light is shocked.

Light tries to convince himself that the death is merely a coindence and packs the notebook into his bag for cram school. At school, he once again observes how horrible people can be but refrains from using the Death Note on his classmates, since too many petty people like them exist. On his way home, Light sees a motorcyle gang sexually assaulting a woman and writes down the name of the gang leader, Shibuimaru Takuo, in the Death Note, with the cause of death being traffic accident. Moments later the woman breaks free from her attackers and dashes across a street. The gang leader chases her on his motorcyle and immediately collides with a passing truck. Light realizes that the power of the Death Note is for real.

Several days later, Ryuk decides that it’s time for him to visit the human world and flies into Japan on a rainy night.
Light returns home from cram school and hands his mother his mock examination grades, in which he got 1st place again. His mother asks him if there’s anything he’d like, and Light replies no, because he already has what he wants: the Death Note, now filled with pages of names. Light laughs maniacally at his accomplishment until Ryuk suddenly appears and frightens Light so much that he falls out of his chair. Ryuk tells Light that he is bound to show up as the owner of the notebook.
After Light regains his composure, he corrects Ryuk by saying that he’s not surprised by but rather, has been waiting for the Shinigami. He then asks Ryuk about what is to become of him for knowingly using the Death Note, like, would his soul be taken away.

Ryuk says that he won’t do anything to Light and the notebook now belongs to him as the property of the human world. If Light gives away the Death Note to someone else, then he’ll lose all of his memories related to it. The only punishments for using the Death Note are the distress and terror that it brings to the user, that Ryuk gets to write Light’s name into the notebook when he dies, and Light won’t go to either heaven or hell.
Light’s mother interrupt the conversation to bring her son a basket of apples, but she fails to see Ryuk. Only people who have touched Ryuk’s Death Note can see or hear him. Light asks Ryuk why he was chosen, but Ryuk explains that it was a coincedence and he dropped the notebook merely because he was bored with the Shinigami world.
Light says that he wrote so many names to deliver judgment of justice because he was bored, too.
After the day when Light first used the Death Note to kill two people, he realized that the world must be purged of its corruption and he is the only one who can do so, through the Death Note.

With that, Light began looking up major criminals and suspects in the world on the Internet and TV, whether they be in jail or on the streets, and writing their names down in the Death Note from night until daybreak.

Light believes that as criminals continue to drop dead from heart attacks, the world will eventually realize that there is someone punishing people for doing bad things and become filled with only kind people as a result. Ryuk wonders if, by then, Light would be the only bad person left, but Light reminds him that he is the 1st place model student in Japan. Light is determined to become the God of the new world that he is creating. Ryuk is content to see that humans are amusing after all.

Ending Sequence
Theme: Arumina
Vocals: Nightmare

I think the last screenshot of the ending sequence above makes for a killer wallpaper (no pun intended, seriously).

Next Episode Preview

People begin crediting the sudden deaths of criminals to ‘Kira’ and build a website to honor him. Meanwhile, Light’s actions has attracted the attention of the international police force, including a mysterious entity named ‘L’.