Yeah, it's one of the animes I've actually finished since it's pretty short compared to most animes, lol. It's pretty good, I still really liked it even after a *someone* died. I love N. <3 However, it's very far from "the best anime". It became very overrated quick. Now I haven't watched and finished much anime myself, but I would suggest watching Elfen Lied. Now that's the best series I've seen.
Also, any "American" remake is shit. They casted Zac Efron as Light. Usually, I love Zefron, but it's definitely going to be crap. More than likely the whole cast will be white and overly cheesy somehow. I've actually signed a few petitions against the remake. Guess it didn't work, not that I really thought it would, lmao. I wish they would just leave it as it was, not keep beating a dead horse.
Actually, by regular anime standards, Death Note is one of the longer ones. The vast majority of animes are 26 episodes or shorter. The short length is one of the main reasons why I love anime so much. And I bounce back and forth on my opinions on N. As for Elfen Lied, I have quite a bit of negative things to say about it but I'm not going to bother getting into that one (I'll be here all day). Will say that the dub is one of the worst I ever heard, the acting in it is cringe-worthy for about 83% of the cast. Kouta and his cousin were probably the worst offenders.
Not sure this applies to every American remake, at the very least I'm holding out hope that the Monster live-action HBO series will be very good. But with Death Note, oh god yes I agree that this will be shit. Honestly though, this is the kind of trainwreck I can get behind. As a critic at heart, I'll have a field day with that one.
Anyway, as for Death Note, it's a very solid series. I want talk on forever like I usually do but I want to give my thoughts on a few things. Firstly, L is one of my favorite characters ever and I want to take the time to say that Alessandro Juliani's performance as L is one of the best voice acted performances I've ever heard and far superior to the more monotone monologue that the seiyuu gives. Juliani's performance has so much nuances and little quirks in it, his delivery is just amazing and in general he just perfectly encapsulates L's character far better than anyone can. His delivery is just so awesome. Light's also a really good character and I enjoy several other but they're not important enough to get into. The show was very clever, it perfectly utilized it's cast (even if it did have a habit of just adding in characters as a way to advance the plot, but it was only a real problem near the end), L's characters, a lot of the Light's plan and what I liked about it was none of the mind games or plans ever came off as bullshit. My brother disagrees with me on one but he won't listen to reason so his opinion doesn't count.
Visually the show always looked good but due to its nature it was very stagnant in movement but it wasn't they had a field day. Making the mundane seem awesome (eating a potato chip has never been more epic [though the score had a lot to do with that too, which was great by the way]). Which also bring up another point, the show was actually pretty funny when it wanted to. I didn't go into Death Note expecting to laugh but I laughed quite a bit watching this, mostly because of L or even Ryuk but yeah it was funny. Save for the last episode or two, the last batch of episodes unfortunately become an incredibly dull show. The luster was all gone, the adding characters to advance the plot started getting to a bit of problem and some characters who you'd think would be prominent are relegated to a couple short scenes that don't really contribute much to the overall plot in the span of the ten-eleven episodes. One of the reasons why that "arc" sucked was because in the manga both the first and second "arcs" got roughly the same amount of chapters but in the anime the first got 25 and the second got 12. But even if it got a similar amount, I don't think it would be any better honestly, I think it just would've been an elongated hell.
I was going to get into spoiler talk but I did say this wasn't going to go on forever, so I'll just stop now and maybe pick up on it later.
