Cover Art

Credits

Director: Tetsuro Araki Screenplay: Takeshi Obata, Tsugumi Ôba, Toshiki Inoue Country: Japan

External Links

Death Note tells of a young student named Light, who finds a book labelled 'Death Note' which contains several rules, and a long list of people's names and how they died. The rules in the book are simple: write the name of a person, whose face you can picture, and how they will die, and 40 seconds later that will be their fate.

Light experiments with the book and starts a killing spree of criminals he sees on TV or on internet news sites, and is soon visited by a creature named Ryuk, who is a Shinigami, a race of extra-dimensional monsters who extend their lives by taking the lives of others. Ryuk tells light that the Death Note belongs to him, and that he deliberately dropped it in the human world to see what a human would do if he had the power of death in this way. Light makes it quite clear to Ryuk that his intentions with the book are thus: he will kill every evil man or woman on the planet and create a utopia, where he will be the God ruling over the lives of every human, with no adversity to any decision he makes.

Ryuk is amused by Light's declaration, and even more so when he discovers the police decide there is a killer on the loose: all of the sudden all these criminals are dying without warning, so someone must be behind it. Light thinks he is safe, and even noticed that he is referred to as 'Kira', a Japanese bastardisation of the English word 'killer', on several websites who declare him to be somewhat of a hero for cleansing the worlds of these types… but the police aren't happy, and employ the mysterious 'L' - a highly intelligent reclusive investigator who, through various wily means, starts to narrow down his search for the one committing all these murders…

'English Voice Actor Behind The Scenes Footage' is a series of interviews with voice actor Brad Swaile (Light) and the English Dialogue Director Karl Willems. The interviews take place of the first day of recording and it is interesting to see how the actor believes the character will end up. This would be even more interesting after watching the last disc to see if his impressions were true!! The two discuss the ins and outs of Voice Recording for animation. I have to admit it was a nice change to see an interview with the English actor instead of one of the Japanese actors, which is what I normally seem to end up with!

'Production Art Gallery' is a series of character reference sketches.
As usual on Madman anime releases, there are 'clean' open and closing credits which of course, show the animation without the hindrance of subtitles or credits. Why? Who knows…anime otaku insist on them I suppose.