Death Note Review

The premise is a rules lawyer's dream and the adaptation treats it that way: the notebook's conditions are stated, enforced and exploited, so every escalation between Light and L reads as a move rather than a surprise. Madhouse's direction is where the show earns its reputation. The potato-chip sequence is a joke about how seriously it takes its own tension and it works anyway, and Tetsuro Araki stages ordinary conversations with dutch angles, hard reds and abrupt silences that make a university interview feel like a knife fight.

Yoshihisa Hirano and Hideki Taniuchi's choral, deliberately overwrought score is doing the same job. Mamoru Miyano's Light and Kappei Yamaguchi's L are the whole engine, and the series never fully recovers when that pairing ends; the final act's replacements are structurally necessary and dramatically thinner. Animation is efficient rather than lavish, spending its budget on lighting and expression instead of movement. The last stretch drags, but the first two-thirds are as tightly plotted as television gets in any medium.