Cartoony is not a word I'd ever thought to use...everything's very dry and flat emotionally; almost all the humor comes from the art--by the way, I think if Ohba had been paired with any less skilled and imaginative an artist than Obata, Death Note wouldn't have become a phenomenon--everybody's very hollow. I guess one way of describing that is as cartoony.
The criminals are cyphers, yeah, they don't even get to die onscreen, and they're never invoked as anything other than summaries of their crimes. They're not characters or even victims, just the poorly articulated idea of the stakes in a game between L and Light.
The real-life complications of mysterious, mass vigilante killings are vaguely gestured at (the use of fear as control, the Kira supporters), but not explored in depth, and the death penalty is never debated. And it should be, because the premise Light is working from is deeply flawed and the reasons for (at least initially, back when Kira had only ever killed criminals and not expanded to FBI agents) trying to stop Kira are inadequately explored without some serious on-screen attention to the death penalty--the justifications for and also the failings of the death penalty and for the modern criminal justice system. It's arguably a flaw that the style of Death Note is actually very dry and emotionless, energized mostly by the way it's depicted, and not by any real feeling in the writing, but what I think is more important than that it has no emotional depth is that it has no intellectual depth.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2008-05-23 05:15 pm (UTC)The criminals are cyphers, yeah, they don't even get to die onscreen, and they're never invoked as anything other than summaries of their crimes. They're not characters or even victims, just the poorly articulated idea of the stakes in a game between L and Light.
The real-life complications of mysterious, mass vigilante killings are vaguely gestured at (the use of fear as control, the Kira supporters), but not explored in depth, and the death penalty is never debated. And it should be, because the premise Light is working from is deeply flawed and the reasons for (at least initially, back when Kira had only ever killed criminals and not expanded to FBI agents) trying to stop Kira are inadequately explored without some serious on-screen attention to the death penalty--the justifications for and also the failings of the death penalty and for the modern criminal justice system. It's arguably a flaw that the style of Death Note is actually very dry and emotionless, energized mostly by the way it's depicted, and not by any real feeling in the writing, but what I think is more important than that it has no emotional depth is that it has no intellectual depth.