Genre: Animation, Crime, Drama
Total episodes: 37
Run time: 24 mins
Release Year: 2006-2007
Language: Japanese
Main Characters: Light Yagami, L, Misha Amane, Ryuk, Rem, Matsuda, Near, Mellow
About the series.
This series is the story about a teenage boy named Light Yagami who finds a notebook that has the ability to kill people. A god of death or Shimigami drops his notebook in the human world. If anyone writes the name of a person while imagining the person’s face in this notebook, then the person dies. With the new found power of this notebook, Light begins to kill criminals and makes it his mission to free the world of all crimes. With the serial killing of the criminals going on, a detective named L is introduced to investigate the case. L can be considered the teenage Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes – excellent deductive skills, not so good on social skills. Light is intelligent and shrewd and so is L. The story then becomes a battle and a mind game between Light and L. The story takes many twists and turns throughout the series without ever losing track of the main story line.
Likes.
The concept of the series is very creative and the entire series is an interesting, ‘edge-of-the-seat’ watch. I binge watched this series because as soon as one episode is over, I couldn’t help but watch the next one. Even though the series is based on a single story line, none of the 37 episode ever bores you because something new and different keeps happening in the series. Even the distorted and terrifying images of Shimigamis begin to appear familiar after a while. Death note is also really funny (I don’t like cartoons that can’t make me laugh!) – thanks to L and Misha Amane! But for me personally, the best part of the series was watching the character L. L appears clumsy, his social skills are pretty much non-existent and he survives in a diet of sweets and cakes, yet he is very adorable.
Dislikes.
The cartoon is like an animated comic. There are scenes where the screen pretty much comes to a standstill with still pictures of characters shown on screen and a single voice playing in the background. It’s hard to figure out what a character is thinking by looking at their face. The ending of the series is justified, yet I felt certain characters in the series didn’t need to die. I understand that when a series is titled with the word ‘death’, deaths are inevitable. Yet to rip a series from its most important character was very distasteful.
Rating.
4.5/5.0
Brief Afterthoughts 
I must admit, there is a definite tipping point in the series where the audience does get disconnected from the story and while the ending comes back strongly, it is sometimes hard to watch beyond that initial climatctic moment. That said, I loved Death Note.
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I felt the same way at that climactic moment. I kept hoping for a different ending, a twist in the plot that could reverse that moment and make everything from that moment till the climax a ploy. That didn’t happen yet I loved DeathNote anyways.
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