Heaven's Memo Pad: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Heaven's Memo Pad: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Go ask Alice.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 1, 2012

It’s an oft repeated fact that there are depressingly few standard setups in most television dramas. There are doctors, lawyers, and cops and/or private eyes, and for all intents and purposes, that's about it for the vast majority of dramatic series. A really surprisingly few successful shows through the years have ventured very far from this proven trifecta, and as the years go on, developers seem to be more and more desperate to invest their take on any one of these three “career” tropes with something new. And so props must be given to Heaven’s Memo Pad for at least attempting to approach the detective genre from a slightly new angle. But intentions don’t always translate into outright achievement, and Heaven’s Memo Pad is a show that at least occasionally suffers from a weird lethargy where its central conceit—a bunch of high schoolers as investigators—gets bogged down in more typical shōnen conventions as it explores the adventures of Narumi Fujishima, a young man who couldn’t care less about his school life, to the point where he doesn’t even recognize his own classmates. In Heaven’s Memo Gate’s opening episode, Narumi wanders into Tokyo’s so-called “red light district” where he sees a young girl jump from a balcony on a building’s second floor. Narumi is then accosted by a weird gaggle of teens who initially think he’s had something to do with the girl’s predicament, but who are soon informed he didn’t, quickly leaving the scene with a squeal of rubber as they make their escape in a bright blue car. Sometime later at school, Narumi is accosted by manic girl Ayaka Shinozaki, who first upbraids Narumi for not recognizing her and then insists that Narumi join her in the school’s Gardening Club. It turns out that Ayaka is also friends with the gaggle of odd kids who accosted Narumi when he saw the girl jump from the balcony, and they in turn introduce him to Alice, a girl who keeps herself sequestered away in a room filled to the brim with television screens and various internet portals that allow her to investigate various nefarious goings on.

Alice is an interesting little character, a sort of childlike savant who seems at times to be emotionally unbalanced but who has quicksilver instincts that allow her to ferret out answers to Heaven’s Memo Pad’s mysteries. Peter Falk gave several interviews back in the day about his old Columbo series where as he put it “Moishe the Explainer” would show up to recount the ins and outs of each episode and detail how the crime really took place (a perfect example in this regard is Hercule Poirot’s standard summation at the close of every Poirot episode). Alice fills that role elegantly, giving succinct little overviews of what has gone before and how all the puzzle pieces fit together.

The other characters, by comparison anyway, don’t fare nearly as well, and that unfortunately includes Narumi himself, who often comes off as a kind of cipher, wandering through the adventures without a clue (literally in some cases). The supporting gaggle of investigators, all of whom describe themselves as belonging to an aggregation called NEET (Not in Employed, being Educated, or in Training, one of several similar explanations of the acronym), are fun, but not especially well developed. The Major, a young boy who walks around with toy guns and a quasi-military ambience is probably the best of this lot, while Tetsu and Hiro, despite some alleged differences, are fairly interchangeable, at least insofar as they function in any given episode. One of the best characters, however, turns out to be one of the few adults populating Heaven’s Memo Pad’s universe, namely Min, the no-nonsense owner of the ramen shop over which Alice’s apartment is located. Min is kind of like a Mother Hen to the younger characters, and she seems to have a special place in her heart for Narumi. There's also the "muscle" behind the geeks managed by Alice, in this case a quasi-militia headed by a mysterious guy with the equally mysterious moniker of Fourth.

The series takes a rather adult look at several subjects, including a number of episodes which deal with everything from teenage prostitution to drug abuse. Alice’s psychobabble at the end of some episodes is kind of lamentable, but otherwise there’s a nice balance between the sometimes comedic interactions of the NEET-niks (sorry, couldn't resist) and the more dramatic elements that make up the mystery aspect of the series. This balancing act continues to be rather artfully maintained throughout the season, though real mystery buffs may not be especially impressed with the less than Agatha Christie-esque development of various plot mechanics. What gives the show its nice, if sometimes overly familiar, flavor is the group of outcasts banding together and finding their place, as epitomized by Narumi. Narumi in fact sees himself as the real outsider (he refers to his NEET cohorts as morons more than once), but the show makes it clear that all of these younger characters have their own issues and have formed their own microcosmic society to help them cope.

The series actually begins to develop some emotional heft toward the end of this twelve episode arc when Ayaka does something unexpected and potentially tragic. This sets Narumi off on an emotional journey that actually finally helps inform his character with some good, distinctive qualities and which also really invests the final few episodes with some surprising pathos. There’s a kind of melancholy that runs through Heaven’s Memo Pad at times, despite its sometimes goofy humor, and that aspect comes front and center as the series reaches its close. There’s just the barest hint of hope in a couple of quick shots toward the end of the show, one which portends toward Narumi not only having found his community but also perhaps being poised to pursue something akin to happily ever after.

Heaven's Memo Pad: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Heaven's Memo Pad: The Complete Collection is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is a very appealing looking high definition presentation, one which offers nicely sharp line detail and some beautifully saturated colors. A lot of the backgrounds here are really sumptuous, often washed in a sort of watercolor Impressionistic ambience, and the show is yet another anime that glories in the beauties of Japan's widely disparate environments, including everything from glistening cityscapes to gorgeous natural scenes of cherry blossoms pouring down around various characters. The character designs here are quite good and very well detailed, and in fact this aspect gives the series a nicely realistic ambience that pops really well throughout both Blu-ray discs.

Heaven's Memo Pad: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Heaven's Memo Pad: The Complete Collection features lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mixes in English as well as the original Japanese. Once again as has seemed to be the case lately, the English dub features a somewhat more aggressive mix that is noticeably more present on the low end especially. Both language tracks offer very clear and clean dialogue, though I personally would opt for the English simply due to its more dynamic amplitude, which also helps with regard to the series' nice music score. Fidelity is excellent and there is no damage of any kind to report in either of these tracks.

Note: You'd be well advised to have your remote handy with your finger on the pause button, as there's a lot of ancillary material that gets subtitled here, including text messages and the like, none of which lasts very long on the screen.

Heaven's Memo Pad: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animation (HD; 1:32)


• Clean Closing Animations (HD; 3:45)


• Trailers for other Sentai Filmworks Releases

Heaven's Memo Pad: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Heaven's Memo Pad: The Complete Collection offers a nice premise and some interesting characters, though quite a bit of the series seems formulaic and predictable at times, especially with regard to its depiction of a bunch of outsiders banding together to form their own little community. There's a surprisingly adult feel to several of the stories here, something that seems to be at odds with the sometimes juvenile humor that is also present in several of the NEET-nik interactions. Alice is a really interesting character, and Narumi, while a bit bland in the opening few episodes, slowly begins to reveal some nice depth and emotional resonance as the series moves on, especially once the subplot dealing with a shocking act by Ayaka sets him spinning into a decline. The show probably would have been more compelling had some of the mysteries been a bit more developed, but there's a really unusual combination of sweetness and almost sordid content that helps Heaven's Memo Pad to partially rise above its more predictable elements. This is a show that starts slowly but then becomes more intriguing as it moves along. Despite some flaws, Heaven's Memo Pad comes Recommended.