ANGEL SANCTUARY (2000)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Given the ending of this OVA series, consisting of just three half-hour episodes, I must assume that the makers had some hope of being able to adapt the whole sprawling ANGEL SANCTUARY manga-series, but that the fiscal support just was not there. The OVA series does appear to be somewhat more streamlined, so a complete adaptation might have eliminated some of the manga's draggy sections.

In my review I noted that the SANCTUARY manga was clearly aimed at teen girls with a taste for androgynous males. The art-style selected for the animation is a little more mainstream, which means that it's somewhat easier to tell the characters from one another. The protagonist is high-schooler Setsuna Mudo, who pals around with his buddy Satsuya and secretly lusts after his younger sister Sara. In the manga all three are eventually revealed to be reincarnations of angels, though the OVA focuses on how the essence of the female angel Alexiel dwells in Setsuna's form (allowing him to sometimes manifest big angel-wings). 

In a very non-canonical version of the War in Heaven, Alexiel rebelled against both God and his angels, including her brother Rosiel. She did so because she felt the angels had done an injustice to the opposing forces of the demons, and Rosiel descends to Earth with the intention of causing Alexiel to rejoin him in heaven. At the same time, two of the demons from "Gehenna" want to enlist the powers of Alexiel for their own purposes. One of these, Kurai, is a young girl who dresses like a boy, while the other, Arachne, is a male demon dressed like a female, so the OVA is without question faithful to the mangaka's affection for cross-dressing.

The three-part tale adapts the first three or four volumes adroitly enough, so far as I can recall, and by so doing it avoids one of the faults I found in the manga-series. The initial conflict of the series is that of Setsuna's transgressive feelings for his sister Sara, and her eventual reciprocation, but over time this dramatic trope tends to get lost in the manga's unending tide of similar-looking angels and demons. But the adaptation cuts off just at the point when Sara has been slain by one of Rosiel's emissaries, so that her soul is condemned to hell for her sin of incest. Setsuna is wary of being manipulated by various forces on both sides (including a phantom-entity named after the Qabalistic concept Adam Kadmon). Yet Sara is so vital to him that he swears allegiance to Kadmon in exchange for being sent to Hades to rescue Sara, and that means that his body has to be slain for Setsuna himself to become a spirit. Given that there's no doubt that he will survive the transition in some heroic fashion, this isn't the downer it might sound like, and it does have the effect of giving the transgressive love of the siblings an equally heroic vibe. Like the manga, even the shortened form of SANCTUARY is just fair on the mythicity scale though.