Angel Heart – 03

Short Summary:
Having sensed something was wrong, Ryo returns to the Cat’s Eye just after Glass Heart ran out. Somewhere in the city, Glass Heart starts experiencing flashbacks of Kaori’s times with Ryo. They force her once again to think about the XYZ message board, but she struggles to figure out where it is. While sitting in an alley, she’s approached by an old man who just happens to mention it. After forcing the information out of him, she hurries there and sees an outline of Kaori outside. She walks into the station and sees the green board. But when she reaches over to touch it, her hand goes through it. We learn that it’s now gone; what she saw was an illusion. Glass Heart faints, but Ryo is there to catch her. He saw the XYZ she had carved into the ground before and had hurried to the train station. He leaves her in the care of a doctor (who turns out to be the same old man Glass Heart got the message board information from) who is very surprised to find that she has a large scar on her chest. That night, Glass Heart wakes up hearing the sound of the typing in the next room. She grabs a scalpel as a weapon and approaches the door, but Kaori stops her. The two finally introduce themselves to each other: Makimura Kaori and Glass Heart.

Episode three covers chapters seven through nine of the first volume. They add into this episode the Lee Taijin scene that I noted had been absent from last week’s episode. Aside from that, there are only some minor dialogue omission differences. The animation looks good, but is starting to show some quality loss: there’s a couple of shots that look a bit choppy. The music is still consistently superb at creating the right mood for a scene.
The XYZ board is a prominent symbol from City Hunter. The legend is that if you have a problem needing to be solved, write XYZ on the board and City Hunter will come help you. And so here, Glass Heart goes looking for the board in order to track down Ryo. And she finds it, and Ryo finds her, but unfortunately, their paths are not yet the same. Not knowing who she is, Ryo leaves her behind in the clinic, and Glass Heart isn’t going to stay put for long. It’s a lot of moving back and forth as our two main characters come really close to seeing each other multiple times, but always manage not to (and in Ryo’s case, he doesn’t know that she has Kaori’s heart). I found the contents of this episode a bit on the boring side, but next week should be a little more interesting.

Closing Thought: I can’t help but be amazed at how clean this series is. The way the raw looks mirrors almost DVD quality, which is pretty unprecedented for a TV airing (HDTV or not).