Revisiting D.N.Angel 20 Years Later

Warning: Heavy spoilers for D.N.Angel ahead

It might sound hard to believe, but once upon a time (or, 20 years ago) searching Google Images with the phrase “anime phantom thief” would've given you results showing a black-winged, purple-haired “smexy bishie >w<!!!! <3 <3 <3” rather than the main cast of Persona 5. That smexy bishie is Dark Mousy: one of the main characters—the titular angel—of a somewhat popular early-2000s anime called D.N.Angel.

Simply put, everything about D.N.Angel feels like it was pulled from a How to Draw Manga book that you could've found at your elementary/middle school's book fair. And I love that.

I realize that's a bit of a strong way to open up a D.N.Angel retrospective, and that it might not even mean much of anything to some readers. So let me try wording that a bit differently:

D.N.Angel is the physical manifestation of something that people in the 2000s who didn't know much about anime could've seen with their mind's eye if you asked them, “What do you picture when I say, 'anime?'” And watching it for nostalgia's sake in 2023—20 years after its release—that makes it extremely charming.

Based on the manga of the same name by Yukiru Sugisaki, D.N.Angel follows 14-year-old Daisuke Niwa, whose family is cursed to transform into the suave phantom thief named Dark and steal magical works of art. He does this partially through good old-fashioned stealth, and partially with help from his familiar With (who appears on the surface to just be the Niwa family's adorable, snack-loving pet rabbit) who can transform into a massive pair of black wings on which Dark can fly through the night sky like a goth angel. Unbeknownst to Daisuke, his mother, and grandfather have been training him his whole life to be a phantom thief—in fact, about halfway into the first episode is a scene where Daisuke comes home from school, and has to dodge his mother's onslaught of cartoonish traps before he can sit down and relax. So while he's a bit reluctant at first, he quickly finds himself adjusting to his new life.

But of course, there's more to the curse than just instant bishie-fication. Daisuke's transformations into Dark trigger when his heart gets all aflutter when he thinks about his “sacred maiden”—or, essentially, the girl he likes. At the beginning of the series, this is Risa: a cheerful girl in Daisuke's class who just so happens to have a massive crush on Dark. Though by the end of the series, Daisuke ends up with her tomboyish twin sister Riku. Contrary to what you might expect (especially since this feels like low-hanging fruit for a narrative involving twins) it's not that Daisuke realizes that Riku is actually the one he liked all along; rather, it's that as the series progresses, Daisuke gradually falls out of love with Risa (whose increased romantic involvement with Dark breaks his heart more and more), and in love with Riku.

But Risa and Riku aren't necessarily without rivals. Satoshi Hiwatari (though his original name is Satoshi Hikari), a prodigy who's already graduated college and is now a police commander intent on catching Dark. He also has a homoerotic friendship with Daisuke, complete with a CPR scene. But the prospective pairing of Hiwatari and Daisuke is more like a sort of pseudo-Romeo and Juliet than anything else. Satoshi comes from a family of artists called the Hikaris, although he's been adopted by the 26-year-old police commissioner. And similarly to how Dark is in the DNA of the Niwa family, so too is Dark's non-edgy counterpart, Krad, in the DNA of the Hikari family—and yes, “Krad” is just “Dark” spelled backward.

Unlike Dark, Krad isn't satisfied by simply stealing works of art; every time Krad and Dark encounter one another, it isn't long before a magical fight between the two breaks out. And just as Daisuke is currently the Niwa family member turning into Dark, Satoshi is currently the Hikari family member turning into Krad. But unlike Daisuke and Dark, who largely seem to get along, Hikari seems to hate Krad and constantly resists the urge to transform into him. Krad and Dark are eventually revealed to be two halves of a piece of Hikari-made artwork called the Black Wings that the family (unsuccessfully, thanks to the Niwa family) tried to imbue with life. Their backstory/full history with each other isn't explained in much detail in the anime, and it comes off strongly as the sort of thing that's probably elaborated on much more in the manga. But alas, the anime came out in 2003—long before the manga finally wrapped up in 2021 (it spent several years on hiatus).

Also serving as a rival is Mio Hio, ostensibly an American transfer student (who doesn't wear the school's uniform for reasons unknown) who appears about halfway into the series. Loud and overzealous about her immediate love for Daisuke, Mio adds a lot of flavor and personality to the series. She's eventually revealed to be a doll being controlled by Satoshi's adopted father, who wants to use her to help him capture Daisuke/Dark. Ultimately, Mio turns on Commissioner Hiwatari, choosing to seal herself within a pendant to save Daisuke and Riku over earning her own life. She returns just in time for the ending, to try to stop Commissioner Hiwatari from unsealing the Black Wings, and wishing Daisuke and Riku—who by this point have confessed their feelings for one another—well before dying.

If what I just described to you sounds a bit confusing, it's because it sort of is. While the series begins as a light-hearted romantic comedy with supernatural elements, toward the end it pivots into being more of a supernatural action anime that's more focused on the history of the Hikari and Niwa families, Dark and Krad's conflict, and Commissioner Hiwatari's attempt at unsealing the Black Wings. D.N.Angel is mostly episodic, with only a few things carrying over into the following episode(s) until the last stretch. The last few episodes hurriedly try to wrap things up, largely by way of exposition dumps (some of which raise just as many questions as they answer). It's certainly rushed, but given the incomplete state the manga was in at the time, a half-baked ending is disappointing but inevitable.

I remember quite liking this series the first time I watched it, which was at least 15 years ago. I remember feeling completely invested in Daisuke's romantic woes and thrilled watching Dark's daring heists. I remember that Dark and Satoshi were my favorite characters, and though I didn't particularly dislike anyone, I did find Mio to be somewhat annoying. I also remember thinking this anime had the most clever title in the world: D.N.Angel. You could read this as a reference to Dark being an angel in the DNA of Daisuke Niwa or Daisuke Niwa Angel. My teenage mind was blown to bits.

Rewatching the series in 2023 for this piece was the first time I've ever rewatched it (meaning that more time has passed between my viewings of this show than the time I had been on this earth the first time I watched it). So I went in with low expectations—after all, it's not exactly rare for people to find out that shows that they once enjoyed haven't aged well (whether because their tastes have changed, or their attitudes toward the subject matter in the show have shifted). But shockingly, I found that I still liked D.N.Angel quite a bit, just in different ways. For one, while I used to think of her as kind of annoying, I now see Mio as being unapologetically over-the-top, and I think she's my new favorite character. Furthermore, broadly speaking D.N.Angel is a time capsule that selectively preserved many of the most benign and charming tropes of anime in the 2000s.

This is what I'm getting at when I (lovingly) call D.N.Angel an anime that feels like it pulled everything from the early 2000s How to Draw Manga book: most of the characters are sporting spiky, technicolor hair. Everyone's eyes are huge and sparkly, and their chins are sharp and perfectly angular. There's a cute animal mascot character. There's an edgy, Hot Topic-clad emo angel with black wings. There's a lot of walking, running, and/or crying in the rain. There's more than one instance of Daisuke running to school with a piece of toast hanging from his mouth because he's running late. At the time, none of these things were particularly out of the ordinary—D.N.Angel was only one of the dozens of teenage/adolescent-targeted anime with these and other similar tropes. But watching it in 2023, it's easy to see how these same tropes could come off as pulpy, and arguably even trite to some viewers, given how stereotypical they've since become. This is what I'm talking about when I say that this show is aggressively 2000s—and for the most part, as a nostalgic viewer I find that endearing.

But this isn't to say that D.N.Angel exclusively preserved the good and conveniently cut all the problematic—just that it didn't happen nearly as often as you might expect knowing that this series is effectively an amber encasing of all things anime-clichés-from-the-late-90s-and-early-2000s. To list off the most prominent examples of this, there's a classmate/friend of Daisuke's who sells pictures of the girls in class. And Dark's age is never specified, though it can be reasonably assumed that he's pretty old, based on his being a “family curse” which even Daisuke's grandpa had; this makes his flirting with Risa (and kissing Riku) come off as extremely creepy, to say the least—that he's a supernatural being, and that he claimed that he only humored Risa's feelings for him because she happened to look like the younger version of her grandma (who Dark was in love with) are irrelevant.

While it works out for D.N.Angel more often than not, it being such an unabashed product of its time is nonetheless a double-edged sword. Where some viewers might see cute echoes of the past, others might see plots and storylines that they feel like they've already seen a dozen times before—because they very well might have. A lot of anime have come out in the 20 years since D.N.Angel. It's possible that D.N.Angel might've served to inspire certain aspects of some of the said anime. This is to say nothing of how D.N.Angel wasn't released in a vacuum; it had plenty of similarities with several contemporaries, some of whose popularity has endured. This problem isn't exclusive to D.N.Angel, it's a problem older/influential series will inevitably fall into especially if younger audiences continue to discover them, but it could easily have the potential to feel heightened in D.N.Angel's case since a lot of its modern appeal can come from a sense of nostalgia, whether it's nostalgia for the show itself or the tropes it uses.

Revisiting the series today, it's oozing of turn-of-the-millennium canned anime cheese is definitely the biggest thing it has going for it, but it'd be remiss if I made it sound like that was its only feature, good or bad. Underneath the thick coat of camp, D.N.Angel is still an entertaining anime. Not necessarily a gripping masterpiece, but enjoyable. Even taking the previously mentioned canned anime cheese out of the equation, this anime still had plenty of melodramatic elements, even by the standards of the time. There was one episode, for example, which opened with a piano about to fall on a kid, Daisuke saves the kid by pushing them out of the way and acts like his narrow escape was simple and walks away from it unaffected. But while moments like these are still captivating, it's hard to deny that D.N.Angel feels incomplete (again: no doubt this was due to the manga's being incomplete at the time) and many aspects of the story are left unexplained. But it can nonetheless scratch the itch for a light, mostly low-stakes (until the last few episodes) romantic comedy. It has a lot of interesting aspects to it that have a lot of potential—Dark's past, the twins, the Hikaris, Satoshi's relationship with his adopted father, Mio—but rarely do they see much, if any, in-depth exploration. While it seems unlikely for an anime whose presence has faded away as much as D.N.Angel's, it's easy to imagine how a Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood treatment could solve a lot of D.N.Angel's problems and make for a wonderfully bombastic anime if the studio really embraces D.N.Angel's corniest aspects, both intentional and not.

For better or for worse, D.N.Angel is firmly planted in the time it was created. And despite the popularity it used to enjoy, today—20 years after its original airing—it feels wrong to call D.N.Angel “obscure,” per se, but it certainly hasn't had the staying power that many other anime that aired even during the same year have proven to have (Planetes, Kino's Journey, and Fullmetal Alchemist to name a few—2003 was a great year for anime). I think a lot of that has to do with how relentlessly y2k this anime is. The same things that made it feel deep and exciting to middle/high schoolers in the 2000s, also have the potential to make it feel shallow and clichéd to adults in 2023. With the right mindset, D.N.Angel could be prime for cozy, nostalgic viewing for some. Others, meanwhile, might find themselves off-put by how instantly dated the show feels, or perhaps bored by how the show can often come off as cheesy, but not so cheesy that it's suited for ironic, so-bad-it's-good viewings. But overall, I'd say that D.N.Angel has mostly aged pretty well. It's not without its issues, but there's something heartwarming and earnest about it that makes it such a pleasure to keep watching. For better or for worse, it's Decisively Nested in the Aughts.