Does the Death Note anime end differently from the manga?

Both versions end where they must: the Yellow Box warehouse, Near's trap, the notebook that does not work, Light exposed. Matsuda shoots him in both. From that moment the two endings part, and they part over a question of dignity. The manga keeps Light in the room. Wounded, cornered, he unravels in front of everyone: he orders Mikami to write, and Mikami, his most devoted believer, looks at the bleeding man on the floor and renounces him, shouting that he is not a god. Light begs Ryuk to save him by writing the others' names. Ryuk, in the room, in front of the task force, refuses, and writes Light's name as promised on the day they met. Light dies there, pleading, while everyone he tried to rule watches.

The anime lets him run. Mikami, instead of renouncing Light, stabs himself with his pen, and in the confusion Light escapes the warehouse. The episode follows him alone through the evening streets, his life crossing his mind, a vision of his younger self passing him on the road, until he lies down on a staircase in an empty building and dies quietly as Ryuk, watching from a distance, writes his name. The anime also gives Misa a final image the manga never drew: standing on the edge of a skyscraper roof, in silhouette, as the news reaches the world. Where the manga closes one year on, with Kira's cult holding a candlelit vigil in the mountains, the anime ends at the staircase.

Neither ending changes the verdict; both are Ryuk's hand and a heart attack. They change the sentence's delivery. The manga's ending is a public execution of the god persona, staged so that every witness, and the reader, sees the man underneath beg. The anime, made by Madhouse under director Tetsuro Araki, chooses the lonelier cut: Kira dies unwitnessed, almost peacefully, and the god dies of privacy. Which is crueller is the argument the two versions have been having since 2007.