Guilty Crown (C, 79.75%)

Dear Followers,

Let’s get something out of the way first. Guilty Crown was not an excellent show. What pulled me back every week was less a desire to watch Guilty Crown and more a preference not to watch anything else. Besides Nisemonogatari, Winter 2012 was somewhat uneventful. When I first began watching Guilty Crown I was blown away by the production value. However, as the show dragged on, I became more and more aware of its insufficiency as a finished product. Before I offend anybody who really enjoyed Guilty Crown, I want to emphasize that what follows is merely my opinion.

The emotion which best sums up my feelings toward Guilty Crown is disappointment. I began watching Guilty Crown at the beginning of Winter 2011/2012. With SUPERCELL handling much of the music, Hiroyuki Yoshino, the writer for Code Geass, and Tetsuro Araki, the director of Death Note, handling the narrative, I had every reason to expect that Guilty Crown would be a phenomenal show. However, Guilty Crown is a classic example of wasted potential in an anime in my opinion.

Guilty Crown revolves around a boy named Shu Ouma in 2039 who functionally finds himself in the middle of a convoluted mess. After injecting himself with the “Void Genome,” Shu gains an ability known as “The Power of the Kings” which allows him to draw out weapons from people known as voids. With his newfound power, Shu joins a resistance group named “Funeral Parlor” which aims to restore Japan’s independence from an international organization known as “GHQ.” Nonsensical as it may seem, I actually found Guilty Crown’s backdrop very interesting. It was the execution that I had a problem with.

I like to divide Guilty Crown into three distinct arcs: Shu is a coward, Shu is a douche bag, and Shu is commendable. The first arc is quite episodic, as Shu uncovers a new void power every week and unleashes his inner shounen on a collection of enemies. While predictable, I found the first arc of Guilty Crown to be decently executed. However, with the beginning of the second arc, the narrative took a turn for the worst. Guilty Crown soon began to suffer from a bad case of taking itself too seriously.

The narrative, seeking to become more complex and dark, suddenly featured an about-face for Shu. Going from cowardly and kind to the point of stupidity, Shu becomes a douche bag dictator in the blink of an eye. Now, I understand why the writers sought to make Shu more pragmatic given what was happening at that point of the narrative, but the mood swings for each character in the second arc when everybody is holed up in the school left me baffled. Arisa actually moved from being one of my favorite characters to being one of my least favorite characters in the span of 10 minutes.

I understand that drastic circumstances can make people act in unpredictable ways, but I began to feel like individual parts of each episode were written by completely different people. The overall focus of the show began to feel very lost indeed, and instead of filling in the lingering questions from the first half of the show, a collection of plot holes only introduced a whole new myriad of questions which made the already convoluted narrative pass the threshold for comprehension.

There remain a bunch of questions which I don’t really understand. Why do you have to be eighteen or under for your void to be used? Really, Mana just became the harbinger of the next generation after she cut herself on a rock from outer space? How can Hare’s void be destroyed with a single bullet when Yahiro’s void can withstand explosions? Who is this random boy from Daath and what is his purpose in the narrative? How can the U.N. fail to eliminate a paramilitary organization in an age of nuclear weapons? Why didn’t Lost Christmas completely exterminate humanity? I could go on and on here.

That’s enough bashing on the narrative for now. While I was frustrated with the ending, I feel like it was a decent attempt at salvaging a narrative that was somewhat out of control. Even with its literary faults, I feel like Guilty Crown does a lot right as an anime. While the character personalities are not always very vibrant (Inori is actually one of the least engaging characters I have seen in anime), the character designs are fantastic. From an artistic standpoint, each character is very well drawn with a satisfying amount of flair to stand out from the mechanical backdrop palette used in Guilty Crown.

The animation ranges from bland to eye-catching, with some of the action scenes featuring vivid movement animations and explosions which allow Production I.G.’s capabilities to really shine through. However, a large collection of episodes feature static animations, and many of the fights are poorly choreographed, consisting of Shu flying across the environment destroying enemies at will without any noticeable finesses or skill. Honestly, when Shu is using Kenji’s void, he has the ability to fly across the room dodging several clips of bullets and surviving several ballistic missile level explosions.

The music is what I found to be the hands down best part of Guilty Crown. With SUPERCELL handling functionally all of the OP and ED pieces, I can confidently say that all of them are fit for download. The background music which plays when Shu is activating his inner shounen is somewhat awkward in my opinion. However, all of the music performed by EGOIST, the fictional band which features Inori as its lead singer, is fantastically sung. Specifically, “Departures ~Anata ni Okuru Ai no Uta~” and “Euterpe” are incredibly beautiful pieces.

Perhaps I was a bit harsh in my review above. Guilty Crown is not a fantastic show, but it is not an awful show. I guess I am particularly frustrated with Guilty Crown because it had everything in place: unrealistically high production value, fantastic music, an engaging backdrop, vibrant characters. However, at the end of the day, Guilty Crown failed to capitalize on its assets and became simply another forgettable shounen show for me. If Nisemonogatari isn’t your style, I would wholeheartedly recommend waiting until Spring 2012 for Eureka seveN: AO. Sigh.

Lost Christmas,
Noel