Guilty Crown - I can't believe it's not Code Geass!... No, wait, actually I can. Code Geass had class.
Guilty Crown is one of those shows that, from its inception and initial presentation, would be defined in its quality by how fast and loose and how tongue-in-cheek the creators intended to be with its premise. When it was initially presented to the world its description was that of a 'mild-mannered teenager given the power of the king from a mysterious woman to save Japan from an invasion', which anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Code Geass would recognise -- even the title brings to mind Code Geass, being two English words mashed together with the same first letters (but, to be fair, in the opposite order). When it came to pass that the show was also made by several of the core direction crew of Code Geass, the comparison only deepened. While the production studio (Production I.G) is different and the show was intended to run in the experimental noitaminA slot (which, admittedly, hasn't been very experimental as of late), the comparisons to Code Geass were obvious from a conceptual stage. And in our current anime industry, a slump that rewards copy-and-pasting, rethreads and instant-sell techniques over attempts at innovation, that comes together as a very non-promising first impression indeed.
But, hey, presentation isn't always everything. There is always hope. There's always the chance the writers were going to pull a fast one like in Narutaru (whose non-indicative premise or first episode completely failed to prepare its audience for what came next). Or that they would fully embrace their lack of innovation, and create a GaoGaiGar!, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann or Black Lagoon-like cheesefest, highlighting the glory of the medium when taken to its most overblown extremes. Or, heck, that they would simply be good enough writers to make people overlook that the premise is hardly the most original. Even a non-original idea can yield an extremely good show: Cowboy Bebop, my favourite show of all times, *is* nothing but repeated homages to 80ies and 90ies western and Hong Kong cinema culture.
Now, the show has come and gone in Japan, and I am here to tell you that of the above scenarios... None of them came true. Guilty Crown really fails at trying to make itself stand out as an independent production, and it takes itself so very seriously while at the same time having little in it that makes it worth being taken seriously.
Animation and Visuals: 7/10 -- Impressive use of CG and distinctive character designs, but there is no true distinction or innovation to its flash.
Guilty Crown, as expected by its production studio and its pedigree in producers, is very well-presented in the art department. The show makes use of many vibrant colours and shiny special effects, especially from all the totally-not-magic-its-all-science effects thrown around. The inevitable giant robots (yes, we knew there would be giant robots) move with the fluidity and grace expected by its genre, and we've got guns and explosions and
scientific instant crystal formations and what-have-you. The main characters look good and distinctive, with the inevitable Unlucky Overlooked Love Interest getting the shaft for *not* having an outlandish character design, the costumes are varied if extremely dramatically overdone, and the fight scenes are slightly boring in choreography but perfectly serviceable.
Really, I have nothing outright to complain or bring up on the visuals: The animation, the art direction, the use of scenery, character designs, they look great all around even if they're not *terribly* outstanding in that we've already seen futuristic worlds and robots and special effects and outfits that look like they belong in a red light district before in practically every show of the same genre. It's just a pity they're being used to visualize *this* show, which makes my bad humour rub off on the animation direction by sheer guilt of association and causes a lot of unnecessary fan-service I'm a couple of decades too old to appreciate any more.
Sound: 4/10 -- The voice acting is so-so, and so is the music.
Guilty Crown's music, in contrast to its over-solid visuals, is less noticeable. The music is fairly standard beat/techno-pop, with some dramatic elements being set to idol music by the female lead (who has a very dull singing voice, it must be said: How someone so lifeless in voice became a pop-hit sensation I can only attribute to the power of Because The Writers Said So). The attention paid to the audio is one of 'music needs to be there': I can sense no wish to excel, care or desire to build a strong soundtrack out of this, and as a result the music goes in one ear and out the other. Furthermore, it's just another strike on the 'lack of originality' issue: Using dramatic choirs and pianos for drama scenes is really rather passée unless you can either back it up with a really well-made soundtrack overall, to which the choir piece is another piece in a larger image of dramatic music (anime like Soul Eater and Sengoku Basara's anime did this), or you can put a new spin on it (Tengen Toppa did this by adding rap to choir music, in addition to also having a very well-made, distinctive soundtrack). Guilty Crown does neither; it just plays it all straight and creates a music underscoring I find neither memorable nor well-made.
Then there's the voicing. Guilty Crown's voicing shows much the same care and attention to the art form as the music: The main character, main love interest, all the characters are voiced mostly according to how the writers have a preconceived notion about how 'this type of character' is supposed to sound as opposed to as real people, especially given the awful dialogue they're forced to vocalize (but more about the 'characters' and their talking later), and the whole thing feels, if not actually bad, slightly artificial and devoid of any passion or creativity of note: We have the whiny main character, the Rei Ayanami impersonator, the playful cat girl voice, and so on and so on: If you found similar archetypes in earlier anime (and you will) and listened to their voice jobs, you would find no effort has been put into making these characters sound distinct from any of their forebears.
The end result is a competent but in no way impressive sound image, which I am not about to praise over much in any way.
Story: 2/10 -- Only *you* (by which we mean specifically the Chosen One main character) can save Glorious Nippon from Evil Oppressive Gaijin With Room-Temperature IQ using Psuedo-MagicScience Hax Powers of Unexplain!
And now we get to the 'meat' of the issue. Or, rather, the 'meat-textured paper mache' of the issue. The story of Guilty Crown is, to put not to fine point about it, a very fine example of how *not*, in my opinion, to do storytelling. The sins of this narrative are many-fold, only barely beating out Kurozuka in pure nonsense factor, and I will likely use too much space for comfort laying out in full about its many flaws.
On the surface, Guilty Crown's story seems simple enough: In the future, following a
totally legitimately scientific viral outbreak of mass destruction in the centre of Tokyo in an event called
Lost Christmas, an outside agency that probably is the U.N. if the U.N. had any power (and not, like in real life, rank somewhere beneath the Walt Disney Corporation on the 'international power' scale; really, come to think of it, for the sake of the story the agency might as well have *been* Disney, since their only aspect the story is interested in is that they are Foreign), who have established a repressive military regime over Japan and violated practically every known principle of national sovereignty to prevent further viral outbreaks. Naturally, these Evil Foreigners take to their role as Japanese Overlords with relish and do a lot of outright stupid evil things for the purpose of serving as series villains.
Naturally, Noble Japanese are rising up against their evil overlords, with the 'face' of the resistance being teenage idol singer Inori, who somehow manages to be the Resistance's main field operative while at the same time being a nationally famous entertainer (yeah... You think about that one for a minute). By accident, a mission goes horribly wrong and Inori ends up giving a
scientific McGuffin to a Random Japanese High School boy I shall only refer to as Shoe (mainly because using his 'real' name may end up confusing him with a character from Fist of the North Star who had some actual claim to being a genuine human being). Shoe then obtains
scientific powers that allow him to pull large, long, phallic
science objects called 'voids' out of people in ways not at all intended to resemble a sex scene (and if you think the writers won't make a rape-like scene out of it at some point, I've got a bridge and a book on anime tropes to sell you), and becomes the new
Scientific Chosen One, saviour of the Resistance, which he continues to do even as he keeps complaining loudly about his woes of being able to save the world, have
scientific powers and a soon to be Idol Girlfriend. And that is just the first episode.
Guilty Crown's story, as it is, is completely unoriginal: A hybridised bastard offspring of Code Geass and Neon Genesis Evangelion (with a dash of Eden of the East thrown in) following Shoe's ascension as saviour of Japan and the world by battling the Evil Gaijin and the
scientific evil disease which turns out to also be an alien invasion and next stage in human evolution that brings instrumentality and
scientific powers to whom the voids were an antibody made by his dead father oh and underway it is not only discovered that he was secretly The Chosen One to which the entire plot was rooted all along without even knowing it because he also had amnesia without either him or the audience knowing it but also that his dead sister (oh, and he had a dead sister. Did we neglect to mention that?) was the queen of the disease and that his noble mentor is the artificially created husband of his dead sister by his father's jealous rival and who dies and comes back to life through
SCIENCE! to marry Inori who is not only a hot mystery idol but also a
scientific ninja with a healing song who is his dead sister's clone she is trying to possess and... Really, the sad thing about this paragraph is that I'm not only *not* making any of this stuff up, but also that I've only started scratching the surface of the show's crazy.
The writers show every sign of wanting to cram as much ripped-off material as they possibly can into the narrative, leading it a badly paced and extremely confusing mess, filled with contradictions, plot holes, and events that make no sense if you take two minutes off to think about them. The Evil Foreigners are cartoonishly evil and incredibly incompetent and their plans and motivations make no sense, the noble resistance is obtuse and hilariously bounces between hyper-competent and utterly ineffectual depending on whether the story wants to show off Shoe's
Scientific Chosen One powers or not, and then the whole disease and the fate of humankind's evolution aspects start kicking in halfway through and things manage somehow to deteriorate further. To top of this sell-by-date sundae with a rotten cherry the entire narrative is focused almost entirely around Shoe, who is (in case you haven't caught that by now) not a very entertaining figure.
And then, as a final sprinkle on top of it, the writers were apparently trying to sell this whole story entirely straight. The narrative is completely ridiculous; crammed, chaotic, contrived, difficult to oversee and fails completely at plot twists, and yet not even once do the writing staff seem to think they're created anything but a completely fresh and original story that (according to interviews) they want to be the new Evangelion. The slightest bit of self-insight and an attempt to play the formula might have saved the story from being an utter rip-bore, and yet they continue wringing the contrived and utterly stupid drama, deus ex machina solutions and problems, an understanding of science that makes me angry, and stealing plot points from better shows, episode after episode. And I haven't even started going into the racist undertones, which are one of the things in this show that actually *disturbs* me: The whole initial scenario is set up as a replay of the post-WWII reconstruction but with the implication that Evil Foreigners want to oppress Noble Destiny of Japan, which frankly freaks me the heck out. Is this really the sort of underlying moral themes you want to appeal to your viewers with?
Characters: 2/10 -- A tale of two gitties.
As the story is a following of Shoe's protagonist journey to hero (read Joseph Cambell if you want more info on it), it is unsurprising that he receives the lion's share of the screen-time and the story, with Inori serving as the deuteragonist as Shoe's inevitable girfriend and
scientific McGuffin girl He Must Definitively Protect. The show lacks a true antagonist, or at least one interacting directly with Shoe, for most of its run as the Evil Foreigners are just some evil force with no personal relation to him; this eventually does get corrected but the antagonist is so dumb it doesn't help but make matters worse. The characters are almost, to a man, complete archetypes; like the story, they're all ripped out of similar works and put to work here, dancing as stolen puppets to stolen strings of the authors to stolen tunes they cannot dance to.
Shoe, for instance, is a very obvious Shinji Ikari-style antihero, only denied all the personality characteristics and interactions that made Shinji interesting. Where Shinji suffered at being the puppet to NERV's strings and intentionally kept mentally unstable by his estranged father and forced to fight inhuman monstrosities, Shoe is the Special Chosen one with a unique power and a *choice*, and yet acts like a spineless harem lead whose only vague motivation is to get inside Inori's (lack of) pants but doesn't even have the guts to admit it. Inori is an obvious Rei Ayanami rip-off, but again without the interesting part: She lacks a Gendo and has a chemistry with Shoe that can only be likened to that of a two noble gases close to absolute zero. This is especially frustrating since the show is pushing her down his throat as his soulmate and 'true love'. She comes off as vague and uninteresting, not to mention all her Deus Ex powers and jumping up and down the competency stage as the show demands it and as Shoe need to Definitively Protect his blushing soon-to-be-bride. The side cast, from the evil clown to the evil professor/administrator to the playful catgirl hacker, suffer the same problem: They're unoriginal rip-offs, and they also lack the screen time for the show to disappoint us in trying to make us think otherwise, and any attempt at instilling sympathy or the ability to care for them or anything they do fails categorically.
Most of the character motivations are missing or entirely idiotic, and most of the cast constantly act according to some secret law of drama, as if some vindictive God forced their universe to conform to drama tropes rather than actual human common sense. The dialogue comes straight off the "who even TALKS like that?" school; words and phrases that possibly sound cool in paper but once you hear them applied to any situation in real life it sounds like someone practising for high school amateur drama theatre. Stock phrases and empty banalities fill the air, joined by legions of incomprehensible technobabble and affirmations of obvious emotions, and moments of genuine human communication are near non-existent.
...Which makes it all the sadder that this is a 'near' situation. Shoe actually *has* some moments of human warmth and dialogue that makes him sound like a human being rather than as the avatar of dramatic grousing, where it seems like someone thought over that this is how a conversation could plausibly go between real people. (Of course, none of them are with Inori; the two I remember was with his mother and the wheelchair girl). This somehow makes it *worse*; it makes it all the sadder that he inevitably goes back to acting like an idiot in the very next scene when the drama calls for it. The one bright spot, the one part of this show that I will line out as almost 'good', was the Evil Foreigner commander who was not so evil the show introduced in episode 8 (and, like all things in this show that were almost good, sadly all too fleeting). He was an American, and he was called Dan Eagleman. I am not ******* making that up. And I salute you, mr. Eagleman, for even if you were almost the most ludicrous thing in this ludicrous show, you and you alone had the GUTS! to stand up and be blatant about how utterly stupid a walking caricature you were, as opposed to all the gormless caricatures who made up most of the rest of the cast. Godspeed, good sir.
Value: 1/10 -- Please, don't. Let's just refuse to give it any.
Let me just be very blunt: Guilty Crown is neither clever, nor innovative, nor memorable or special in any way. It is a show that repeatedly and shamelessly stands on the shoulders of giants and then urinates on their heads. It steals plot points and elements in the very worst fashion without even realising why those plot elements worked in the the shows it took them from, and thus fails to understand why this is no longer the case here. And, as a final kick in the face, tries to take itself seriously and present itself as innovative and truly dramatic even as it has so egregiously failed at it, due to the above infractions. Its originality is best expressed with a negative value, and its re-watch value as a number so close to zero it can only be found on a 200-decimal logarithmic scale. I have absolutely nothing, nothing, good to say on it on the value front.
Enjoyment 2/10 -- There may be some found in laughing at how dumb it were. Alas, that pleasure is for those more good-humoured than myself.
Guilty Crown is a show I found so dull and dreary I went out of my way finding plot holes, contrivances and nonsensical elements and violations of science I could rip it apart from, and yet even now I feel I have fallen weary, oh so weary, at having to think of them and more to the point to annoy you, my dear viewers, with my continued grousing of it. Guilty Crown was a failure in making me care about anything in it, story, character, music or visuals, and the very core of its being falls apart at the most minute of scrutiny. There is close to no redeeming factors to it; while I am sure there are those who could find enjoyment in laughing at how overblown it was I cannot, and the writers probably wasn't intending for the show to be seen that way either.
Total: 3/10 -- Well, I for one feel a little guilty for having suffered my way through this, so that may have been the connection they were trying to make.
Would a summary even be necessary at this point? I think that, at this point, you've got my message. Guilty Crown is bad. We're not just talking the 'took the show in a wrong direction' bad of Code Geass R2, or the 'we failed to invest the proper amount of dramatic tension and character focus' of Star Driver. It's more like combining both of those problems with 'we had no idea what we were doing in the first place' of Kurozuka and 'we want to sell things on surface trivialities' of shows like K-ON!.
But, really, the writers of this show wouldn't have made any of those concessions, and that's the *real* tragedy behind this show. Not the utter boorish mess this turned into, but that behind it there are people, real people with real jobs, who thought they were making something new and impressive here and have created a good show. Because from where I stand they have failed, *utterly*, and I would like to disabuse them of this notion. Because there may be some real talent behind this show that could only get better by becoming a little more meta and a little more aware of their failings. And because I don't want the Japanese anime market to become a macrocosm of this show, shameless rip-offing mired in fanservice and two-bit drama some of my friends in middle school could have outdone.
And I really don't want a further promotion of the racial/nationalistic implications this show is mining its initial story path with. Because if this is an indicator, or a promoter, of what Japan wants to think of outlanders, especially in their current socio-economic situation, we may be headed for some *real* trouble our way in a decade or two. And that's something even this show doesn't deserve to have its legacy be a part of.
