Guilty Crown

If there's anything Tetsuro Araki, director of Production I.G's newest sci-fi spectacular, is good at, it's action. Even if you were so tired of zombies that watching it made you feel like one yourself, the one thing you couldn't deny about Highschool of the Dead is that it kicked monstrous ass. Ditto the confused Kurozuka and even Death Note, whose fights were mental but dynamic and exciting nonetheless. Guilty Crown allows Araki to unleash that action beast, without giving him a chance to indulge in the self-conscious edginess that so often accompanies it. In so doing, it becomes one of his more enjoyable works to date.

The story takes place in the future, after a plague has ripped through Japan and forced it to live under the control of a multinational "relief" force known as the GHQ. Shu Ouma is a high school student in this future. He's pretty normal, if reserved and maybe harder on himself than he should be. That is set to change, beginning with the theft of a top-secret...something from GHQ. Injured, the girl who stole it takes refuge in a run-down room that Shu uses to edit videos. When GHQ thugs come for her, Shu knuckles under like a good sheep. Disgusted with himself, he takes the...something to its intended destination.

Whereupon he hooks up with some anti-GHQ guerillas and all hell breaks loose. Swords are pulled suggestively from nubile youngsters and bloody fragments of repressed memory come into it, as do genocidal mecha and one badass, flowing-haired prince. It's pretty conventional (wake up and smell the wish fulfillment!), more than a tad predictable, and pretty much awesome from start to finish. That has something to do with screenwriter Hiroyuki Yoshino, who has long experience with turning tired premises awesome (My-HiME anyone?), and everything to do with Araki. The episode's final minutes are a lesson in cinematic excess, filled with odd angles, dizzying camerawork, and slicker-than-greased-lawyers animation of glowing energies, slashing swords, burning cities, flying fists and exploding mecha. Before you watch, get a stick; you'll need it to prop your jaw back up.

Thanks to ANN