[Flawfinder]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

4. Anime is a visual medium, and also one in which audio is important. While how well an anime is written is important, it's not the only thing that's important. If an anime looks and sounds better than 95% or more of all the other anime out there (and that's honestly how I feel about Guilty Crown), then I think that's something that deserves a lot of credit. And this isn't something I'm being generous just with Guilty Crown over. I also showed Hanasaku Iroha a lot of slack for much the same reason. If an anime truly looks and/or sounds great to me then that makes it a lot easier for me to forgive somewhat sloppy writing. Maybe that's wrong of me, but that is honestly the effect that extremely good-looking/good-sounding anime tends to have on me. Some (if not all) of the shows that I was more critical of than I was of Guilty Crown were ones that didn't have GC-caliber visuals/audio, so they didn't earn that slack from me the same way GC did.

As a rebuttal to this particular point of yours (I know it's just you personally, but I've seen a lot of people use the animation as a defense, and I just want to get this off my chest), let me go into detail about an anime cliche I personally despise: Narration and inner thoughts. Because oh my god, this anime uses that cliche a lot.

Spoiler for Why I hate narration and inner thoughts:

Why do I hate this cliche so much? Because it renders the great animation absolutely moot and doesn't allow it to tell the story. What's the point in making something beautifully animated if you're not going to use the animation? I wouldn't say it uses it to the extent of a Makoto Shinkai film and such, but I can think of many scenes in this anime that would have been better if it was silent and just let the character's expressions do the talking. The flashback episode for example didn't need narration because we could see what was happening. Shu's narration that confirmed he hadn't fully gone evil in Episode 17 could have been replaced with flashbacks to happier times followed by a smile whilst charging that tower in order to confirm he hasn't forgotten them. With all the effort going into making the anime look good, they couldn't have done something like that? And I still remember that scene in Episode 3 where he whined about why people weren't paying attention to his feelings? Why wasn't that scene silent? We could see the expression. We could see his frustration. We knew the how, what, and why of that scene because the animation told us. But no, they had to give one of those "people don't understand me, despite the fact that I never make an attempt to them" speech.

Cowboy Bebop is considered one the few anime I consider to use narration effectively, mostly due to the fact that it barely used it. Most of the flashbacks just showed what was happening and that's all I needed to see. Narration is used only as a cap off or transition out of the flashback, and that was it. And excluding the flashbacks, I can barely recall any scenes where inner thoughts were used. They just showed the stuff happening and/or used some quick dialogue, trusting we could see what was going on. Guilty Crown doesn't do that. Or at least it doesn't do it often enough to justify its high budget.

Point is, animation is great, but if it's not being used as a means to tell the story, then why did you put so much effort into making it look good? I know the action scenes are silent about half the time, but there's still another half of them that are ruined by inner thoughts or just plain bad dialogue. And there are a few subtle scenes, but they're not enough to justify the animation.