Review of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

(Disclosure - at the time of writing, I have not yet seen R2, this show's second season) Code Geass is an amalgam of nearly every popular anime genre - mecha battles, supernatural mystery, brainiac rivalries a la Death Note, alternate (future) history, high school slice of life, romance, pizza hut commercial. What's even crazier is that, in many ways, the show actually succeeds in each of these genres. However, given the breadth of subject matter and the large cast of characters, ultimately we are left with a show that lacks focus, and suffers as a result. To handle the most obvious things first, the art style ofthis show is... conspicuous. While this is the first CLAMP show I've seen, I had been aware that they had a characteristic style. While the show's impossibly tall, thin characters aren't poorly designed, as such, it's definitely an acquired taste that I never quite acquired. Often I found the clearly deliberate choice to make the characters gastrointestinally impossible beanpoles off-putting - the tone of the show is quite a bit more serious than the lanky shounen dreamboats would suggest. Zero especially suffers from this, as it's hard to take seriously a military mastermind who looks like he'll roll up and blow away at any minute. I realize that this is a matter of taste, though, and it's not all bad. In particular the facial expressions are excellent and do an even better job of conveying the characters' emotions than the script does. The mecha battles are also fast and fluid, but never hard to follow. The battle choreography is top-notch and really expresses the speed at which the battles take place.

The show's biggest issue is the scope. As mentioned above, it manages to shove nearly every major genre into one show, and while each of these elements of the show, taken on their own, actually hold up pretty well, the show simply isn't long enough to do any one aspect of it justice (other than perhaps the mecha battles). Right off the bat protagonist LeLouch is given a mysterious supernatural power, with the requisite "ground rules" that govern its use, but the how and why of this is not really explored. The power comes with a mysterious cutie named C.C., and we're given tantalizingly few glimpses into her past and the nature of this power, but the series can't commit to exploring this (or her) further, because it's too busy having the president of the high school student council dress up like a cat and then bake the world's largest pizza. The result is that the show feels disjointed and tonally inconsistent. I would much rather the series have focused on Zero's ambitous grab for power and the fallout of his actions. When the show is focusing on these elements it is at its strongest, but too often it is interrupted by the aforementioned pizza worship.

Another element that further bifurcates the focus of the show is the massive cast of characters. This is something of a double-edged sword, as while the characters themselves are actually pretty interesting and manage to each be fairly distinct and memorable, there are just so many of them that almost none are given enough screentime. They each have their own plots, too, which further eats into the amount of time available for exploring the show's themes, but Code Geass actually redeems itself here by having each of these plots, no matter how small, drive the plot forward in some pretty ingenious ways. I actually almost gave up on the show midway through because it seemed to get completely lost in its own cast, and subplots were introduced and rapidly concluded without seeming to lead anywhere. Impressively, the last few episodes tie together nearly all of the different plots and characters, and in particular the later story beats justify the amount of time spent on setting everything up.

Pacing and scope issues aside, Code Geass is a solid show for fans of mecha combat and complex plotting, or skinny, skinny dudes and dudettes. It's often billed as "Death Note with mechas," but besides the intelligence of the main character, there's really not that much in common.