Review of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

After roaring onto the anime scene at the helm of Infinite Ryvius, director Goro Taniguchi has had something of a checkered history. His series are visually inventive and unfailingly entertaining, but beyond that, quite variable. It's his habit to follow each of his respectable projects (Ryvius and the more modest but equally brilliant Planetes) with something, to put it kindly, with a lot more trash in it—a la the intense but insanely stupid s-CRY-ed. By that logic Code Geass, coming on the heels of the spectacularly uneven Gun x Sword, should be a beautifully-constructed masterpiece. Well, patterns, like rules, are made to be broken. From thefirst episode, when Taniguchi takes his tale of political strife and drives it straight into the kind of hammy, blood-soaked territory that would have been handled by Vincent Price were it a micro-budgeted live-action film from the seventies, it's obvious that a masterpiece is out of the question. Lelouch is a bastard, full of hubris. Superior characterization is supplanted by a slew of characters as thin as their whipcord designs (by CLAMP). Tense mecha battles alternate with stretches of goony humor that blend into the series' tales of terrorism and compromised morality like hippies at a skinhead convention. And occasionally the series wanders off onto single-episode tangents that might as well have “character-building” signs stapled to their foreheads. Hardly the stuff of masterpieces.

But no one ever said that a series had to be a masterpiece to be good. The sizable cast is also as colorful as their designs, Lelouch's hubris is tempered by his absolute devotion to his sister and friends (and it doesn't hurt that he regularly gets his comeuppance), and the plot—cobbled together from equal parts Death Note and Gundam Seed—is propelled at such a speed that neither its derivation nor its jarring shifts in tone have much time to rankle. The massacre that rages over the first two episodes sets the tone, never letting up or allowing the tension to flag, even as it prioritizes careful strategy over godlike piloting skills.