Sometimes a pivotal scene will simply fail. Youâ€™ll hear rousing music, animation quality will skyrocket, and the main character may suddenly gain whatever he was lacking to overcome the challenge, but all of it rings hollow. It doesnâ€™t matter that the production studio has pulled all stops and warned you that a significant turn is about to happen. At this point, youâ€™ve already stopped caring, and their attempt to engage you only makes it worse. Nevertheless, thereâ€™s nothing intrinsically poor with whatâ€™s playing before your eyes. If you cared just a little more about the characters, or the plotâ€™s intrigue had built just a little more suspense, the exact same scene would have elicited a far different response. What went wrong? (Spoilers for Guilty Crown, as should be expected.)

On a technical level, Guilty Crownâ€™s penultimate scene in episode eleven is exactly this. The show sets up the perfect excuse for an insert of the ending song. Production I.G. gives themselves creative license to throw pretty CG strands around well animated cars and exploding bridges. Shu even finally pushes forward his own character development by growing a pair and springing into action. At least, he would have had character development, if not for the fact that his decision was spontaneous, his character relations are tenuous, and his reasoning never quite expands beyond â€œI must.â€ Given a character with believable growth in his confidence, we might have gotten a powerful look into the how the change of his behavior increased his capabilities. Instead, Shuâ€™s vapidity drains any such satisfaction, as well as leaving one wondering about the plot holes that led to such a scenario. So much for a good scene.

Incompetent shows constantly bankrupt their key scenes, even when theyâ€™re well done, because the shows’ weaknesses can remove any kind of weight the scenes carry. What is worse is that these scenes can often weaken the shows even further because they fail to engage the audience, making them seem manipulative or extraneous. Since the audienceâ€™s problem is one of emotional connection beyond the scene, it is logical to assume that something went awry in the narrative structure. Specifically, at some particular point of time the narrative failed to impart or capitalize on a particular impression the audience needed to empathize with in order to engage the scene correctly. To pinpoint an exact general problem that causes this, however, is much trickier. Is there a single thing that the production studios are doing wrong that detract from these scenes and make them worse?

Take, for example, the opening sequence of Guilty Crown. Weâ€™re treated to a glimpse Guilty Crownâ€™s rather grand scale through Inoriâ€™s desperate attempt to flee the Endlaves and Shuâ€™s idle viewing of her PV, all set to the eerie backdrop of Euterpe. Changes happen to the beat of the song and movement happens fluidly because Production I.G. sank enough budget into it to put every other show airing last season to shame. In one go, weâ€™re already intrigued by both Inori and Shuâ€™s roles, as well as trying to make sense of the situation Inoriâ€™s got herself in. As a first impression, the scene is extremely competent and builds the correct (albeit misleading) expectations it wishes to impart to the audience.

The problem arises when Shuâ€™s monologue comes before his discovery of Inori. Weâ€™re given another separate look at both of the characters when we really should not. The opening scene has already framed some kind of picture of the two, but Shuâ€™s inner thoughts simply sweep it under the rug to tell us again in a much more elaborate but boring explanation. Equally frustrating is his monologueâ€™s unfortunate positioning between the opening scene and when Shu finds Inori. The transition of a logical sequence of events becomes drawn out, making the two much less dependent on each other. If the two scenes had been together, it would seem natural that the opening sequence would develop into their meeting. Instead, we view their meeting as on some level isolated from the opening. The result is that the opening sequence feels unnecessary. With its current set up, Guilty Crown could have begun with the monologue and gone from there without losing anything except a pretty hook for the series. The double introduction thus renders the opening scene useless, leaving it oddly out of place and further detracting from what could have been a much tighter script. Unlike the first example, however, the issues of the scene seem very different, even if they seem to both come from some hole in the narrative.

Another scene that was done rather well and falls much more in line with the first example is Shuâ€™s mock battle with Ayase in episode 5. Shu has gone through the entire episode training in order to gain some acceptance, and he beats Ayase with aplomb by cheating. Thatâ€™s hardly an issue. In isolation, the scene is likely a good representation of how Shu learns to harness his rather broken power and implement it cunningly. What is again a problem is that when this scene is viewed in context of the whole, it hardly changes anything. Shu has not learned something new about his power, nor has he become more proficient. He continues to use it the same way heâ€™s been using it since episode one, and he rarely ever strays from Gaiâ€™s command on how to use it. While the development is similar to the first example because we are unable to sympathize with his nonexistant change, the scene holds the same problems as the second in that it seems extraneous because it changed nothing in the grand scheme of the plot.

In a sense, Guilty Crown and many other shows like it are composed of some well executed scenes that are dwarfed by how cringe worthy the rest are. Unlike what one would expect, however, the poor scenes sometimes result in a domino effect, making the rather well constructed scenes look just as bad. What causes this? Ultimately, I donâ€™t know. I’ve merely pointed to specific examples and explained the different ways they come short. Perhaps Iâ€™m looking for a nonexistent overlying issue that pulls them all down, and theyâ€™re simply victims of the same varying issues that can make a show less than stellar. Maybe the scenes I brought up are really just poorly made and I missed it. Or I could just be finding more excuses to rag on Guilty Crown. Regardless, I do believe that there are many scenes that could have struck much more engagement; they merely had the bad luck of being part of a bad anime.