Guilty Crown: Lost Christmas

   Well, just in case anyone was about to forget about it, Guilty Crown returns with this 11-minute OVA after a season and a half after its finale. The short is essentially an extended teaser to the VN Guilty Crown: Lost Christmas by Nitro+, and hence explains very little about the premise. The bulk of the content in terms of the “plot” are in the trailers instead, and frankly, Lost Christmas is what the original should have been.

   The original Guilty Crown was all about the heavy-handed, flashy sequences, with little to no subtlety in the way events were carried out. Lost Christmas is still flashy, but its tone is a lot more serious and there is an almost pseudo-philosophical air that pervades the dialogue, which tries to provoke some deep thoughts regarding the state of the world. I won’t say it succeeded entirely, but the atmosphere and mood it sets is on a different level than the uneven tone and strange dramatics of GC the series.   

   In a funny way, I think GC benefits from being an 11-minute short that isn’t really charged with doing anything but looking pretty and whetting the appetite, because those were things it was always pretty good at.  It was when a larger story and character development came into the picture that things went off the rails.  “Lost Xmas” is light as a feather, but it looks and sounds great – the usual high-quality I.G. animation with the series’ usual excellent art direction, and a really lovely ED to tie a bow on the whole thing.  It might serve to remind you painfully of what might have been, but if have any affection for Guilty Crown in spite of its flaws you’ll probably enjoy Lost Christmas.  

Scroog's releasing the void inside Carol.

Carol constitutes every bit of the eye candy Inori was.