デュラララ!! / Durarara!!

I started watching Durarara!! when it began to air, back in the beginning of 2010, and was being hyped up as the next big thing – which, arguably, it was. After a few episodes, I stopped to watch Baccano! My reason for doing so stemmed from a misunderstanding, really – I read that Isaac and Miria from Baccano! were in the show, so I decided I didn’t want to see these characters without understanding their origin story, and only when I resumed Durarara!! did I realise that in fact they only had a momentary cameo in a single episode – but I’m glad that’s how I did things.

You see, it's not just that they are from the same author and are made by the same anime studio, with the same director. In many ways, Durarara!! leads on from and is informed by Baccano!, and I really feel I understood a lot more watching the series after having seen that great, stylish, stylised story.

It’s not hard to make direct comparisons: both have a large cast of characters, all of whom have their own stories. Both have supernatural elements, and a lot of fighting. Both are about the strange things that can be found beneath the surface, and both are more slices of larger, ongoing stories than complete beginning-middle-end narratives. In more direct terms, too, it’s quite useful to draw comparisons: Baccano! probably has the more original and compelling setting, but Durarara!! has a more tight-knit story. While Baccano! has a few characters who are likely more interesting than any in Durarara!!, the latter develops its full cast more completely. Durarara!! shows from the very start that it has a lot of supernatural happenstances, so there is no jarring appearance of magic potions or slight disappointment things aren’t kept more naturalistic, but the stakes in Baccano! are much higher and its timescale far broader. The truth, though, is that they really compliment one another, and really work best seen concurrently – and trust me when I say that the weirder elements of Durarara!! seem to make more sense after having seen Baccano!

An ordinary boy with the brilliantly fancy name of Ryuugamine Mikado (with which his incredibly ordinary online handle – Tanaka Tarou – is an amusing contrast) moves to Ikebukuro, a built-up part of Tokyo that not many English-speaking tourists go to, and which I know primarily as Mami’s stomping ground in Super Gals! and for having an affinity with owls (‘bukuro -> fukurou, which means ‘owl’). What seems at first a simple story about a naïve country boy moving to the big city, meeting his childhood friend and his funny friendship group gets more complicated as it becomes apparent Ikebukuro has some crazy personalities: a waiter who goes on rampages with his super strength, a dark-skinned Russian immigrant who enthusiastically sells sushi in broken Japanese but is about the only one who can stop such rampages, and most iconic of all, a biker clad all in black who is actually a female spirit from Ireland searching for her head – a dulluhan, the creatures that inspired the likes of The Headless Horseman. Beneath the surface are other factions – delinquent gangs, a demon sword who possesses all it slashes, a man who loves to toy with others’ minds and some very silly doctors for the criminal underworld.

Unlike Baccano!, conflicts between the characters will most likely lead to cartoon violence rather than anybody’s life actually being in danger, but if anything that makes the contrast between daily lives and the big, exaggerated second lives the characters lead more believable. As the spotlight is turned on each character in turn, I found myself liking just about all of them, and never being bored – especially as there’s enough of a plot that episodes flow into one another rather than coming across as repetitive or, indeed, episodic. The fact that the most likeable characters, other than the boys at the centre of it all, are the most outlandish ones – the dulluhan who can only communicate through typing, the gentle giant from Russia, the misunderstood ultra-strong guy who so often ends up throwing about enormous pieces of the scenery – is testament to some clever writing. It’s also funny, and I love the nods to other anime – not just Baccano! but things like Wolf and Spice and Shana.

Durarara!! isn’t constantly the best-looking anime, but it’s definitely nice on the eyes and some of the effects –like Celty’s powers – are spectacular. There are some fun character designs, like the daft gals, and you definitely see a lot of things you won’t see anywhere else, like men hurling vending machines at one another. Witty, strange and yet also a little more heartfelt than its predecessor, I’d recommend it highly – but it’s best enjoyed after having seen Baccano!

バッカーノ! / Baccano!

I’m glad Baccano! became quite a hit upon its release in 2007, and continues to enjoy excellent word-of-mouth, especially when very loosely-connected follow-up series Durarara! not only became an even bigger hit, but sends people back to check out its precursor. That’s actually how I came to watch Baccano!, although I’d been intending to for a while before that: I enjoyed the first few episodes of Durarara! but decided I wanted to see the whole of Baccano! first.

It’s taken me a very long while to finish – I started watching around the same time as I was enjoying Paranoia Agent – especially because the three OVA episodes were hard to find in good quality, but now I’ve happily watched the whole lot, and I not only like Baccano! and its eccentricities, but I respect the daring and unorthodox approach that went into it.

Takahiro Omori has directed some unusual anime in his time, but usually their complexity comes from empty ambiguity, as in Jigoku Shoujo and Haibane Renmei, the latter of which he worked on as an episode director. He also isn’t averse to cutesiness: he adapted and directed the anime for Gakuen Alice. Somehow, though, Baccano! feels much more mature and idiosyncratic than those, and not purely because it isn’t centred on young girls. Ultimately, the sophistication here comes from the source material, though – a light novel series that I get the impression unfolded the story in a rather more obvious way than the series, which takes quite some time to reveal its supernatural elements.

One factor that marks out Baccano! as something different from the usual crop is its setting: at the centre of the sprawling plot is the Italian mafia based in prohibition-era New York. It is not a setting you see much in anime, and an attempt at a realistic presentation is a very long way from how the mafia is presented in the likes of Reborn!. Though some utterly ridiculous character names (the most obvious being ‘Jacuzzi Splot’) remind you that this is not a setting the author is wholly familiar with, the feel and the aesthetic work nicely, and there’s the great decision to have the majority of the real action of the series unfold on board a train.

The cast is huge and varied – rival gangsters and hired mercenaries, rich and poor, hitmen and small children. All have their own agendas, but get mixed up with one another’s intrigues and grudges during the journey on the Flying Pussyfoot. And through it all, capering like jesters, are the loveable comic relief duo Isaac and Miria, winsome and clueless and yet endearing themselves to almost all they meet.
A backstory involving a sinister patriarch soon comes to the fore, and it becomes apparent that many of the cast members are bound together by a long history. Beneath the turf wars and mafia hits is the rediscovery of an elixir that first surfaced in the early 18th century, and owes just a little to Highlander. Its effects give an added interesting dimension to Baccano!, as ideas of very old minds in young bodies and the limits of pain humans can cause one another get explored.

There were elements of Baccano! I did not like. There was a degree of the annoyance many felt towards Lost – it was soon apparent that novels were basically made up as the author went along, with no real overall structure and arbitrary pacing, and the closing scene where a man with a monocle lectures a small girl about how stories are most interesting when they are open-ended and can just go on forever was a total cop-out and annoyed me despite the man’s hilarious intonation. And while if you can accept magical elixirs, you really ought no to have complaints about other magical elements, I would rather everything was natural except for this one conceit: fun as it is to see guys fighting with ridiculous prowess and strength, it just didn’t feel right in the world of Baccano! and I would have rather seen everyone within human limits apart from the results of the magic potion. Claire was fun, but his supernatural skills just seemed out of place.

But overall, Baccano! does a lot that other anime do not, and does it well. It is not a perfect, polished work, but it is an incredibly fun one, with superb characters and compelling, multi-layered stories. Impressive and well worth watching.

地獄少女 / Jigoku Shoujo / Hell Girl (season 1)

When a person has been wronged and is desperate for revenge, they can turn to Enma Ai, also known as Jigoku Shoujo (‘Hell Girl’, but without such cheesy comic-book connotations). Through a mysterious website, accessible only at midnight, they can name the one who wronged them, and have them instantly taken to Hell for all eternity. But two holes appear as you curse a person – you cannot have them damned without being damned yourself, although unlike them, you at least get to live out the rest of your life.

Jigoku Shoujo is an interesting piece. Most of its 26 episodes explore its concept in a way reminiscent of Shinigami no Ballad – we get introduced each episode to a new character with new problems, usually having their lives wrecked by some amoral person, from abusive parents to bullies, see them have a crisis of conscience, and then finally they decide to damn those who wrong them. Although there are some mis-fires, some parts that become daft instead of creepy, by and large the damnation sequences, where Enma Ai and her associates torture the miscreant are effective, and the budget is high enough here to show some really impressive art and animation. The character designs are excellent, and Jigoku Shoujo herself is iconic. The main flaw is that things get quite repetitive, with over 20 episodes generally built upon the same premise.

Only towards the end do important questions get addressed: except perhaps the vet, who was evil but hardly deserved damnation, all the revenges seemed justified, and ia few times delaying only causes more suffering for the innocents. It’s painted as a noble self-sacrifice, bearing damnation in order to rid the world of some horrible person. But what if the person doesn’t deserve to be taken to hell? Does Enma Ai refuse? This is addressed in the final arc, when a little girl with a strange connection to Jigoku Shoujo and her detective father investigate her. Soon, they learn of her past, which is very typical of Japanese horror.

What Jigoku Shoujo has in abundance is elegance. It’s stately, and pretty, and concerns itself with beautiful things and tragedies. It has something of a Poe gothic horror story in its juxtaposition of a refined way of living and the horrors of damnation. It is never rushed, never concerned about keeping its audience’s attention with bangs and crashes. It moves at its own pace, and concentrates on building mood.

As it is well-written, well-acted and well-animated, it achieves this all well. There is a second season to watch yet, and I will certainly be checking it out – at a slow, even pace, no doubt!

(originally written 15.5.08)

学園アリス/ Gakuen Arisu / Gakuen Alice

It’s often much easier to know whether a manga, or an anime based on a manga, is written by a man or a woman than it is to describe why, even when they’re generally action-oriented. It’s difficult to say that female mangakas tend to make ardent friendships central to their story and resolve tension with melodramatic speeches while men tend to focus on striving for a goal and solving problems with fights when you have, for example, Naruto and Sasuke’s deep friendship in a very male comic indeed (though it’s true that Naruto makes more concessions to its female fanbase than most shounen manga) on one hand and the dramatic fights of Rozen Maiden on the other.

But sometimes you get shows on very familiar turf that are a little bit different because of gender differences. Gakuen Alice is about a little girl who follows her best friend to a privileged school, only for it to turn out that all the children there have super-powers known as ‘Alices’. But while the premise is very X-men, the tone of the show turns out to be far more Harry Potter – and I mean before it got ‘dark’.

Pretty much every male character is waifish, pretty and sexually ambiguous. Girls tend to have crushes and get themselves into embarrassing situations that make them blush. There are darker themes, kidnappings and forced child labour, but really, the problems never seem very threatening, and there’s never much real sense of danger. Kids may be tied up and dumped in a warehouse one week, but soon after they’re happily watching boys cross-dress in school plays. (Now there’s something typical to female writers!) No combating galactic perils here, only threats to a way of life, and problems that can be resolved by having a tearful talk with the opponents. And of course, the show is cute, cute, cute, cute, cute!

The heroine of the piece is Mikan, an earnest little girl who isn’t too smart but who always tries hard, voiced by Ueda Kana (Yumi from Marimite, to whom Mikan bears some resemblance) with such a strong Osaka-ben accent that when she tries to speak English, she calls herself ‘House’! Mikan’s best friend is the spacey, rather cold Hotaru, voiced by Kugimiya Rie in a role very far from Alphonse Elric in Hagaren, which is amusing because Paku Romi voices Natsume, the dark, brooding boy with a painful past who of course starts to open up to kind-hearted Mikan, with a voice very similar to the one she used for Edward Elric. Natsume’s best friend is Ruka, who can talk to animals, and while the two are together with suspicious frequency, they might just both have a crush on Mikan. All these characters are adorable kids, with very cute character designs and archetypical anime personalities. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing incredibly gripping, but it’s very sweet and makes for compulsive viewing.

But it is undeniably girly, with a lot of cute and not much cool – and what cool there is neatly packaged into understandable categories. Which is fine, for a nice, light series. There’s nothing epic about Gakuen Alice – except for how long it took to get subtitled: I started watching this show in 2004 and the last eps were released yesterday!

(originally written 22.5.07)

Haibane Renmei / 灰羽連盟

The thing you have to know about Haibane Renmei is that it’s not going to give you the answers to the questions it raises. Why are these ‘Haibane’ and the people of the town unable to leave the walls? What happens when they vanish? Where do they come from? Why do they have wings and halos? Well, the answer to the last one is pretty easy – because it looks cute, and the creators thought it would be neat. And here, I think, we get to the crux of Yoshitoshi Abe’s writing: he likes to introduce bizarre circumstances and unorthodox plot developments to his anime, because it makes people think. But ultimately, this is a weak form of storytelling. Some people enjoy vagueness, because it lets them fill in the blanks with what they want to hear. But I only care about what the writer was trying to say. When I’m almost certain that it was nothing more than ‘draw your OWN conclusions’, I am invariably disappointed. So it was with Haibane Renmei.

A new Haibane is hatched from a cocoon. Because she dreamt of plunging to earth from the sky in the cocoon, she is given the name ‘Rakka’, which means ‘falling’ – and it is the Haibane’s tradition to name each newborn after some aspect of their dream. Rakka finds her feet in her strange new world by accompanying each of her new acquaintances to their jobs. Then the limitations of a 13-episode series seem to hit, and all the characters’ stories but one are dumped, giving a sense of climax, albeit a hastily cobbled-together one, to the final episodes.

I’ll say this – it’s a beautiful anime. Gorgeous art, excellent music and animation, nice, varied character designs and beautiful scenery. The characters are mostly drawn from typical anime stock, but that’s okay; in such a brisk series, they don’t get dull, and stock characters have becomes stock characters for good reason. However, the story is deeply unsatisfying, simply because it’s several episodes of excellent exposition and mystery, a climax as one character disappears abruptly, and then there’s an apparent realisation that all these good ideas don’t actually lead anywhere: an interesting backstory set up for the last episodes gets resolved far too quickly, and a false conclusion in the end satisfies none of the evoked curiosity, leaving only a sense of bathos and indifference.

An enjoyable anime, but an irksome ending. Much is promised, little delivered, and it’s very apparent that no matter how hard you look, the answers to your questions will never come. There’s just not enough there.

(originally posted 13.10.05)