You spoke loud and clear with your votes – Baccano! was the series you wanted me to reach back to 2007 and cover this season.  That’s good with me – it’s a show I’ve never rewatched and have very fond memories of, so I’d been thinking about it anyway.  It’s entirely possible that Baccano! may be my favorite LN adaptation ever – I suppose it depends on how loosely you define the term (if you included Shin Sekai Yori, that would have to take the top spot).  Light novels have changed some in the intervening years, but so have my tastes as an anime fan – which makes revisiting the series now an interesting mystery.

Narita Ryohgo is certainly an influential figure in the LN world, what with Baccano! and Durarara to his name.  I find that Durarara has not aged as well as Baccano! has – perhaps in part because it’s closer to what LNs would evolve into (and many of them copied it shamelessly).  This show is a pretty singular entity – strange and deliriously zany.  It hails from Brain’s Base at a time when they were putting out good anime with a higher success rate than anyone else in the industry (IMO), features an all-star cast and staff (including director Omori Takahiro).  I’ve seen very little over the years (maybe just 91 Days, a little) that’s made me say “this reminds me of Baccano“.  Baccano! is Baccano! – everything else is everything else.

My initial thoughts after watching the first two episodes are mainly that the series has not lost its charm.  It looks damn good for a 13 year-old show, and the music (Brain’s Base stalwart Yoshimori Makoto) is ideally suited to the material.  Japanese popular media is quite obsessed with prohibition-era America – perhaps because our organized crime is so different from Japan’s.  Somehow, though, anime never seems to capture its potential as a dramatic canvas.  Baccano! is the exception – yes, it’s a funhouse mirror and wholly Japanese take, but somehow it feels faithful to the setting.  Or rather, to how the setting is depicted by the great American novel and Hollywood (which is probably more important than the reality now anyway).

What a cast…  You can’t really single them out, but Wakamoto Norio’s unmistakable delivery of “Carol! is one of my lasting memories of Baccano!, and along with Koyama Rikiya’s “Shounen!” from Zetsuen no Tempest maybe the most memorable forms of address in anime.  It’s certainly bittersweet to hear Fujiwara Keiji as Ladd, maybe playing against type a little.  And those names – a bizarre melange of Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian and Easter European that suggests a random character name generator gone rogue.  And the greatest among them is surely Jacuzzi Splot, maybe my favorite anime character name of all time.

It’s a massive cast, as befits a story which spans multiple centuries.  Starting off with Gustave and Carol and using them as a linking device is brilliant, but for me it’s definitely Isaac and Miria who tie everything together.  They’re the definition of characters who, based on their description, should annoy the hell out of you but somehow in practice are awesome.  In this massive cast they do stand out as being quite different to the others, and I think that’s exactly the point, and exactly why they work so well as audience inserts and as a source of continuity.

Carol’s very early comment about Firo being “main character-poi” is intentionally ironic, because Baccano! really doesn’t have a conventional protagonist.  The narrative weaves all over the place in every sense – POV characters, location, even time period.  It kind of has to all work or risk not working at all, and while it certainly did for me in 2007, I’m interested to see if that’s as true now given how much anime I’ve watched since then.  Early returns are positive, but there are still 14 episodes to go.  But I still get the same buzz off Baccano! that I remember – the irresistible energy, the relentless pacing (quite intentionally like a runaway train), the sometimes shocking violence.  It’s a strange, heady concoction, and I’m really looking forward to experiencing it again.