Baccano is a lot of fun. It’s got an interesting setting, charismatic characters, and a tongue in cheek humor about the whole thing. It’s one of the better anime to have aired in 2007, which was a pretty good year.
Except, I’m also grading it on the anime curve. It’s got an interesting setting, charismatic characters, and a tongue in cheek humor about the whole thing…for an anime. I’m focusing more on positives than negatives at first because I did generally enjoy the show, but just how objectively “good” I found the show is really in relative terms.
In general, I like anime that are well, anime-y. They’ve gotta be the type of thing that’s hard or impossible to find outside of the interrelated media of anime, manga, games, and light novels. This can be things like genres which don’t really exist elsewhere, like mecha. Or, they could be anime made by specific auteurs. Yuasa expresses himself through visually inventive anime, for instance. The flipside is also often true: anime which are easily represented elsewhere have a very steep slope to climb. Comedies are the worst offenders here by far. Character-driven dramas also fare terribly with me when anime has to square off against well, everything else.
It reminds me a bit of a conversation that I had a few years ago with ghostlightning after he was really impressed by a show that I had only been able to watch a little bit of before dropping. Maybe it was Toradora? Anyway, my reason for dropping the show was that it was kind of decent, but I could easily do better elsewhere. I then recommended to him to watch some of the American serial dramas that were airing at the time that were considered good, like The Wire, Mad Men, and Friday Night Lights. He then promptly blew his mind and shit bricks after scenes like “WHERE’S WALLACE!?” or “CLEAR EYES FULL HEARTS CAN’T LOSE!”
Baccano had that problem in spades. A story about American gangsters? For anime, that’s pretty unique. But it’s one of the great American genres. Hell, when Baccano was airing the two best serial TV dramas of all time were also airing, and both of which prominently featured gangsters. The show’s problem quickly became the fact that I was relentlessly comparing it at every turn with far superior non-anime rather than far inferior anime.
Take my biggest gripe about the show, its structure. Simply put: it’s a gimmick. In general, I’m very anti-gimmick. If you don’t need that gimmick to make some kind of a point, you shouldn’t be using that gimmick. I kept scratching my head as to why the story needed to be fractured in the way that it was. Similarly, the episode titles and the first episode were too-clever by half, feeling like a handwave or contingency plan if the structure ended up not really working. Think of it as insurance against something like what Brains Base did later on with DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR where they decided to focus on main characters, only to have said main characters be the most uninteresting characters in the show. Baccano’s fractured chronology isn’t “bad” in some kind of objective sense, but simply seeing if/how “everything comes together” is not really an achievement in narrative to me. We’re not talking about how The Godfather Part 2 does it to show how the family is becoming corrupted, or Irreversible does it to turn motivated violence into senseless acts, or (I’m getting really obscure here) Two Friends does it to sever teleological fallacies about finding primordial events in people’s lives.
But if you’ll notice, I just compared Baccano with something like freakin’ The Godfather Part 2. I didn’t compare it with something like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which also mixes up its timeline. Compared to Haruhi, Baccano’s structure is a lot more “honest” and well, “better”. Baccano isn’t doing it purely as a way to trick the viewer into thinking that the show will be like the experimental first episode, and then to make it easier to intersperse filler through the season. Think about how much less interesting Haruhi would be if the mysteries get solved in episode 5, and then we sit there for 9 episodes of everyone waiting in the clubroom for the rain to stop. Similarly, the humor and violence of the show didn’t make me think how dull most anime characters are, or how weightless character deaths are compared to Baccano. It made me think about how the Coen Brothers do that style better. Perhaps it’s why I probably liked DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR more than Baccano?
Sidenote: I watched it on Hulu and the Funimation subs get awfully schizophrenic with all the terms of address. This is partly an artifact of the show, where some people go around using Japanese titles while others address people in more American ways. Smith-san vs. Misuta Smisu, if you will. Yeah yeah, you don’t need to say it weeaboos. We all here understand that Japanese social relations use terminology that doesn’t perfectly translate in English. You might not have noticed, however, that English has plenty of words to describe the social relations between Americans in America during the 20th century. Just let them drop all the honorifics in their translation. I’ll even still believe you when you swear that you totally know Japanese.
I get you. I think.
I think I’m pretty consistent with distinguishing why I like shows for being anime-y. I made a big deal about this writing about Gundam this year.
I found Baccano! interesting enough, but if I had put as much thought in it as you have I would make similar conclusions. There are fans of anime in general, who seem to me go beyond wanting anime to be “legit” as a narrative or, uh, art form. They want to say that it’s superior in some ways to other mainstream formats.
I’ve no problem with this per se, but like you I find that some of the examples given: comedies, character-driven material, non-mecha action… are indeed inferior to many examples from different formats. The adoration that they inspire has much to do with the viewer’s affinity for the tropes and elements of anime and perhaps otaku culture itself.
Grading anime against a curve is a good way of putting it. One of my curves is definitely informed by my love of illustrations. It’s what keeps me watching anime.
@ghostlightning
You know what else it reminds me a lot of? The various “Why I like anime” posts that people write where they quickly make the reader aware that the reason that they think that anime is some kind of superior medium is because they haven’t actually seen any of the other media that they’re comparing anime to. I mean, how many times have you read someone say that the reason that anime is better than live-action TV is because anime is a serial medium and live-action TV isn’t?
That’s how I watched Haruhi. That’s how they packaged the english dub and I didn’t know any better.
Yes, it was indeed incredibly boring to have most of the last episode being Yuki Nagato reading a book
@scamp
oh lawl
@scamp: I can’t even fathom how anyone thought that’d be a good idea.
Augh.
I sort of get what you are saying when you compare it to other gangster shows because I personally thought the gangster portions held little weight. I feel like you could just as easily set it in say, revolution era France. However the Sci-fi portions clearly root it in anime’s realm Sonny ain’t gonna get back up after he’s pumped full of lead. So do you consider it sci-fi elements or a sci-fi anime with gangster elements.
I will say though I don’t think the non-linear storytelling is gimmicky. I think it fits the spirit of the show perfectly. As Baccano is supposed to be about chaos basically. The show starts off laying out all the players who potentially could be the “main character” of the story. From there the show continues at a breakneck pace, increasing intrigue, weaving the characters between the major dates, and showing that the show really can stand by it’s namesake. Also without the non-linear plot it would have been difficult to tell both stories at once since if the story was told linearly we would know some of the big twists down the line.
I like to think of Baccano as a gateway anime personally. For people who aren’t huge anime fans, I think there is a lot to enjoy. Like some great seiyuu performances (if they watch the subs, i can’t speak for the dub) and fun characters like Ladd.
I think if you don’t get premium channels cable tv is largely non-serial. For every Friday Night Lights, 24, and Breaking Bad there are 2 CSI’s, 2 NCIS’s, and like 4 Law and Orders. Plus a million and a half reality shows, long running comedies like the office, 30rock, scrubs; and House, Grey’s Anatomy, ER. So there are a few serials here or there and the ones that manage to stick around for their full run are usually really good (mostly you have to rely on AMC) but the rest of the television has little differentiation. (Don’t get me started on TLCs scheduled blocks about fucking cakes.) I personally feel anime is more differentiated but I’m sure there are those who would disagree
As I mentioned in the post though, this isn’t really much of an achievement. Saying “It’s about chaos” leaves me going “…and?” It says what about chaos? That chaotic stuff is chaotic? That’s more of a jumping off point than a conclusion. Or a priori rather than a posteri.
You know, ironically I think what makes an anime a great gateway anime is that it isn’t very representative of anime as a whole at all. (Which can be also something like Cowboy Bebop which is unique in and of itself). You don’t show someone an “average anime” like I dunno, Mainichi Kaa-san or something. You show them Baccano.
Isn’t the question of access kind of irrelevant though? We’re talking about anime that we need to download because we don’t live in Japan, and even if we did live in Japan we probably wouldn’t get those satellite channels like WOWOW or Animax anyway. For a comparison, WOWOW has about 2.5 million subscribers (about 2% of Japan), HBO has almost 30 million (about 10% of America), and AMC has almost 100 million (about 30% of America).
As for differentiation, well…
Sadly, it goes without saying that some people (the hopeless cases, myself included) will always prefer anime to live action because of the limitless possibilities of character-centric fetishism it provides. Anime gives a representation of a character that is an icon in itself, there’s no need for an inconvenient actor standing between you and your favorite moeblob or bishie. The image you get is a veritable window into the other world that you can hang up on your iconostasis for worship and contemplation (read: masturbation). I even believe there’s something of a general trend heading in this direction outside of anime fandom. What else is the popularity of Tw***ght series about than valuing fetishism over appreciation of art and good entertainment?
You know, this was pretty much my thought process upon going through Heavy Rain recently. It’s got a decent enough story for a video game, but it bills itself as an “interactive movie”, and when you compare to something like, say, Seven or Zodiac or whatever, it doesn’t hold up at all. (Especially considering the voice acting is so atrocious. The whole isn’t quite Garzey’s Wing bad, but a few of the actors would have blended in, especially the characters with inexplicable French accents.)
Anyway, I like Baccano! a lot and didn’t really have this problem with it, but then again, I think I and many others unconsciously compare series only to others within its medium unless there are other circumstances (like an adaptation or whatever). Even with the gangsters and whatnot, I mostly compared Baccano! to other anime in my head instead of gangster flicks and TV series. Then again, I might not be singing the same tune if I had seen The Wire and/or The Sopranos.
Personally, I wouldn’t compare ‘Baccano’ to the ‘Godfather’ movies – not because they are different mediums, but because they are trying to do different things. The ‘Godfather’ is a serious story that is trying make a serious point (I assume, I haven’t seen those films yet). But ‘Baccano’ is just trying to have fun, and succeeds better than most anime (or live action works, I think) by throwing off the constraints of established tropes, and through its clever narrative structure.
Personally, I find the (overused) comparison to early Guy Ritchie movies more apt, because ‘Snatch’ and ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ not only use similarly fractured narrative structures, but have their hearts in the same place. I think Baccano compares favorably to these films, and it is certainly superior to many live action works that can’t acheive the same sense of pure fun that it manages seemingly effortlessly – including Guy Ritchie’s recent ‘Sherlock Holmes’ movie.