neko's thinkbox

Without getting any warm-up on anime after over a month, I immediately start with Baccano! After the first watch… Hmm. My first reaction would be: confused. Yeah, it was somewhat confusing throughout the whole episode. It was a confusing, but also amusing randomness.

  

I already was a bit intrigued before watching Baccano. “Just what could it be about?”, I kept asking myself. Good, I picked up that suggestion from Totali, and immediately downloaded the episodes while checking out some pictures on image boards. Unlike most of the other anime series with suggestive titles and pictures though, Baccano didn’t really reveal me much about its main subject. I figured out the title was Italian though (since there is an Italian pizzeria in town where I often hear that word). The etymology of the word reminded me of the french “vacarme”, which means “noise”. Hmm, noise.

The opening sure caught my attention. Not only because of the catchy tune, but I also found it quite cool getting a quick introduction of the many different protagonists, even if it’s quite difficult to remember 17 names and faces at once… Couldn’t instantly identify any of those in the anime.
Also, the opening didn’t really show me what this anime was about – there was a lot of randomness. Okay, I got a hint on the setting, looked like some early 50’s stuff in the US, with the stereotypical Italian mafia clans. Anything else? Not at first. After rewatching the opening a few times, I noticed that all of those seemingly unrelated happenings were all linked by one specific thing between each other, like a falling bottle gets caught in the next sequence, a flying dart becomes a knife, etc. I’d never have imagine that this would propagate into the episode as well. Noise, huh. But it looked more like comedy than some serious stuff. At first only.

  

It starts off with a little girl browsing through a desk full of books, when the vice director of some newspaper comes in and lectures her about how to interpret and relay all kinds of information. They get into a discussion about some sort of story that could have happened in November 1930, but apparently started in 1711, with a ship, a train (the Flying Pussyfoot, hilarious name), and a lot of people. Huh. A lot of different scenes are shown, where some guy gets his ear cut, a little boy gets a head shot, mafia members doing a hit-and-run on a library, killing a few people… All in all, loads of flowing blood.
The girl suggests the main hero of the story being a young boy giving money to a beggar who attacks him with a knife from behind a few seconds later… The boy intercepts the attack and gets two of his fingers cut off, only to see the blood flow back into the open wound and the fingers fly back to stick to their original place, the hand?

  

I’m not sure I understood anything, but it seems to me like the main mafia clans are the Gandors, the Martillos, and the Runoratas… Well, exactly as one would expect from opposing mafias, they’re all killing each other. The henchmen of the ones spread the hate amongst their troops, the others just beat the pulp out of their enemies (and Tic sure can handle the scissors well) – yeah, never has lynching made you so cool than during that period. Hit-and-runs aren’t cliché at all, like the one in front of the library, and usually you would expect no survivors. But we’re talking about Baccano. Luck and Firo, who should be dead by that rain of bullets, instantly regenerate. Firo even manages to capture one of their aggressors… Talk about weird.

Another scene, they find a lot of corpses beneath a railroad, but it turned out that two of those were still alive. Yet another scene, that guy who got his ear cut at the beginning had an intact ear, because it regenerated as well. The kid who got his head blown off has his head back in its right place and mumbles about someone being an useless guy. Some other guy standing on a train says he’ll find someone. Some woman is sleeping on a wooden box that is drifting off in some river. Firo, Maiza and Eniss are waiting at the train station for another group, Isaac and Miria. And some boy carrying some luggage appeared.

  

…Yes, I could have named them all if I compared them to the opening. But that would take me very long, and… I don’t know if that would solve my confusion even one bit. Man. That’s the pinnacle of randomness. Not only are there a whole bunch of characters at once, but there isn’t even the slightest hint why everything happens like that. Well, maybe there is. I think I figured out that there must be some kind of curse or so, I mean, there are a lot of people who can regenerate to their normal state, no matter how badly injured they are, and there must be some kind of link between all of those. Maybe… it’s a bit like in “Heroes” (that one US series), where they all have some kind of superhuman powers but don’t know that there are more people that also have those… But in Baccano, I don’t really see the point of it all yet, because it’s just much too random. The incoherence between the different scenes is very intriguing, but also quite interesting at the same time.

The animation looks solid, nothing too thrilling, saw some CG’ed elements, yeah it’s okay. In contrast to the funny Santa Claus part at the beginning of the opening, I was surprised to see a lot of graphical content – that boy getting his head shot for instance, lots of blood, or that one witty scene where that guy who fell off the train waved around with his bare arm bone covered with blood. Yummy. Character design looks decent as well. As I said, I had expects some kind of comedy or slapstick over those Italian mafias, but until now, I don’t know if it turned out as I expected. I really need to watch the second episode to maybe get a better hold of the story… I just hope it won’t be as random as this episode. That would greatly help me to make my future Baccano entries less random as well…