While waiting for Ghost Hound and Moyashimon, I’ve been watching Baccano! Four episodes in I’m beginning to get some idea of the story. The series could be first-rate, or it could be a massive trainwreck (in more than one sense). We’ll see.
It’s set in Prohibition-era America. The characters cover a wide ethnic range — can you name any other anime featuring a Czeslaw? — though quasi-Italian names predominate. A lot of them are mobsters from the Mafia and the Camorra. Many, if not most of them, are immortal. You can shoot them full of bullets and cut them up, but in a little while the blood oozes back into the bodies, severed fingers and heads reattach themselves, and wounds magically heal without a trace. Some of them are pretty nasty — one is a outright psychopath who favors white suits because splatters of blood show up so brightly. Others seem nice enough.
The story focuses on the events on the train the Flying Pussyfoot ((Originally the Grand Punk Railroad, if I’m interpreting the book titles correctly.)) between Chicago and New York. Something is hidden on the train, perhaps a couple of bottles of immortality elixer, perhaps a bomb. The passengers include many mobsters and many immortals. There are also Isaac and Miria (the former played by Masaya Onosaka at his most clownish), a pair of enthusiastic nitwits to complicate the already complex proceedings. Bloody hijinks ensue.
Ordinarily a show this violent wouldn’t interest me, and if the narrative were presented in straightforward fashion I would have quit after the first episode. Baccano!‘s novelty is that the story is is told in bits and pieces, skipping backward and forward in the years from 1930 to 1932. Following the plot is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Even if the series is ultimately disappointing, there is still the pleasure of fitting the pieces together.
The story might be worthwhile. Baccano! is based on a series of light novels, and that is often a good sign. The main problem, aside from the level of violence, is that we never spend much time with any one character. Thus far, most are one-dimensional, though a few of the quieter ones hint at some complexity.
I doubt that Baccano! will ever have much of a following. It expects the viewer to pay close attention and remember what he sees, and some of it is brutal — when I rewatch the series, there are several sections I’ll skip. Still, on the basis of the first four episides, I’d rate it the second-best series from the summer that I’ve sampled, after Mononoke.
The Wikipedia page focuses more on the novels than the anime, but it does have a list of characters that might be helpful to keep on hand while watching. There are no serious spoilers there yet, though that might change.