Azraled: Time to Review Baccano! With less cursing!

Baccano time!

Sitting here trying to figure out how to begin this review was probably the hardest part about starting it. I have no idea where to begin and where to end the talk about Baccano. The thought of not knowing where this review would end up quickly became the perfectly ironic start for talking about this crazy, unexpectedly suave Anime.

Baccano was extremely overlooked in 2007 when it was released. By gaining no attention to a large scale audience, it slowly drifted to the island of forgotten Anime. The dub savagely yanked this dead anime out of the trashcan whenever the dub was released and gave it some much needed attention from American audiences. I have asked tons of "Anime nerds" who stumbled across me in real life if they had ever seen Baccano before or even heard of it. To this day I have never met a single person who has said yes to this question in real life, even out of my home town with the most avid Anime watchers. Almost everyone I talk to online gives me the same answer. "No." If you have actually watched Baccano, I estimate you are one in a small group of people to have actually watched the entire series.

Baccano circles around three different stories set in the 1930's, all telling the same story of three different train robberies, all simultaneously happening on the same train (Sheesh that sounds even crazier when it is typed out.) All while a group of people (who you quickly learn about) have their own agenda and goals in mind. Upon telling the story of the robberies in the first episode, the three different time lines go back to lead up to how the mess of the train robberies first came into fruition. Three different time lines which all cross back and forth on top of one another that keep the entire journey leading up to the robberies, which is confusing at first glance. It was at first confusing about what charcter was who and what was going on in the different time lines with each character, which means that it took awhile to fully catch on to the story. After understanding the fast, choppy story telling style I re-watched it to completely understand Baccano in its entirety.

A few warnings to the potential viewers, if you do not like puzzles or trying to figure out what is going on and drawing your own conclusions on Baccano, it is probably not the Anime for you. It feels like it was the entire budget for a 26 episode long anime all packed into 13 episodes and freight-trained directly down your throat for maximum pleasure. All of the characters are extremely likable in some way or another. However, the true masterpiece of this crazy unexpected work of art is that even though all the stories are confusing at first and could not possibly make a logical conclusion, it all beautifully and effortlessly fits the pieces together in a truly remarkable way that I have never experienced in any television series until watching Baccano. There are three stories being told all at once, crammed into 13 episodes. SO GIVE IT A CHANCE, and I will say it again, it might be a little confusing at first, but it turns out as an amazingly executed ending.

Action, comedy, horror, romance and plenty of blood! I was completely hypnotized and awestruck after my second watch through. Baccano literally has everything to make it a masterpiece. I have not been this impressed with an anime since the first time I watched Cowboy Bebop, nor had this much fun watching an Anime in a long time. Baccano made me start laughing one second and scared the shit out of me the next moment. In a nutshell, it has a confusing beginning and a nontraditional ending, the story quickly travels at an alarmingly fast rate towards its conclusion. Large scale events happen in such a short time, that I immediately started it back over to the first episode to better understand the entirety of the series. So much happens in such an artistic, mysterious and action packed way that missing little detail in the beginning shouldn't be uncommon. Baccano was so damn entertaining. The story made it almost impossible to find a scene where something was not advancing the storyline in some way or another, regardless of how insignificant it may have seemed at the time.

I gave the highest rating possible, and have decided that hands down this is my favorite Anime of all time. I would highly recommend this to anybody for the hilariously fun to watch thriller that I know as Baccano.

 

@Azraled There are some parts that I don't understand/need further explaining. The phrase "After being savagely yanked out of the trashcan whenever the dub was released" to me means that the dub saved the anime once immediately upon being put on dvd (but with the implication that it's also multiple times...) and then faded back into obscurity, which makes no sense. Likewise, "all telling the same story of three different train robberies" is a confusing sentence structure. That makes it sound like all of the train robberies were parallel in themes, not time. I do not believe you meant that sentence in that way, but maybe you think there's some common unifying factor.
If there is one major problem with this review, it's the utilization of passive voice. Passive voice is when the object and subject change places. So, I went to the store becomes The store was my destination. Normally, passive voice is sort of frowned upon in a way that I disagree with, but here its problems manifest quite clearly. The ideas sort of flow into each other in a haphazard way, making it hard to tell where one begins and the others end. It is also unclear what modifiers go to what part of the sentence. Basically, passive voice needs short tight sentences or else, the river of your argument becomes a swamp of loosely related ideas. I thought that the use of passive voice might be intentional, that you might be going for a noir style narration, but ultimately it just led to a bunch of confusion.
Reviews are more active in nature because they are formed out of opinions. So while passive voice makes it sound more concrete in limited usage, it sort of makes your review into a consensus if you use it too much, which it really isn't and it hurts your argument.
I might edit this review further.

 

What can i add? Pretty much this. I just couldn't stay interested in it and the style they used just isn't for me. Not my kind of anime and i'm also one of the few people that dislike it.

 

I've had a few friends that just can't keep focused on it for some reason. Never really understood it but I guess how they told the story is a bit on crack lol.