I just watched... Baccano!

Yavar Ahmad enjoys talking a lot and writing a lot, without really using his mind.

Italian for 'ruckus' or 'chaos' 

                All in all, I’d have to say that Baccano! is the single most enjoyable thing I have ever experienced, and this enjoyment is boosted even further by the fact that it’s pretty damn re-watchable. It might not be the most incredibly dramatic and hair-in-your-pants-erect suspenseful, but it’s a ridiculously good watch worthy of the time of anyone ready to stomach the violence and capable of not taking an all-scouring eyeglass of extreme seriousness over everything in existence.

Even a rainbow has many stories.

                At a basic level, ‘characters’ are easy to create and thus it is incredibly easy to create a huge number of characters to fill your cast and be able to swing around a giant billboard that says ‘huge cast, yo’ in order to gather attention. Huge casts of characters are easy, anyone can do and almost everyone does do it. Look around, chances are you’ll look to the left and a bit downward and find something with a huge cast (if you don’t, look down a bit further, then break your leg and go to the doctor and get your cast). It’s everywhere, like a plague of elitists who state that mankind can only eat bread made in a clay oven, present and not in obvious plain sight but an inherent danger to mankind. Another common feature in all these big-cast ensemble things is that almost all are fucking terrible. Look at things like Bleach, that has a cast large enough to circumference Europe if they all stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and I’m not even kidding… and of course, it’s terrible.

The series sure captures the feel of the roaring twenties. 

Personally, I believe that the root of the problem lies not in the fact that the author has a personal desire to set a world record, but in how they flaw the creation process. Well, put simply, the root of the character-explosion lies in the creation of characters with the sole purpose of fulfilling a purpose in the story. This leads to the creation of what I like to call ‘hanger characters’, wherein the hanger is their purpose in the story and you can freely drab anything over them as you like or see fit. ‘Real’ characters, if I may so paradoxically say so, aren’t just created for a single purpose, they aren’t crafted as tools, but as real beings who have their nuances, purposes, aspirations and everything else that fills an ideal character.

Characters exist to fill voids that would float around without them, exist wholeheartedly in the work that they occupy. If they die they re-open that void, which is why people react strongly to deaths, because they don’t like having voids floating about glaring at you with what looks like inscrutable curiosity and a desire you pull you into the great unknown.

It's rather amusing that every character manages to be creepy at some point. 

Where all this walky-talky is taking me is to the fact that Baccano! has a really big cast of characters. It’s not ‘over population of characters crisis’ large but more like ‘that’s really big cast’ large. But the point I’m trying to make while cyclically rambling on like a dog chasing its tail which has a turtle latched onto it which is on fire; is that Baccano! manages to handle its cast incredibly well, to the extent that I’d use it as an argument of how you can flesh out characters minimally and give them just enough style and pizazz to make them all stand out.

Guess who's Jacuzzi!

To top things further, the large cast of characters isn’t the only prismatic draw of the series. In fact, I’d argue that the strongest element of it is the narrative and non-linear storytelling. Chances are strong that you’re going to spend the first several episodes with absolutely no idea regarding what in alchemy’s name is going on. And sure, you might be entertained when action breaks out and characters act dramatic, but you are likely going to be unsure if you truly get what all is going on. Then you proceed further, and as more is unravelled everything you saw in previous episodes begins to click and fall into place, and it is glorious.

If Pulp Fiction was akin to a man in a bouncy castle regarding the linearity of storytelling, then Baccano! is a man in a bouncy castle on a pogo stick with jet packs attached perpendicular to it. If A-B-C-D-E is the standard progression of a story being told in a linear fashion, then the series begins with the E, spends a moment in the A, then goes for a moment to the K, then to the B, then C, then A once again, then C, then B and so on. The further beauty comes in the fact that it all manages to fall together in place, almost as though you threw a million piece jigsaw puzzle into the air and it landed on the ground as the complete Mona Lisa, albeit far more exciting.

Another really interesting thing about the characters is how they all invariably manage to get you invested in them, and moreover managed to not be annoying. There are a lot of members in the cast who, by all means by what is green on this Earth, ought to go down in your memory as some of the most insufferably annoying characters you have ever seen… but manage to subvert this fate. Against all odds, characters like Isaac, Miria and Jacuzzi (yes, there’s a character named that) ought to be infuriatingly annoying, and when I watched the series for the first time my first thought regarding them was ‘these people are going to be very annoying very soon’, but they didn’t. While that’s more understandable for Isaac and Miria, who are so lovably you’d reach a melting point, it’s considerably more surprising for Jacuzzi who… well, watch the series and you’ll understand precisely what I mean.

Isaac and Miria are utterly ridiculously loveable. 

But the characters aren’t all pristine. Eve, while sympathetic, can get a tad grating though she doesn’t overstay her welcome long enough to truly be so, and some of the side characters could have done with more screen time, the Daily Days crew for example. Though, one of the good things I found in repeated viewings is that some of the more ‘bland’ side characters came across as more interesting in subsequent viewings, with Goose being a prime example of that.

Ladd Russo is utterly psychopathic and loveable.  

The series has a unique style in the fact that each character has their own unique features and err… structures, having unique appearances but even unique designs in many cases, to the extent that two characters can almost look like they belong in different series… almost, there’s just enough consistency to make them feel like a part of a cohesive whole. Otherwise visually, the series still stands well today, though it has obviously become far outdone by later series. The entire series is accompanied by a really stylistic jazz soundtrack that really helps bump up the atmosphere, and the ‘feel’ I seem to like talking about these days. The series just FEELS stylish.

There are some mysterious forces at work. 

Though, arguably one of the ‘flaws’ perhaps is the fact that some people might be turned off by how over-the-top it is in places, which I’d agree with if it truly tried to be 100% serious all the time (I’d accredit it as being serious 61.32% of the time, and even then that’s questionable).

For those not in the know, Baccano! can be best summarised as a series based in the Great Depression, and involves the game of booze between Mafia families, alchemy, demons and immortals, to describe it lightly. The most unique thing about Baccano! is how it is told, since it starts with the ending, then goes to the beginning while the middle portion seems to just fuck off somewhere else and keep itself busy, occasionally showing its head.

“I HAVE A GUN IN MY HEART!”