And the way the narrative twists, turns, jumps back and forth, and generally has an anarchic life of its own will probably leave you breathless. Added into the mix are a bunch of immortals, and alchemists searching for the secret of eternal life, stretching all the way from the 18th Century to the 21st. There is a mafia turf war in 1930, there is the Flying Pussyfoot incident a year later, and then there is a young girl’s search for her brother in 1932. On the face of it, Baccano! is a Prohibition era crime story, broadly concerned with three events that link a cavalcade of characters together in unexpected ways. It has a back and forth, piecemeal approach to storytelling that makes Tarantino movies look simple and straightforward. It’s a continuity nightmare, a fractured narrative set across several years, featuring countless characters. You’re probably expecting a narrative at this point, an explanation, summary, or brief précis of what this show is all about. My opinion on the show hasn’t changed, so that text is recycled from my DVD review and presented in italics. They actually sold out of the big, chunky premium edition, and I wound up picking up this ‘budget’ edition instead, which collects all three discs into just one Blu-ray Amaray case.īut it is still just an SD anime, right? It can’t look much different from those DVDs, right? You’d be surprised. Baccano! was released on Blu-ray in Japan, in both English and Japanese, with English and Japanese subtitles, and Aniplex imported those discs and repackaged them for the US market. They sell comparatively small numbers to a niche within a niche audience, those who will pay a premium for the shows that they really want, and where selling just a few hundred copies is still enough to turn a profit. It’s a compromise to cater for the Japanese idea of a show’s value, a seemingly fair balance. Aniplex US do premium releases of anime, selling at prices that make Western anime fans feel faint, but still look ridiculously cheap to Japanese fans. Baccano! is an anime of the old school, in that it is animated in SD resolution, but when I heard that Aniplex US was re-releasing the show on Blu-ray, I was more than interested.

Baccano english dub subtitles