A little disappointing was the introduction of a new character, Graham Specter, who appears to be Ladd Russo redux, similarly verbose and psychopathic, and prone to swinging a skull-crushing wrench around with abandon. The back and forth of their earlier episodes is gone now, or rather much reduced, although there are still twists and turns and surprises. It turns out that it wasn’t as wrapped up as I thought, as there were still plenty of loose ends to tie up. The first time I saw them on DVD, I was curious to see where the story would go after being wrapped up in the first thirteen. I just saw the television run of Baccano! originally, and this set has the three bonus episodes that were released straight to disc in Japan. The only nitpick might be a little digital banding around point light sources, such as candles, but even that is far less than in many native HD anime on Blu-ray. This is the best SD upscale I have yet seen. It is an SD show, but the upscale is sympathetically accomplished, detail maintained, while presenting character artwork with smooth lines, without aliasing or visible compression.
Baccano! may be an SD show up-scaled to HD, but the difference between it and the DVD version, is still as drastic as the difference between a native HD show presented on DVD and Blu-ray. But the Blu-ray format handles that kind of particulate motion very well, and you don’t have to deal with compression artefacts here. But it’s a good sort of breathless.Īlso Baccano! tends to have locations and settings that don’t deal well with compression, there’s use of a lot of hazy light, while episode 2, which introduced the Flying Pussyfoot at the platform enveloped in steam, or episode 7, set aboard the fog shrouded and rain soaked Advenna Avis, really broke the DVD compression algorithms. 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.
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