Durarara!! Anime Review

Quick Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2011-09-08 (updated 2012-06-16)
• 4 stars out of 5 (?)

Durarara!! is a quirky, genre-defying yarn set in hip, urban Ikebukuro and well-versed in Internet culture. It starts out at a much more leisurely pace than its Prohibition-era cousin Baccano, although it's still packed with characters and loosely-intertwined stories. This slowly builds to a dense knot of twisted relationships, crazy backstories, wild plans, and all-around entertaining comedic-dramatic-exciting-adventure. The mix of genres defies easy categorization, but it's all kinds of fun to watch. And then the series launches into its second season with some of the most hilariously, lovably, jaw-droppingly incongruent stuff imaginable, the sort of thing you have to see to believe. This is quickly overlapped with what looks to be an even crazier cacophony of intertwining plots building to an even wilder finale.

It's something of a slow-motion shock, then, when the closing third devolves into a three-way sea of brooding adolescent angst with some additional scale and weirdness added for flavor. It's not that the shoujo-style tragedy of errors, full of dark pasts and misunderstandings, can't be entertaining. It's not even that Durarara!! does a bad job of it. It's just that the show had been roaring along with such magnificently warped, sporadically-hilarious gusto that the lead-in to the finale feels mundane, bleak, and downright slow in comparison.

Durarara!! is still a roundly entertaining and thoroughly memorable show that I highly recommend, it's just a shame the end doesn't live up to the incredibly high standard it sets for itself.

Read the full-length review...

Full Review

• Reviewer: Marc
• Review Date: 2011-09-08 (updated 2012-06-16)
• 4 stars out of 5 (?)

Durarara!! is a heck of a show. A mix of genres that defies easy categorization, it's packed with characters and loosely-intertwined stories that slowly build to a dense knot of twisted relationships, wild plans, supernatural goings-on, and all-around entertaining comedic-dramatic-exciting-adventure. Its only fault is that it sets an exceedingly high standard for itself in the first two thirds, then fails to live up to it in the final story arc, but it's still a wild--and wildly entertaining--ride.

Durarara!! is sort of a cousin to the Prohibition-era spectacle Baccano!--also written by Ryohgo Narita and set in a very different time and place in the same world. It's very much its own series, though; rest assured that familiarity with Baccano! is by no means necessary (or expected).¹

Things start out at a relatively leisurely pace; the first episode is a a who's-who tour of the huge cast of colorful Ikebukuro movers-and-shakers from the perspective of a small-town high school kid destined for big things. The second episode is a solid downer that establishes the villain by having him spend an entire episode literally trying to talk a depressed girl to death. Do not let that turn you off--it foreshadows the final story arc a bit, but is otherwise out of place in this cheerfully crazy series.

Once it gets underway, Durarara!! has a quirky, offbeat sense of humor that won't quit, and manages to feel approachable and unpretentious despite its hip, urban locale and comfortable familiarity with Internet culture. It's also very human--for all the crazy stuff going on, it's heavily character-driven and full of heart. The genre-defying blend of magnificently warped romance, crazy backstories (everybody has a skeleton in the closet), and deadpan hilarity just keeps getting better--every time the show does something so marvelously incongruent that you think it couldn't possibly top it, it proves you wrong, right up through the introductory part of the second season, which is pure entertainment magic.

It's something of a slow-motion shock, then, when the closing third devolves into a three-way sea of brooding adolescent angst with some additional scale and supernatural seasoning.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with adolescent angst--Durarara!! plays the somewhat shoujo-style game of tragic misunderstandings fairly well. It even does a good job of making something entertaining of what is essentially several straight episodes spent investigating who's doing what, and why--stuff the viewer already more or less knows.

Part of the issue is pacing, or lack thereof; it sprints gleefully through the first two thirds only to peter out and mope around for most of the incongruently down and slow-moving closing third. Mostly, though, it's that something so straightforward and, frankly, un-awesome comes as a catastrophic letdown after what Durarara!! had just finished pulling off. Merely good isn't nearly good enough for this series. The finale does leave a decent taste in your mouth, but it's way too long in coming.

Phrased more colorfully, Durarara!! demonstrates conclusively that it's on a first-name basis with Awesome and his buddy That Did Not Just Happen, but decides to hang out with Adolescent Angst for almost the entire endgame.

So that's what Durarara!! does wrong. Now I'll back up to the beginning and explain what it does oh-so-right.

The real beauty of Durarara!! starts as soon as it's done with the introductory episodes, when it declares that it has every intention of defying expectations and giving you about as much anime entertainment as is possible.

Now, it's hard to say too much more without spoiling some of the surprise, which seems a pity since the quirks are so deliciously unexpected. So, if you haven't already seen it and want to fully savor the experience, just take my word for it, stop reading right now, and go and watch at least through episode four. If you haven't started to fall in love with the series by that point, forget it. If you have, you're welcome. As for those who don't care about spoilers:

It turns out phantom motorcycle rider Celty--occasionally-spotted urban legend of Ikebukuro--is a modern-day headless horseman.² Cool. And one of the good guys. Even better. At that point, I found myself musing--as I sometimes do--"Wouldn't it be awesome if the headless horseman was a main character?"

Well, Durarara!! is one of those rare shows that hears the audience thinking that and answers, "Yes, yes it would." Not only a main character, arguably the main character for the entire first half. And you know what? It is awesome. In both the literal and colloquial sense--awe-inspiringly wild, incongruent, hilarious, and endearing,³ and flat-out, jaw-droppingly awesome.

There are plenty of other wonderfully quirky characters, too: A cheerful, geeky back-alley plastic surgeon, a mafia enforcer with a sense of justice whose conversational repertoire mostly consists of hitting people with street signs, a troupe of slightly unhinged hardcore geeks with a minibus and an in-joke anime reference for every situation, and two of the most clinically insane lovebirds you could hope to never meet. And that's just a start.

On that note, one of the less dramatic things that distinguishes Durarara!! is its willingness to let people talk. It's refreshing to see dialogue given priority over action when appropriate, and it has the added twist of a lot of the conversations going on in an internet chat room that many of the characters frequent. This is more entertaining than it sounds--the face-to-face conversations are almost always colorful (plus look for hilarious unrelated stuff going on in the background), and the chat sessions are succinct and flavorfully-written.⁴ The only flaw in this (apart from the slow endgame, which has more to do with structure than dialog-focus) is the tendency to let insane villain rants go on a little too long, but that doesn't happen often.

The series is character-driven, but the plot is a nicely-intertwined cacophony involving one evil pharmaceutical corporation, several street gangs, a legendary cursed sword, local organized crime, and a scheme to bring about Armageddon. For all that's going on, it's not unnecessarily difficult to follow, and makes for a satisfying yarn.⁵

The spectacular visuals, by auteur studio Brain's Base (who also gave Baccano! its look), are beautiful and unfailingly creative without seeming pretentious or unnecessarily flashy. There's an artistic flair to the camera work that gives even the most straightforward scenes a distinctive feel--slightly-off angles and perspectives subtly play with the viewer's sense of balance and place. It also cleverly embraces the anime tendency to draw unimportant background characters crudely; in the many crowd shots unimportant passerby are grey sketches. Rather than being distracting or feeling like a budget-induced cop-out, this does a remarkably good job of drawing the viewer's focus without resorting to artificially empty streets, and captures a bit of the alienation of city life.

The backgrounds are utterly gorgeous. Full of realistic urban detail and Ikebukuro flavor, the deft use of rich color and beautiful lighting set the ever-changing mood. This is quite a contrast with the simple linework and flat coloring of the character art, which gets its own life from the exceptional character animation. The characters have so much personality in no small part because of the distinctive ways in which they move, mixing lifelike gestures with some extra pizzaz. Then there's Celty; despite the lack of a head, she has every bit as much emotion and personality as the rest of the cast. As a fan of good character animation, she alone was worth watching the show for.

Speaking of Celty, she has a voice (though only we get to hear it--she communicates via PDA), one of the better ones in an all-around stellar Japanese cast. The comic timing is sharp, every one of the characters has a distinctive and memorable voice, and the acting is as good in the dramatic parts as the swaths of deadpan comedy. The acting also tells much of the story in a more literal sense; many episodes are narrated by one character or another, adding a great deal of personality and variety to individual sections.

Makoto Yoshimori's music is the final component, and, for a score with a relatively small number of unique tunes, it does an exceedingly good job of holding scenes together. The series has several funky musical cues--most memorable a cute little schoolyard-style piano and recorder tune--that it pulls out at just the right moment to complement (or juxtapose amusingly with) the onscreen action. The opening and end themes--two each--are a nice selection of punchy rock. The first opening is particularly catchy.

Each of these individual elements--clever musical score, cleverer visuals, exceptional acting, a cast of characters as large as it is varied and fun, a sense of humor by turns wacky and deadpan, and a twisting, multi-layered story--weave together into a unique and tremendously entertaining whole. Even if the final story arc isn't as much fun as everything up to that point has you craving, Durarara!! is still entirely worth watching.

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Related Recommendations

As different as Durarara!! is from Baccano, that's still by far the closest series in terms of multi-genre, massive-cast entertainment. Samurai Champloo is also quite similar in some ways, although it's set in a less-concrete, urban-hip take on the Edo period. Cowboy Bebop is another slickly-produced series that takes a different approach to the multi-genre thing (every episode is a different genre, rather than the whole series being all of them mashed together). You might also have a look at Eden of the East for a series that is set in a roughly-real, but very different-feeling modern Japan, has very high production values, and, while much more serious on average, also dabbles in comedy and drama mixed closely together.