3 Episode Taste Test: Durarara!!

Within moments of the first epis­ode, Dur­arara!!‘s con­nec­tion to Bac­cano! is obvi­ous: brightly col­oured eye­c­atches punc­tu­at­ing the open­ing and enu­mer­at­ing the size­able cast. Shar­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant por­tion of its predecessor’s pro­duc­tion team, dir­ector and char­ac­ter designer included, it like­wise refuses to be pigeon holed into a single genre instead throw­ing its weight behind its eclectic char­ac­ters and pacing. Unlike its pre­de­cessor how­ever, every­one intro­duced in the first three epis­odes is fas­cin­at­ing in isol­a­tion, but fizz with chem­istry when the ensemble cast collide.

“the deadly ser­i­ous kid­nap­ping of Magenta is in stark con­trast to the blonde bar­tender who punches a gentleman’s clothes off”

Set in Ikebukuro, Mikado Ryugam­ine arrives at the train sta­tion after being invited by his friend to attend the local high school. Eager to be part of the city life, Masaomi Kida shows the some­what naive Mikado around, intro­du­cing him to friends and warn­ing him of the dangers that the enter­tain­ment dis­trict of Tokyo holds. Weav­ing through the busy night time streets, they pass a girl meet­ing up with a man she has sup­posedly spoken to online. Events spiral out of her con­trol and things look bleak until one of Ikebukuro’s urban myths arrives: the Head­less Rider — an enig­matic driver of a jet black motor­cycle. Story threads diverge and coalesce with equal fre­quency as more oddball char­ac­ters are intro­duced includ­ing a Rus­sian giant hawk­ing sushi, a mon­strously strong bar­tender and a whim­sic­ally vicious young man.

Bac­cano!, while a tech­nic­ally pro­fi­cient series lacked empathy for its cast, present­ing them as jagged cari­ca­tures with crazy phrases or super­hu­man abil­it­ies rather than char­ac­ters ripe for explor­a­tion. This ensured that although enter­tain­ing, it had no after taste or mean­ing­ful impact, drift­ing out of mind as soon as it had com­pleted. Dur­arara!!, per­haps as a res­ult of its second exclam­a­tion point, avoids this by focus­ing on story first and off-the-wall per­son­al­it­ies second. The first three epis­odes touch upon all of the cast fea­tured in the splen­didly pitched open­ing, but smartly reduces many of their intro­duc­tions to cameos and con­cen­trates on ground­ing the story with Mikado first then gradu­ally unfold­ing the super­nat­ural under­tones. This approach mit­ig­ates the over­load com­mon with a bar­rage of names and ter­min­o­logy and keeps the storytelling smooth and enticing.

First epis­ode syn­drome strikes again with a per­cept­ible shift in nar­rat­ive style from the second epis­ode onwards, favour­ing a more cohes­ive plot as opposed to the open­ing episode’s bite-size stor­ies. What elev­ates the show over its peers though is that it never for­gets how to have fun within its own set­ting: the deadly ser­i­ous kid­nap­ping of Magenta is in stark con­trast to the blonde bar­tender who punches a gentleman’s clothes off; the blatantly paranor­mal, scythe-wielding head­less rider versus the freak­ishly strong Rus­sian sushi tout. Enter­tain­ment is always at the fore whether that’s sym­pathy for the con­tinu­ously betrayed school­girl or awe at a par­tic­u­larly one-sided street­fight; in the first three epis­odes the series never strays from that approach.

If Dur­arara!! con­tin­ues the way it sets out, it could swiftly become one of the quir­ki­est releases of the sea­son. At first blush the team behind it appear to have learned from their pre­vi­ous pro­ject by avoid­ing entan­gle­ment through too numer­ous a cast and too flimsy a plot; how­ever the remain­ing nine epis­odes will reveal whether a story can be both developed and com­pleted with the same gump­tion the rest of the pro­duc­tion demon­strates. The most dis­rupt­ive ele­ments of the open­ing three epis­odes — the near con­stant nar­ra­tion and the con­fus­ing inter­net chat­room for­ays — could well prove a con­stant niggle as the series pro­gresses, non­ethe­less they stand as slight speed­bumps on an oth­er­wise superbly enjoy­able intro­duc­tion to the series. ¶