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Posts Tagged ‘baccano!’

Legend of Korra First Impressions

So how do I feel about the sequel series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best American animated shows ever?

Korra and Tenzin

Yes, it’s that good.  And the first episode is free, so you don’t have an excuse not to watch it.

Highlights: Korra, the new avatar, is brilliant.  The series creators have maintained the moral center of the world, while updating it and deploying a whole new cast.  World design: amazing! (As always with this team.)  Sound: wonderful!  Fight choreography: stunning!

A more subtle take, for those of you familiar with the first show: This series narrows the gap between the protagonist and the adult world.  In the original Avatar series, the main characters were kids, and the gulf between them and the adult world was absolute.  The adults were immutable forces: Iroh has a powerful history, but it’s hard to imagine him as a boy, or how he felt about his father.  He doesn’t feel contingent, or unsettled, though he does have regrets.  Ozai, Bumi, Jeong Jeong, Pakku, etc. have all similarly found their place in the world.  Aang, Katara, and Sokka are trying to figure out what to do with the world they’ve inherited from this older generation.

At 17, Korra is (intentionally, I think) older than any of the main characters in A:TLA, and is as a result closer to the adult world from the beginning.  She’s become strong, but she still has to learn how to be a part of society.  Meanwhile Tenzin, her airbending trainer, and Lin, the chief of police in Republic City, are both in late middle age–Tenzin, despite being set up as the aged Kung Fu Master of the show, is younger by a decade than any of the members of the White Lotus sect in A:TLA.  The first episode shows Korra discovering Republic City and trying to figure out how to be a part of this weird new world–everything she tries in the city turns out wrong somehow.  Meanwhile, we see just enough of Tenzin to tell that he feels the same way: still striving after thirty years to build and uphold the world his father left him.  They’re both uncertain, imperfect characters in moments of transition, and they’re both trying to do their best by the world with which they feel they’ve been entrusted.  I get the sense that each of them will be growing a lot over the next two seasons, and that dynamic feels fresh and full of possibility.  The first show passes down a powerful inheritance; this new setup stands to build upon that inheritance.

Anyone who falls in love with the 1920s gangsterland vibe of the series, by the way, should check out (the considerably bloodier) Baccano!, as well as Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, which influenced A:TLA.

Baccano! – or, Yay! There’s no Main Character!

I don’t watch TV much.  Never had cable or TV reception in my house, so I never got in the habit.

Anime was the one exception for a while – Bastard! hooked me, Cowboy Bebop reeled me in, and Kenshin landed me.  And, of course, I watched Evangelion and felt like Anno had written me a personal letter.

(That last sentence gave you the wrong impression about me, so let me explain: that sense you get, watching Eva, like you want to shake Shinji until he feels better?  That’s the right sense.  He’s deeply depressed for most of the show, and the story tells of his, and everyone else’s, struggle against not only loneliness but the fear of loneliness, the desperate fight to be your own person without cutting yourself off from the universe.  Shinji’s a boy with serious problems, surrounded by people who want to help – but have serious problems of their own.  Eva is a realistic look at the dark, scary sides of adolescence, and both endings are brilliant in their own crazy way.   So there.)

Anyway, after college I fell a bit out of love with anime, largely because I was getting tired of the Main Character.  I watched a lot of shonen stuff – boy’s stories – and man, some days it seems like you can’t throw a shoe in anime without four plucky young protagonists running up to challenge you to a shoe throwing duel, to prove that they’re THE GREATEST SHOE THROWER IN THE WHOLE WOOORLD!

It gets old.

I stumbled into Baccano! via the wonderful time-sink that is TV Tropes – Gangsters? Anime? New York City? Broken chronology?  Intersecting narratives?  Yes please.  Six episodes in, I’m a bit infatuated.

Why?  Well, all of the above – plus, there’s no Main Character.  The plot’s shifting between 6 or 7 groups of characters, each with their own (sometimes weird) moral universe.  Even the best are pretty flawed (‘cept for maybe Firo), but, thank the Maker, nobody’s running around trying to be the Best Gangster in All History!!1one.

Except for Ladd Russo, and he’s a mass-murdering lunatic.

In fact, the first six or seven episodes are a sort of commentary on Generic Anime Plotting.  The series has a frame narrative in which an information broker and his junior assistant are chatting about how to tell the story of these connected events – and they spend half of the first episode arguing about who the main character might be without reaching a conclusion.  Everyone is going about their own story, and the stories intersect, sometimes chaotically – at one point three different people try to hijack the same train! – and the consequences are fascinating, weird, and exciting to watch.

Sort of like real life, only with gangsters, immortal alchemists, demons(?), death cultists, spy-reporters, and murdering lunatics.

So, if you’re at all like me and a bit tired of the nice kid trying to be the Best Sumo Sushi Master In The World, check out Baccano!

Just be ready for the blood, because there’s a lot of it.