Baccano!
バッカーノ！
Baccano! (2007) is a supernatural mystery and action thriller anime series spanning 16 episodes, produced by Brain's Base and based on the light novel series by Ryohgo Narita. Kinetic, chaotic, and gloriously confident in its own construction, it is one of the most distinctive non-linear narrative anime ever made — a Tarantino-esque ensemble thriller that treats chronology as an obstacle rather than a courtesy.
- Aired
- Jul 27, 2007 to Nov 2, 2007
- Premiered
- Summer 2007
- Source
- Light novel
- Rating
- R - 17+ (violence & profanity)
The Story
There is no single protagonist. There is no single timeline. There is barely a single genre.
Baccano! weaves together three primary time periods — 1711, 1930, and 1931 — across the streets of Prohibition-era New York and the length of a transcontinental train called the Flying Pussyfoot, where something has gone catastrophically, bloodily wrong. The connecting thread is an alchemical elixir of immortality — who made it, who possesses it, who wants it, and what a group of beings who cannot die choose to do with eternity.
The cast is enormous and deliberately overwhelming: feuding mafia families, a pair of cheerfully amoral thieves, a Rail Tracer that may or may not be a supernatural entity, a homunculus, a torturer who enjoys his work rather too much, and somewhere in 1711, a ship full of alchemists making a bargain they do not fully understand. The series drops you into the middle of all of it simultaneously and trusts you to find your footing.
What makes Baccano! exceptional as a non-linear mystery thriller is that the shuffled chronology is not a stylistic affectation — it is the point. Characters who seem peripheral become central. Events that appeared to be causes turn out to be consequences. The immortality mystery and the train massacre and the street-level gang war are not separate stories but facets of the same collision, and watching the connections snap into place is one of anime's great structural pleasures.
Themes
Immortality and Identity — What a person becomes when consequence is removed from the equation
Chaos and Interconnection — The series proposes that in a sufficiently dense web of human activity, everything eventually touches everything else
Violence and Comedy — Baccano! holds genuine brutality and absurdist humor in simultaneous suspension, and the tension between them is part of what makes it so alive
Fate Without Destiny — Nobody in this story was supposed to end up where they did, and that is precisely what makes it interesting
Legacy
Baccano! occupies a beloved and singular position in the action thriller anime landscape — a series that rewards rewatching more than almost any other, because the second time through every scene is doing double or triple the work you initially recognized. For fans of ensemble mystery storytelling, non-linear narrative anime, and the aesthetic of Prohibition-era crime fiction, it remains an exhilarating and irreplaceable experience.