Durarara!!...Almost lost my head over it

Durarara!!

Some of you may know Durarara!! or Drrr!, either from the manga which has been around for a few years or the English dub anime by Aniplex which has been out since January 2011, so it is not a new series of the season. But since the show began its U.S. broadcast with Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block on June 26^th 2011, and maybe like me, it’s first time you’re ever seeing it, I decided to do a review. So here we go, and as usual it contains SPOILERS

This show starts off simply enough. A young boy, Mikado Ryūgamine (right), bored with his life in his quiet town immediately accepts the invitation of his childhood friend to transfer to his high school in the big city, Ikebukuro, Tokyo. So far nothing strange about that. Mikado is a quiet sort of kid, so when he finally arrives in the city he is a little intimidated, but thanks to his slightly obnoxious old friend, Masaomi Kida (left), he begins to learn the ropes of Ikebukuro and he realizes that some of the city’s people are not as normal as they seem. A superhuman strong man with a short fuse, a mad scientist in love with his “monster”, mysterious gangs and that’s not even half of it. Yeah, it’s getting a little out there. And the bizarre cherry to top the weird ice cream is the city has a headless motorcycle riding urban legend called the “Black Rider”, who is seen on a regular basis driving around the city doing jobs for people who hire her.

Sooo…yeah…This show is obviously not so simple. And I think that’s the main charm of this series: Nothing is ever as it seems. This show is built around a cast of some of the strangest characters I have ever seen in an anime, but you never see it coming because they are placed in this ordinary, slice of life type of atmosphere that makes the most surreal thing almost natural. Even the characters are not as alarmed as they should be by a headless rider roaming the city who uses her shadows as a weapon, or the fact that they could be hit by flying soda dispensers at any time.

Another aspect I like about this anime is the shared narrative. Each character gets equal time to tell their story, and you slowly realize how all their lives intertwine and how they all contribute to the greater plot. It’s interesting to see different POVs of the same story going on around them, and it is ingenious how the writers of this show make them all fit together so well. It’s a brain twister sometimes, not as intricate as Deathnote, but still deliciously mysterious.

Celty with helmet

But don’t ever think that you’ve got a character figured out, because they all have more layers than an onion. That boy who comes on the first day of school just to say he was never coming back could be a psycho in love with a head, the happy go lucky Kida secretly may be the ex-leader of a gang, or even Mikado who appears to be a helpless spectator of all the madness around him, an outsider, can turn out to be more part of the city than you would believe. But because they are all so unusual, you never know what part they will play, making the plot delightfully unpredictable and exciting. Even the Black Rider Celty, who is an ancient Grim Reaper like creature from Irish legend, has an unexpected character which is hard to wrap your mind around. She is ready to cut off someone's head if she has to, but as the show progresses you see she can be friendly, sensitive, shy, and has an odd fear of aliens invading (??) 

Celty without helmet

Of course it being a supernatural anime there’s gotta be the creepy element. Underneath the simple round-headed no-nose drawings, light background piano playing and humorous dialogue, there is a layer of darkness, which in contrast can be very disturbing. There’s kidnapping, murders, obsession and human experimentation, and these dark undertones are always there, but sometimes you forget because of the normal atmosphere which hides it like a fog. Though this show does not let you ignore it for long. Every episode contains something to remind you that, like Celty, underneath the motorcycle helmet of Durarara there are shadows.

For those of you who want a lot of flash, this is not the anime for you. The action scenes are few and far apart, and if you aren’t willing to wait, you may lose interest.  Some may think it’s boring because there are many parts where you will have to really listen and observe the stories being told, and you will have to put them together like pieces in a puzzle. Because of this I found it a little confusing, slow paced and I sometimes became impatient when I did not see the point, but the good thing about this show is, even if you don’t get the big picture right away, you can still sit back and enjoy the mini stories weaved in there.

I give Durarara 3 out of 5. The art needed to be brighter and better detailed so it did not look so dull and cartoonish, and the plot sometimes lost momentum for too long. Despite that, I dug it, mainly because it never failed to leave me guessing. After watching so many animes and seeing the same tired plots being recycled over and over again, a show like Durarara is refreshing and definitely worthy as a satisfying main course.