Dual exclamation points and all.
Durarara!!, from the gang who brought us the also highly recommended Baccano, is about a dullahan working as a courier in modern-day Ikebukuro in Tokyo while seeking her stolen head.
The head games are epic, up there with Death Note and Code Geass.
The animation is superb, especially the magnificently accurate representations of Ikebukuro. (Those Brain's Base guys do good work.)
And the music! As epic as the head games! Things I was particularly impressed with:
- The use of celtic-influenced themes in honor of Irish Celty
- Action themes that were fitted to the length and pacing of the action scenes (unlike in, say, certain shounen anime where there's a predefined set of themes that are inserted full-length into action scenes even if they're a little too soon or run a little too long; it's doubtless one of the benefits of only making a single season)
There's a delicious heap of in-jokes. Books and anime and manga and Tokyo and otaku and... Like the main character's password for the network site is baccano. And when we first meet the most obvious otaku characters, they're carrying a standee of Holo from Spice and Wolf; later, they offer to torture a guy using methods from whichever manga he chooses.
And the bad guy is ambitiously, delightedly psychopathic. I'm impressed.
I seriously wanna hang out with the people that create these characters. They're twisted in all the good ways.
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