Review for Durarara!! Part 1

Introduction

It's happening on a regular basis now. I watch an anime streamed online, courtesy of sites like Crunchyroll, and upon watching them I determine to own them at the soonest opportunity. With most shows that stream, this becomes a forlorn hope, as I tend to like the niche shows that rarely get licences for home video release. Durarara!! was one of those shows that I fell in love with after just one episode. It's from the makers of Baccano!, so if you appreciate fractured narratives, intertwining character arcs, and complex characterisations, you'll know just why I fell in love with Durarara!! It all looked so good at the start too, as I certainly wasn't the only one. Beez Entertainment licensed it ahead of the rest of the world, and would release it in a subtitled only form to the UK first. I started saving up my pennies. Then Aniplex US licensed it, and announced a dub version. It wouldn't matter, as the Beez release would beat the US release to market by several months, and we were promised an upgrade programme to the eventual dub.


Then the worst happened. The Beez release got delayed to the point where its sub only releases would come out on the same week as the US dub version. It also turned out that there were some minor problems with the UK version's audio and subtitles. On top of that Beez went out of business, which apparently scuppered the eventual dub release. By this point I was resigning myself to importing the rather more expensive Aniplex US release (it is a speciality boutique label that offers limited editions of its titles at premium prices), except they've recently changed their policy regarding export and stopped major retailers from selling outside the US. While all this was going on, Australia's Siren Visual licensed and released a PAL version of Durarara!! with both the subtitled and English dub version, and at a very reasonable price. I treated myself to a birthday present and imported all 3 parts of Durarara!!, but my review pile being what it is, I have waited so long to get to watch it, that Siren Visual are just about to release a complete series collection for the show. The coda to this little licensing nightmare is that it now seems likely that someone else will pick up the licence to Durarara!! in the UK and release it properly here, while just recently Aniplex in Japan has released a very delicious Blu-ray of the series, with English audio and subtitles, that made me wish I'd set aside a few hundred quid more for the show and waited just a tad longer.


How do you even begin to describe a show like Durarara!!? Various lives collide in Tokyo's Ikebukuro, and all kinds of bizarre stuff happens. That isn't exactly the most clear of series descriptions, but Durarara!! isn't a show which predicates clarity. It's a complex interweaving of narrative, various characters' lives are explored, often presenting visions of events from different perspectives with different meanings. The stories mix, intermingle, switch back on themselves, and jump all over the place. And in Durarara!! this is a good thing.


In the nine episodes in this collection we meet Mikado Ryugamine, naive newcomer to Ikebukuro, a country boy attending a big city high school, where he's reunited with his best friend. Initially intimidated by the city, he develops an unhealthy fascination with the local gang culture, particularly the Dollars gang, who have replaced the Yellow Scarves as top dogs. His best friend is Masaomi Kida, who's quick to fill him in on Ikebukuro, who's friendly, and more importantly who to avoid. He's a happy go lucky guy, but one with a dark past. A sort of love triangle develops, a rivalry between the two friends over class rep Anri Sonohara. Anri's in Ikebukuro looking for her friend Mika Harima who has vanished, and avoiding the attentions of a rather creepy teacher. Another schoolgirl, Rio Kamichika gets stressed by her home life, wanders into the wrong part of town at the wrong time of night, gets kidnapped, rescued, and then runs into Izaya Orihara.


Izaya is one of the guys that Mikado's supposed to avoid, something of a sociopath, master manipulator, who likes to poke people just to see how they react. The only guy capable of keeping him vaguely in check is Shizuo Heiwajima, the other guy who Mikado is supposed to avoid. Shizuo is insanely strong, and insanely violent, prone to throwing street furniture at Izaya at every opportunity. The only guy capable of keeping Shizuo in check is the Russian sushi vendor, Simon, but he's a nice guy(the only reason to avoid him is some rather weird sushi). Seiji Yagiri turned up to school on the first day only to drop out. He'd much rather find and be with his girlfriend, a mute girl with a scar around her neck, and whose head doesn't match her body. Seiji's sister runs the family pharmaceutical company, and keeps a girl's head floating in a jar...


And with all this going on, rumours start to fly around Ikebukuro. The social networks are buzzing with gossip. There are teenage girls being abducted to be used in human experimentation. There's a slasher around stalking helpless victims. There's a headless motorbike rider who's going around looking for her missing head. And the Dollars are behind it all. Some of the rumours are even true. The headless biker is called Celty, works as a courier, she shares an apartment with a Yakuza doctor named Shinra Kishitani, and she likes watching the X Files.


This first collection of episodes from Siren Visual collects nine episodes across two discs.

Disc 1
1. Exit 1/First Words
2. Highly Unpredictable
3. Rampant Evil
4. Utterly Alone
5. False Advertising

Disc 2
6. Active Interest
7. Bad-ass Dude
8. Ephemeral Dream
9. Love and Cherish

Picture

Durarara!! gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic PAL transfer with the requisite 4% speedup. The image is clear and sharp throughout, free of any obvious compression, and brings the show's fantastic animation and art design out to good effect. The character designs are very special in this show, while the style offers realism with a fantastic twist that really works well for the story. The animation comes across very smoothly and fluidly on these discs, and other than the faintest sign of aliasing and shimmer, I would have had little to complain about. The thing is that I watched the episodes on a medium sized CRT television, which was just great. It's when I watched an episode upscaled to an HD flat panel display, that that aliasing and shimmer revealed itself to be an annoying touch of edge enhancement. It's selectively applied as well, to the character art and not the background art. Durarara!! is a bold and vibrant visual experience that doesn't need this treatment, but if you watch it on a sub 35" screen, you will hardly notice it.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 English and Japanese stereo, with optional translated subtitles for the Japanese audio, and a signs only track for the English. I love the Japanese track, as that's the way I first saw the show, but I sat down and listened to one episode in English. The dub has been well worth waiting for, as the translators know that they have a special property on their hands, and the actors do their characters full justice. Durarara!! is one show that you can happily watch in either language and get an equivalent experience with both. The show gets some very quirky incidental music, little off tempo riffs and whimsical melodies that counterpoint the drama, and heighten the show's absurdity. The show also gets some absolutely ripping theme songs, and you'll never skip a credit sequence.


The subtitles are clear, fairly accurately timed and free of error, with a couple of exceptions. One is the way that the show handles the on screen captions in the translated subtitle stream. The text captions are displayed as part of the dialogue subtitles, inserted between captions, and can be disconcerting when people are speaking. They really need to be at the top of the screen, separate from the dialogue subtitles at the bottom, where they can stay 'active' as long as the original text is on screen. Also, not all of the screen text is translated. During the social network sequences, some idea of the character handles would have been useful (as it was during the original Crunchyroll streams). The other thing is that the rare occasion that two people are talking over each other, subtitles from one person will be displayed, and then the translation for what the other person is saying will be shifted in time past the current caption. In particularly dialogue heavy sequences, noticeably in episode 9 this may mean that some dialogue is left un-translated, which makes the presence of the English dub here essential.

Extras

Durarara!! Part 1 gets a card slip cover with the indecently large Australian ratings logo on either side, which somehow fails to obscure some very nice artwork at the front, and the blurb at the back.

This does mean though that the Amaray case is free to showcase the show's artwork without blemish. It's a transparent case, and the inside sleeve has more art, as well as an episode listing. One disc is held on a central hinged panel, while the other is on the back pane of the case.

The episodes and language options are accessible from a static menu on each disc. This collection has no on disc extras.

Conclusion

Did I mention that Durarara!! is one of my favourite series, and has been ever since I first watched it on Crunchyroll. It fits neatly into the same sort of narrative gap that Baccano! occupies; unsurprising since it's from the same creative sources. Its focus on character development, its fractured narrative, its deft blending of comedy and drama, supernatural elements and contemporary life, its reflection of pop culture and the sheer energy and style with which it spins its elaborate yarns is unlike anything you'll have seen before (except maybe Baccano!, but that's a period show). Not only is Durarara!! unique, it's brilliant too. The thing is that you probably won't get that from these first nine episodes. The episodes on these two discs are really just setting up the bigger picture, introducing the characters and setting the scene. That's certainly true for the first seven episodes at least, which are the equivalent of throwing all the pieces of the jigsaw on the table, sorting them out so that you can take a good look at them, and it's only in episode eight that the jigsaw starts being assembled.


Having said that, the individual pieces are gripping and entrancing enough in their own right to hold the attention, and entertain for the duration. For these early episodes, each one is narrated by a different character, and the story in that episode may be about them, or it may be about events or characters that they observe. The first episode is Mikado's introduction to Ikebukuro, and is really just a general overview to the story, as Kida shows him the sights. The other characters flit in and out of the episode, and the seed of one of the storylines is sown when a girl is abducted. That story is expanded in the second episode, where we get to know more about one of the prime movers of the story, Izaya Orihara, as well as the headless rider, the mythical Dullahan Celty Sturluson.


The third episode introduces Anri Sonohara, and sets up the odd triangle of Mikado, Kida and Anri, three school friends that begin to get caught up in the odd happenings in Ikebukuro, also introducing more of the gang elements in the storyline, and the two colossi of Shizuo Heiwajima and Simon. Episode 4 takes us into the life of Celty as narrated by her flatmate Shinra Kishitani, and we see his perspective on living with a mythical being. And so the episodes continue, introducing more and more elements of the story, different characters, different perspectives on the characters, and it's all done with wit, style, humour, and pace. It's a whirlwind of ideas and storylines that is hard to keep a hold of at times, but it rewards very much if you do.


By episode 8, you'll have a hold on the main plot elements, Celty's search for her missing head, the situation with the gangs in Ikebukuro, the abductions, the rumours of human experiments, the slasher, and Seiji Yagiri's ditching of school to be with his odd looking girlfriend. The first major storyline of Durarara!! begins to coalesce when Celty runs into this girl and has a revelation. During the final two episodes in this collection, a chase sequence ensues, and a tale of love, obsession, and murder unfolds, which leads to a cliff-hanger with Mikado somehow sheltering the girl that half of Ikebukuro wants dead or alive. It's as confusing as hell trying to explain just how Durarara!! got to this point, but it makes perfect sense if you watch it. And while it's been one hell of a ride to get to this point, the best is yet to come.


This Siren Visual release of Durarara!! Part 1 is good, but it could have been even better. Some minor issues with the subtitles and an annoying bit of edge enhancement stop this from being a technically perfect disc. Hopefully Part 2 will improve in this regard.