Baccano!

• 1. Introduction

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  Baccano! begins on a ship called the Advenna Avis in 1711, where a group of alchemists summons a demon and walks away with eternal life. That single transaction sets in motion a chain of events that will not fully resolve until the year 2002. The series, written by Ryohgo Narita and illustrated by Katsumi Enami, unfolds across centuries and continents. But its beating heart belongs to a single decade: Prohibition-era America, and most urgently to the streets of New York City in 1930. How does a story about immortal alchemists become one of the most praised works in modern Japanese popular fiction? And how did a light novel that Narita admits he created through what he called his own "useless calculations" end up winning the Gold Prize at ASCII Media Works' ninth Dengeki Novel Prize in 2002?

• 2. Prohibition and Chaos

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  Ryohgo Narita chose the Prohibition era for a practical reason: almost no light novels were set there, which he believed would catch the attention of the ASCII Media Works judges. After watching The Untouchables, he spent roughly ten days processing that inspiration and then built the world of Baccano! out of what he called those "useless calculations." He consulted many books while writing the first novel, The Rolling Bootlegs, weaving fictional characters into historical situations to produce a plot that felt grounded even as it bent toward the fantastical. The story he first imagined was far more conventional: an ancient magician revived during Prohibition begins terrorizing New York, and a group of mafiosi fights back. That concept did not survive contact with the characters themselves. Narita never wrote a formal outline, and he later said he was relieved by that choice, because it allowed the characters to move on their own and carry the story to places he had not planned. Three of the original character concepts illustrate how far things shifted: Maiza Avaro began as a hypnotist, Ennis as a succubus, and Szilard as a magician. Every member of the Camorra except Firo Prochainezo was also supposed to die. None of those original fates survived the writing process, and Narita stated plainly that he was glad they did not.

• 3. The Elixir and Its Consequences

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  November 1930 in New York City is the pivot on which the entire series turns. Szilard Quates, one of the immortals who scattered after the 1711 incident on the Advenna Avis, finally succeeds in recreating the immortality elixir, only to have it immediately stolen by a young thug named Dallas Genoard. What follows is a cascade of accidents: the three Gandor brothers, the thief pair Isaac Dian and Miria Harvent, and the Camorra family known as the Martillo all end up handling the elixir in turn, and most of them accidentally drink it at a party for Firo Prochainezo, mistaking it for alcohol. The elixir passes from hand to hand not through strategy but through the sheer density of competing agendas piling on top of one another. Szilard creates Dallas into an incomplete immortal, meaning Dallas still ages, in order to retrieve what was stolen. That plan also fails. Firo is told by Szilard's own homunculus, Ennis, how to destroy Szilard, and he does so. Dallas is then cemented into a barrel and sunk to the bottom of the Hudson River by the Gandor brothers as punishment for killing their members, a fate that will not resolve for several more years.

• 4. The Flying Pussyfoot

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  In late 1931, a single transcontinental train called the Flying Pussyfoot becomes the setting for the series' most concentrated burst of violence and dark comedy. Luck Gandor calls on his adoptive brother Claire Stanfield, who works as an assassin and train conductor, to travel to New York to help resolve a gang conflict. Claire boards the Flying Pussyfoot as its conductor. The train is immediately hijacked by two rival gangs, the Russo and the Lemure, each pursuing their own agenda, including an attempt to kidnap a senator's family. A separate group of thieves led by Jacuzzi Splot and Nice Holystone tries to protect the passengers. Claire resolves the threat in his own fashion, adopting the persona of a creature called the Rail Tracer and systematically eliminating most of both gangs. During the fighting, Claire interrupts a confrontation between Ladd Russo and Chane Laforet and, without any apparent irony, proposes marriage to Chane on the spot. Chane is the daughter of Huey Laforet, one of the original 1711 immortals. Ladd Russo survives the train but loses his arm to Claire and is subsequently imprisoned. Narita later noted that Chane was a character he originally did not like and had planned to kill; as he wrote more of her, he became attached to her and changed her fate entirely.

• 5. Building the English Dub

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  Tyler Walker, the ADR director hired to lead Funimation's English dub, ran casting auditions for six days, during which approximately 140 people arrived to compete for eighteen main roles. Walker described this as probably the longest casting process Funimation had ever held. The difficulty was rooted in the series' demographics: the cast is dominated by older men, a type Walker said he did not work with often, and the characters come from a wide range of European and American regional backgrounds. He asked directors and actors for recommendations and made a deliberate effort to seek out newer talent, seeing the series as an opportunity to discover performers who had not yet established themselves. To prepare the dialogue itself, Walker watched a range of films set in or made during the 1930s, including The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Once Upon a Time in America, and Miller's Crossing, along with multiple films starring James Cagney. He drew specifically on The Untouchables, particularly Robert De Niro's portrayal of Al Capone. His goal was to capture the lingo and rhythm of the era, and because Baccano! was, in his words, a "stylized gangster flick," he made the dialogue more flowery and lingo-rich than historical accuracy alone would have required. The anime team working on the visual side pursued a similar commitment to authenticity: art director Akira Ito and other staff scouted Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, Chinatown, Little Italy, Grand Central Terminal, and various locations along the East River. They also visited the Steamtown National Historic Site to study real steam locomotives.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  The first Baccano! light novel, The Rolling Bootlegs, won the Gold Prize at ASCII Media Works' ninth Dengeki Novel Prize in 2002, placing third overall among all submissions. The anime adaptation, a sixteen-episode series directed by Takahiro Omori, aired the first thirteen episodes on the Japanese pay-per-view station WOWOW from July 26 to the 1st of November 2007, with the final three released direct-to-DVD. Reviewers at Anime News Network called the series one of the most cleverly written in recent years and gave it an A rating for both subtitled and dubbed versions. THEM Anime Reviews awarded the full series five out of five stars, with reviewer Bradley Meek calling it "a joy to watch" and describing it as "a beautiful, confounding mess of chaos and delight." Theron Martin at Anime News Network wrote that the complex plotting and large cast, paired with strong dubbing, animation, and musical score, made it "a must-see series for fans of American mobster stories." One Active Anime reviewer compared its structural influence to what Pulp Fiction did for film. The podcast Anime World Order named it their best series of 2007. The series has since been distributed in North America by Funimation, in the United Kingdom by Manga Entertainment, and in Australia and New Zealand by Madman Entertainment. Funimation's rights to the series expired in 2016, when the license transferred to Aniplex of America. Yen Press announced at the 2015 Anime Expo that it would publish the novels in English beginning in 2016, with The Rolling Bootlegs appearing in print that May.