I really wouldn't say that Monster has filler, but it does have alot of scenes that could have been edited out or shortened with no harm to the work itself.
Anyway, I just finished watching Baccano! and I have to say it was a very entertaining anime.
However, alot of the aspects of the show grated on my nerves just as they were becoming apparent by the end of the serial. One thing, was that skipping back and forth between different points in time seemed very needless. Yes, it gives the show a very distinct feel to it, but I feel it sacrifices a whole lot in the process. It took me a little bit in order to keep track of all the different years and make sense of everything that was happening at first, which is the first down. There wasn't any relevant order, to me atleast, such that the scenes were seemingly just played in a random order. Kind've like if you divided up every chapter of a DVD movie into it's own video file, and then placed them in a list and selected "Play at random", you'd have what is basically the same effect. There was no narrative discourse, is what I'm trying to say. Finally, it vastly decreases the suspense. And what I mean by that is that why should we care there's people fighting in the past if we zoomed to the future earlier and we already know that they're going to be A-OK? This is probably a big one for me.
One thing I REALLY REALLY like about the show though is that characters we EXCELLENT! My favorite by far are the Isaac and Miria duo, and Ladd Russo, who I will gladly argue is one of the most chaotic evil characters in all of fiction. All of the dialogue with these characters is pure gold, Isaac and Miria are people so dumb and naive I'm honestly surprised they succeed at anything at all, but they throw themselves at any given task with such gratuitous amounts of joy and enthusiasm, that it's extremely hard to hate them. Ladd Russo is a psychotic killer who follows a neurotic creed of killing people who think themselves invincible, and sparing those that submit to death. He doesn't always follow this creed though, as he just simply LOVES killing, and is more than willing to just kill whoever the hell he pleases if the mood hits him right. He's extremely over-the-top and hammy, but he really grew on me. I can definitely see other people not liking him.
There's other characters, but they don't steal the show in the same way. Jacuzzi is a hyper-naive crackly-voiced cliched hero that flip-flops between crying little boy and stereotyped action hero good guy that spouts CORNY AS HELL lines like "The gun is in my HEART!". He has a wife, Nice, who he apparently never kisses or makes love to inspite of them being married for the last 10 years, which was bizarre and never elaborated on. Firo was one character that was your cliche anime hero right from the start, and yet probably has the fewest scenes out of all the characters, inspite of him having the most important role of killing main antagonist Szilard. Szilard was a competent villain, but his exact motives are never clearly elaborated on besides an ideological quarrel he had with his rival some 200 years ago. Then there's Clair Stanfield, aka Vino, Aka the Rail Tracer, who was my least favorite character, out of sheer merit of appearing out of nowhere, being VASTLY more competent than every other character, having the most godawful god complex imaginable, and beating the shit out of Ladd, which left him out-of-commission for the rest of the series, easily tripling my resentment for him, and the fact that he contributes EXTREMELY LITTLE to the overall story. God I hated Vino, it was like the story was functioning perfectly well by itself, and then someone shoehorns a unlikeable Marty Stu into the story just to fuck with everyone.
There's also the bizarre monkey-wrench guy, who literally comes out of nowhere in the last 3 episodes and doesn't contribute anything to the story besides an extremely awkward change of pace and alot of mediocre anime cliches. There's alot more characters, but these are the ones that stand out the most to me.
The story was alright, but by the end I realized something important: this isn't an anime to watch for the story, the story is mediocre and poorly thought out. There's extremely little tension, the pacing is awkward, the climax is anti-climactic, there's TONS AND TONS of loose ends that the story just outright ignores, there doesn't appear to be any philosophical consequences to the cast making a literal deal with the devil nor with more than half the cast being immortal with magically healing bodies, and worst of all is that there's no real ending, the action just stops and the series ends.
Then it occurred to me, to not appreciate this for the story, but instead like Azumanga Daioh, where all the entertainment isn't in the story, but in the characters and their interactions with eachother. Now, while I enjoyed Baccano! alot, if the creators just realized this and stopped with their pretentious, schizophrenic bullshit and just ran with a single idea, I probably would have enjoyed this series MUCH more. Lotsa potential, so much waste.
In short: Magic 1930's Gangsters for the win.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3148493 times)