It was more Baccano!
OK, that’s a little too brief. What these 3 bonus episodes offer is something between an epilogue for the episodes that aired on TV, and a prologue for a potential second series. It starts to show what various characters are up to in New York now they’ve arrived. We get to see pretty much everyone who survived the first 13 episodes, but the focus is on Jacuzzi Splot’s gang, Chane and Claire. We also get a few reveals, that will make rewatching those first 13 episodes more interesting.
Also of interest, there are definitely scenes shown in episode 1’s various hops around the overall Baccano! storyline that still haven’t shown up in the main narrative. So it definitely looks like they hope to get to adapt further books in the series.
Unfortunately some of the animation flaws the series had were even more evident here. There tends to be two paths that you can take in TV anime to use the limited budget to good effect. One is to use not very much animation, but make what drawings you do use visually interesting as stills. The other is to do low detail, fluid animation with lots of key frames.
What Baccano!, particularly in episode 16, falls afoul of is having bursts of the second option, but then leaving characters static on those key frames for too long. The actual key frames are invariably great poses, but the lack of detail (particular in relation to the background) does hold up to long static shots where only the mouth of the character is flapping (mouth animation not a Baccano! strong point). The cafe conversation between Claire and Rachel is the best example of it’s failings I can give.
That’s not say all the animation was bad, there’s was plenty to like too, with some neat fights, and a comedic scene involving dominoes.
Anyhow, these 3 episodes did their job. More Baccano! please.
And roll on Funimation’s release of the first series on DVD. Done-in-one boxset please!