Durarara, from a ‘meh’ to a ‘wow’

Yes, um. Dur­arara. It’s dif­fi­cult to ima­gine a series that triggered more pre-hype than it. Every­body was like, ‘hey, Dur­arara is going to be cool! It will be like Bac­cano, it will be great!’ Thanks to all these assump­tions fly­ing straight midair, my atti­tude towards the anime became neg­at­ive even before it premiered. And at first I was right. But at last I was wrong. And I’m happy about it. Why?

The core of my issue is that simple yet pretty import­ant thing: pathos. Dur­arara begun and moved on with a whole lot of that stuff. It was soaked in pathos. Just look at the OP, present­ing all these char­ac­ters like if they’re all super-mega-cool-and-important! The pre-hype prob­ably added onto that, I just couldn’t help but think: Why so pre­ten­tious? It hon­estly annoyed me.

But the anim­a­tion qual­ity was good, there were a couple of char­ac­ters I liked (the one who stayed unshown in the first epis­ode, yet still won over all my sym­pathy — the one kick­ing the vend­ing machine 20 meters high, for example) and so I gave it a second chance with the second episode.

The first half made me think my hopes had no reas­ons to con­tinue their existence.

And then the motor­bike drive scene happened. Music, col­ours, sound, text — everything was so damn right I felt like I was slapped for a moment. This was one of the most beau­ti­ful sequences I’ve seen in anime, right it was said “It felt like a dream” — it did. On from that moment, Dur­arara held the level. And the pathos, which of course stayed (where would it go by free will?), became jus­ti­fied. Dur­arara is good.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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4 Comments

  1. Posted January 20, 2010 at 12:39 | Permalink

    I think Dur­arara!! has had some inter­est­ing points/moments, but over­all, I’m still not impressed with the series.

    Epis­ode 2 focused on a char­ac­ter that I was bored by to begin with, and while it was a good way to intro­duce Izaya, I just didn’t like learn­ing about Miss Magenta.

    I’m still hop­ing for a little more with the next epis­ode (and the next, and the next…), because I do want to like this show for whatever reason.

    Most ove­rhyped lame­ness I’ve seen in a while. =D
    mefloraine´s last blog post: Oto x Maho / おと×まほ

  2. Scamp 19
    Posted January 20, 2010 at 14:56 | Permalink

    Ah the glory of a hyped show reach­ing it’s high expect­a­tions. It’s a far bet­ter feel­ing than an unde­r­hyped show sur­pris­ing every­one. It’s why I loved Eden of the East so much

  3. Ryan A 66
    Posted January 20, 2010 at 22:50 | Permalink

    Can’t delve too much into the series after 2 epis­odes, but I’m thor­oughly pumped thus far.

    Think­ing about Bac­cano!, I think there is a sim­ilar approach going on here (yea~), which has to do with the mix: 50% char­ac­ters, 40% present­a­tion, and 10% left to occur­rences, coin­cid­ences, chance, fate, and com­plex­it­ies. Great stuff.

  4. Xiao 36
    Posted January 20, 2010 at 23:41 | Permalink

    It’s hard not to get hype aver­sion, espe­cially since winter sea­son is always lack­ing good shows so every­one just gets des­per­ate on one very prom­ising show this is the time you usu­ally avoid twit­ter and the like.

    But I’m glad it finally came around for you. If Ryogho Nar­ita knew what he was doing for Bac­cano!, then DRRR!! should have some of the same ele­ments to make the unim­pressed change their minds in one way or another. :)

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