Review for Durarara!! Limited Edition

Introduction

A hysterical gang member hits Shizuo Heiwajima in the head with a wooden stick so hard that the stick shatters. The blood drenched Heiwajima then punches the hapless gang member so hard that he’s sent flying fifty metres, and with such kinetic force that his clothes are ripped from his body in the process. That’s just one of countless moments in this show that always tickles me.

It was Crunchyroll that first introduced me to this show, after I had already become enamoured of one of Ryohgo Narita’s earlier works turned anime, Baccano! Durarara!! on the other hand got a longer run, and a contemporary setting, but still held onto that unique storytelling style that made Baccano! feel so refreshing. Just as with Baccano!, I became determined to own this show on disc, and it wasn’t long before the now defunct Beez Entertainment licensed it, aiming to get a hasty subtitle only version onto shop shelves before releasing the inevitable dub version. I’m okay with subtitles, and I had the thing pre-ordered. But it got delayed, while at the same time Aniplex announced the dub, and that US release would come out practically day and date with the Beez version. I cancelled my order, expecting a UK dub version to follow soon enough. Except that Beez went out of business, while their sub only release had enough in the way of audio issues when it came to PAL speed-up, and poor subtitling, that I never in the end bought them.


I did however shell out more money than I feel comfortable discussing importing the Siren Visual DVDs, which not only had the native PAL transfer, but they had the dub as well. As soon as those arrived, Aniplex went and announced that they would release the Blu-ray. Siren’s DVDs themselves weren’t perfect, at least at first. They released the show in three parts, and it seemed that the first part had inherited Beez’s subtitle problems, unable to show multiple captions on screen at one time, making it difficult to follow the show’s dense dialogue and screen text translations. Also there were issues with edge enhancement which made watching the show on a large screen less than enjoyable.

I resigned myself to squirreling away enough cash for the Aniplex Blu-rays, expecting to be able to afford their lush, lunchbox Limited Edition sometime after I retire. Yet even with all the physical extras, those discs weren’t without issues of their own. Aniplex had, as with Baccano! simply imported the Japanese discs and repackaged them for the US market, hence while they had English and Japanese audio and subtitles, there was no signs only track for the English dub, pretty much essential in this show. That made me hesitate long enough for Siren Visual to announce their Blu-ray release, and All the Anime in the UK to follow suit, finally bringing the dub and the sub to the UK as well as in high definition. What’s more, when Siren Visual announced a delay to their Blu-ray to ‘fix some authoring issues’, I wasn’t alone in hoping that meant that they would add a signs only track to the release, especially as All the Anime would use Siren’s masters for the UK release.


Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Durarara!! on UK Blu-ray still lacks a signs only track to accompany the English dub. What Siren Visual have done is reduce the disc count from five dual layer Blu-rays to four dual layer Blu-rays, add their own menus, and strip out the superfluous (for us at any rate) Japanese subtitle track. But still, it’s Durarara!! in high definition! You shouldn’t sniff at those exclamation marks.

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.

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.


26 episodes of Durarara!! including the 2 bonus episodes are presented across 4 Blu-ray discs as follows.

Disc 1
1. Exit 1/First Words
2. Highly Unpredictable
3. Rampant Evil
4. Utterly Alone
5. False Advertising
6. Active Interest
7. Bad-ass Dude

Disc 2
8. Ephemeral Dream
9. Love and Cherish
10. Never Before Seen
11. Storm and Stress
12. Yin and Yang
12.5. Heaven’s Vengeance
13. Takes a Sudden Turn

Disc 3
14. Turmoil Reigns
15. Dumb Like a Fox
16. Mutual Love
17. Everything Changes
18. Out of Your Control
19. Anarchy

Disc 4
20. A New King Will Arise
21. Everything Covered in Fog
22. Declaration of Disbandment
23. Complicated and Confused
24. Selfless Devotion
25. World at Peace

Picture

Durarara!! gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at the 1080p resolution. I gushed over the Baccano! Blu-ray, and that was an upscale of a wholly SD animated show. Durarara!! on the other hand takes advantage of being animated in HD, so you can imagine the squees of delight that elicits. Also, coming too from the auspices of Aniplex, even with the minor compression of 5 discs to 4 from Siren Visual, the transfer is sublime. I couldn’t spot any compression, and digital banding too is non-existent. It’s a clear, sharp and colourful presentation of a gorgeous, contemporary set anime, and if I mention that one line of character art in episode 4 exhibited aliasing, or there’s a bit of shimmer on the fine lines in the second end sequence, that’s only to indicate the extreme level of nitpicking that you’ll have to do to find fault with this transfer. It goes without saying that those issues I had with edge-enhancement and shimmer in the DVD collection are long forgotten here.

The show’s fantastic animation and art design stand 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 Blu-ray presentation brings out the true richness of the colour palette, while in HD I realise that the show makes significant use of textures in its artwork, something I had missed on DVD. Things like fabrics, upholstery, carpets, school blackboards, architecture, all exhibit a rich, layered feel that only becomes apparent on Blu-ray. This is the definitive way to watch the show.

Sound

You have the choice between PCM 2.0 English and Japanese stereo, both encoded at 1.5 Mb per second. You also get optional translated subtitles for the Japanese audio. On disc insertion the Japanese track is selected by default, but you’ll have to turn on the subtitles from the options menu. And as you can guess with lossless audio, Durarara sounds fantastic. I love the Japanese track, as that’s the way I first saw the show. But the English 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. I did feel that on disc 3, the Japanese dialogue was a little low in the mix, but it was still audible throughout.

The good news is that episodes 1-9, which on Siren’s DVDs had issues with displaying multiple captions simultaneously, have had the subtitles corrected for the Blu-ray release. You can now get more than one caption on screen at a time, and episode 9, which had issues with so much on screen dialogue and text that some dialogue was dropped completely, is a lot more legible this time around.


The bad news is that while Siren have for the rest of the episodes used the same subtitle script as they did for the DVDs, albeit in a yellow font instead of white, some silly errors have crept in. The early episodes do have the odd typo where apostrophes crop up, an example being at 9:10 into episode 3... anyway here’s a list. Yes, it’s depressing enough for there to be a list!

Episode 7 – 19:10 missing subtitle
Episode 12.5 has two subtitle format errors, the next episode preview lacks subtitles completely (note that this next episode preview wasn’t on the DVD release)
Episode 13 – 18:56 missing subtitle
Episode 14 – 6:53 missing subtitle, 15:47 flashing subtitle
Episode 15 – 3:20 flashing subtitle, 11:01 missing subtitle
Episode 18 – 14:03 missing subtitle
Episode 22 – second half of episode has all subtitles and captions preceding dialogue and on screen text by up to a quarter of a second
Episode 25 – 19:02 line of gibberish in between two subtitle captions

Note that there are also instances where subtitles are mistimed; either appearing on screen too early by a beat or late by a beat. I didn’t bother noting those down as you still understand what was said.

Extras

The four discs present their content with static menus, which will look very familiar to those who bought the Siren DVD release. It’s odd to note that the music playing behind the menus exhibits the 4% speed-up that it would have had on the PAL DVDs. Naturally the audio in the episodes is unaffected. Only the first disc has extra features, and they amount to the textless credit sequences, both openings and both closings. In an error, they are labelled incorrectly, the second textless opening is the second textless closing, and the first textless ending is the second textless opening, but they are all on the disc. Another minor flub is that when you navigate through the screen, sometimes the disc keeps an option highlighted in blue, even though you’ve moved off it. Again it’s just another minor flub.

I only received the check discs for review, and cannot comment on the packaging or the art cards that will come with the retail release.

Conclusion

It’s turned out to be an auspicious few days for Durarara!! Not only is the show’s English dub finally coming to the UK as the show makes its HD debut, but just this week, a second series, reuniting the creative team behind the anime was announced in Japan ahead of the light novel’s tenth anniversary. The last time I reviewed this show on DVD, I opined that there were plenty more stories to tell in the curious world of Ikebukuro, and now it seems that we’ll finally get to watch them, and most likely this summer at that. It’s a good time to be a Durarara!! fan, and I can’t tell you how much I have been waiting for the definitive release of the show in high definition. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting.

Durarara!! is still the fantastic, jaw-dropping awe inspiring series it has always been, and it’s still a show that defies critical analysis, as to pick apart its story and its characters is to spoil the experience for the first time viewer. It’s a great show to talk about after viewing with a bunch of like-minded fans, but such fan fervour has no place in a review such as this. You do not want to know what makes Durarara!! so cool second hand, you really need to find out for yourself. But it’s a venture well worth making. Durarara!! 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.


It’s the rich diversity of its characters that makes it so appealing, and you get the sense that each and every one of them has a hundred stories to tell. You want to know all about Celty Sturluson, the mythical Dulluhan turned motorbike courier, you want to know more about the insanely strong and insanely violent Shizuo Heiwajima, you want to know about the equally strong, but utterly pacifist Simon Brezhnev, you want to know more about the utterly manipulative Izaya Orihara and all the other characters that the show introduces, but 26 episodes is just not enough time. The show invariably inspires you to consider these characters though as living beyond the confines of the television screen, and that is an amazing achievement.

This series is really about the three central characters of Mikado Ryugamine, Anri Sonohara, and Kida Masaomi, or at least their lives, and their viewpoints on the story really inform much of the way the show develops. As such, you can divide this first series of Durarara!! into three arcs, the Dollars arc, the Slasher arc, and the Yellow Scarves arc, with each centred around one of the three, although the various characters in the show do all play a part. Durarara!!’s style is to present a story, an idea, and then remove a layer to reveal an unexpected truth beneath the surface, and to continue doing so until you get how the pieces work together. So that while on the surface, Mikado might be the bright-eyed newcomer to Ikebukuro, Anri might be the soft-spoken timid girl, and Kida the outgoing playboy, the complexities of these characters are only slowly revealed, and the show makes you work for the good stuff too.


Fans have their favourite arcs, and it’s easy to see why the Dollars arc is the most well received, as it not only tells a very interesting and compelling story, it also has to do the grunt work of introducing this world and developing the side characters too. Driving it is one of the most interesting subplots in the show, Celty and the search for her missing head, coupled with that of Seiji and his scarred girlfriend, culminating in one of the most awesome scenes I have seen in anime which puts this show’s conceit of showing non-important characters as grey silhouettes to stunningly effective use, and on top of that having my favourite anime cameo of all time. It is hard for anything to live up to that, but the Slasher arc has the benefit of being short and sweet, while also letting Shizuo Heiwajima really cut loose. It’s the Yellow Scarves arc that usually courts fans’ ire, and it does suffer a bit from pacing, from losing a bit of the sense of fun from the previous arcs, and from being light on the incidental character moments that so liven up the earlier episodes, but I find it a really effective bit of storytelling nevertheless, and it serves to resolve the three friends’ arcs and gives the series a sense of closure.

On top of that there are the two bonus episodes, with the first again one of my favourite episodes in the show, a standalone story which really makes effective use of Baccano!’s patented back and forth narrative jumping storytelling style, and with an awesome, literal punchline. Speaking of punchlines, the second bonus episode is the perfect note to end the series on, once more bringing the animosity between Shizuo Heiwajima and Izaya Orihara to the centre of focus, and ratcheting up the collateral damage to epic proportions.


There’s a lot to like about this Blu-ray release of Durarara!! The video quality of the release is peerless, the audio is impressive and watching the show for the animation alone is a joy. It’s just that the subtitling lets the side down. Little errors, flashing subtitles, mistimed subtitles, and subtitles missing altogether are not want you want on a release of a show of this quality. The annoying thing is that it’s not prevalent enough to just out and out say the release is faulty, but neither is it the rare occurrence that lets you dismiss it as one of those things. They’re like landmines, lulling you into a false sense of security. You watch a couple of episodes without issue, think all is fine, then Wham!, a painful reminder of the release’s shortcomings. The mistimed subtitles in the second half of episode 22 suggest that Siren took the subtitles off their PAL sped-up DVD release, and massaged them to fit the longer runtime of the Blu-ray, resulting in the sync issues here. That really begs the question as to why they simply didn’t use Aniplex’s subtitles! The litmus test on any Blu-ray for me is to whether I can retire the DVDs. The absence of a signs only track already answered that question (you need subtitles when Saika shows up on the chat room, all psychotic text but no voiceover, or when Simon starts speaking Russian), but while Siren admirably fixed the subtitle errors on the first 9 episodes, I can still see myself watching the DVD versions of a couple of the later episodes rather than put up with the errors.