Baccano and the Art of Non-linear Storytelling

Recently, I returned to the world of anime with a re-watch of the series Baccano!. Baccano has always ranked among my favourite anime shows, constantly challenging the position of number one with the Ancient Magus Bride and Cowboy Bebop. These are very different anime who rank in my number one spot for very differing reasons from one another. For Cowboy Bebop, the animation and story mixed with an incomparable soundtrack to create a masterpiece of complex human emotion mixed with violence and love and jazz. The Ancient Magus Bride takes all my love of mythology and folklore and gives it new life in one of the most visually beautiful shows I’ve ever seen. Baccano stands out from these two in its soundtrack being similar to Cowboy Bebop in its use of jazz, but isn’t quite as well composed or pared with as well paired with parts of the show. Its characters are not as complex or deep as either Ancient Magus Bride or Cowboy Bebop. So why does it capture the imagination of so many people, as well as myself?

The interesting thing about Baccano is it’s use of storytelling as an art itself. Baccano utilises non-linear storytelling to tell a complicated tale of a huge array of characters. While the characters are simplistic, the simplicity is part of the necessary exploration of storytelling in ways that are innately familiar to the viewer, calling on simplistic natures of folklore and myth to build archetypes which are both familiar and special.

Today, I wanted to spend some time really digging into the world of Baccano and explaining just how its non-linear storytelling works to connect to storytelling and mythology.

Baccano is set in the United States, and though it jumps around in time, the primary time period is Prohibition era with a focus on New York and Chicago. Despite this, the narrative is constantly shifting time periods as well as character perspectives, telling new views on the same story that impacts different people in different ways. The result is a somewhat disjoined narrative, which feels partially purposeful and partially confusing. Different dates get shown on screen, keeping the viewer on their toes correlating which characters are where at what times.

Some people have criticised the show for this, thinking it far more on the disjointed side than the “non-linear” side. This problem is compounded by the sheer number of characters. The cast is made up of at least twenty primary characters, with only groups of them interacting at different points in time. The various names and associations become difficult to track, especially as these relations shift over time — though this means the associations shift back and forth because the linear structure of the shifting nature of relations means that the non-linear storytelling takes this backwards and forwards depending on what time we’re seeing.

But there is a method to the madness. The non-linearity, as well as the sheer number of characters, is prepared at the very beginning. The story starts the audience at the Daily Days, a organisation which fronts as a newspaper while actually working as an information gathering network. We start with Carol, a young girl whose sat in a pile of papers on a table, sorting through all the information regarding the incident on the Flying Pussyfoot — a transcontinental train. In fact, she throws out a date in which the incident all began. She is questioned, however, by the vice-president of the Daily Days.

What follows is a complicated exchange discussing the nature of stories and characters.

VP: What are you doing up there anyway?

Carole: Well honeslty, sir, I was thinking about the story.

VP: Story?

C: Well, I just can’t seem to stop thinking about the series of strange events that began back in November of 1930, sir.

…

VP: What we record is neither unaffected information nor perceived information. It’s the precursor to a conclusion. Tell me, you could have chosen any date on the timeline, but you selected 1930 as the point these stories began. Why?

C: Umm…

VP: How can one not have the answers to these questions and call themselves the assistant to Gustav Saint-Germain, the Vice-President of the Daily Days?

C: Uhhh…

VP: Perhaps you’d like some help?

At this point, the Vice President throws out two potential starting points: 1711, aboard the Advena Avis — a ship crossing the Atlantic; 1931, the Flying Pussyfoot, the transcontental train. He questions Carole about why she picked November of 1930 with all the information and potential starting points.

C: Well, Mr Vice-President, I was thinking about how to make the story easy to understand and I thought, well, the easiest way to see this is through our eyes, so I picked the time when the whole mess was first brought to our attention. Smart, huh?

…

VP: While that’s the easiest way to see this mosaic, you should think about more than time, The characters are crucial elements as well. Do not neglect to consider them.

The two then consider several characters, and the audience gets their first glimpse of several primary characters we’ll spend the rest of the show getting to know in greater detail. At the end, the VP gives a imporant piece of advice to Carole.

Still, Carole, depending on which of these interesting characters you focus, the same incidental will behave like the surface of the ocean, changeless yet ever changing, In other words, there may be but one event, but as many stories as there are people to tell them.

This exchange is one of the most important scenes in the entire show, because it explains everything about how the show is structured and understood. Every character has their own view on the events that unfolded, and every event that unfolded impacts a multitude of characters that the initiators may not even recognise.

We, as individuals, think of life as a story we are our own main character of. Because of this, we may think of events as ultimately impacting ourselves, when, in reality, they impact every body near us, near the event, and near others at the event, in a ripple affect that draws in far more characters than we would have considered.

Each of these characters also have their own way of understanding and structuring their stories. They are a different main character with a different way of organising the events they experienced. As storytellers, Carol and the Daily Days’ Vice President must choose which view to tell the story of particular incidents, and we as the audience experience the story of Baccano through the difficult processing of how each view changes the perspective of the story.

But as I said earlier, the characters we view the events from are very archetypal. And there’s a very important reason for this.

Baccano’s Characters

Baccano’s story jump through time and location also means that there are a variety of characters for the audience to keep track of. These characters can be roughly broken down into nine rough categories: (1) The Daily Days, which has has several characters throughout the show gathering information or helping individual characters; the many crime families, inlcuding (2) the Gandor family, (3) Genoard family, (4) Jacuzzi’s gang, (5) the Martillo family, and the (6) Russo family; (7) the ever changing group of the Immortals, which at times includes individuals from these other groups and at times does not; (8) Huey Laforet, one of these original immortals and his followers; and finally (9) the rag-tag collection of random other characters who somehow find themselves entangled, such as Isaac and Mira, a crime-committing couple.

I write all these out not to be super padantic about explaining each character’s role, but rather to illustrate the sheer number of characters at play. Not all of these characters survive throughout the events of the show, but they all play some part — whether it be small or large.

But each of these characters are very basic in their construction. They’re simple and easy to grasp the base of. But simplicity should not be mistaken for unthought or discardable. Baccano’s characters calls back to traditional storytelling in myths and folklore, where characters are simple but meaningful. Characters in these more traditional stories are not simple for no reason — they are present in order to serve a particular purpose.

Carl Jung viewed myths and folklore as being universalisal stories — they weren’t impacted by different cultural or social backings, but rather were easily applied across these boundaries due to the collective human unconscious. He saw the simple characters as falling into what he called “archetypes”- pre-set understandings of role, actions and goals that the characters enact in the narrative. Some Jungian archetypes are roles such as “the Hero” or “the Trickster” — each name denotes not only the type of character they are, but also how they can relate to other characters and story. The Child, for example, is not always necessarily a child, but can be childlike, but their primary role in the story is that of innocence. Essentially this means that the archetype of the Child allows us to not only know who they are as a character, but also how they fit into the role of the narrative.

While Jung’s view on myths and folklore isn’t my favourite, his in-depth look at the role of archetypes can be useful in studies like Baccano — and in particular to understand how simple characters can be intricate in their own right. Each of the characters in Baccano can be understood as archetypes — maybe not necessarily perfect to the archetypes laid out by Jung, but as archetypes more generally.

Eve Genoard, for example, is a good sample of the Child. Her pure innocence in simply wanting the best for her brother, despite her brother’s rough actions toward both her and his own life. Despite the threat of many violent characters in the mafia surrounding her, she continues to act with a bravery that seems only to come from her position of innocently expecting the best of those around her.

The characters’ archetypal nature also helps to allow multiple characters to shape the narrative not only in their interaction, but also in their relationship to one another. Ladd Russo is a great foil to the other hitman of the story, Claire Stanfield. Where Ladd kills ruthlessly and for the fun of it, Claire picks his targets with precision and with an understanding of a value to what he’s taking or leaving.

The characters archetypal nature means that the narrative can flow between characters in complex ways — allowing the complexity of the character to be within their placement of narrative and their relationship to other characters, rather than relying on deep complexity of psychology. It’s often a fallacy in narratives to think that complexity in characters needs to be in their fleshed out self-understanding. Simple characters are not necessarily not-complex — they are just simple to understand and relate to.

Baccano’s Most Complex and Disjointed Character

One of my favourite memes is the role of New York as the other character in Sex in the City — not because it’s inherently stupid, but because it’s inherently true. Even though I’ve never really watched Sex in the City, I understand the idea of inherently deep complex growth not necessarily being tied to human characters. A similar function is happening in Baccano.

So we understand our human ensemble cast to be made up of simple — but not inferior — characterisations of archetypes. These archetypes work in foils to one another, as well as playing off of one another’s needs and motivations to create a complex functionality of interrelations which lead to strange events. These events only happen due to the relationship between these characters and the ways in which they interact. The understanding of these events can also change depending on whose eyes we’re viewing the event through.

Despite the vast array of characters, we don’t follow one in particular as “the main character”, or even have a solid individual whose understood as the singular “antagonist”. In fact, sometimes protagonists in one view can become active agents working against another character — shifting roles to antagonist when the perspective shift occurs.

These complex ways to understand the roles of characters and events is what leads the narrative of Baccano to essentially require the simple archetypal characters presented. But that’s not to say that there’s no such thing as a character that isn’t complex in the way we’ve grown to understand complexity. The complex way these characters flow from event to event, interacting with each other in growing complicated entanglements, leads to the true detailed character of the show: the story itself.

And this is where the non-linearity of the narrative really shines. Without it, the story would be appear to be just as archetypal as the characters — and individuals would flow out of our interest just as quickly as they came in. The non-linearity of the narrative requires us to actively pay attention to the growing cast, and the ways in which they interact. Essentially, the non-linearity of the narrative’s presentation paired with the growing cast of archetypal characters means that the focus for the audience is on the story itself.

The most intricated and most disjointed character in Baccano is not any of the human or immortal characters encountered, but rather the story itself — the intricate interweaving nature of how characters interact and therefore impact the world around them is the primary character worthy of the audience’s consideration.

Traditional storytelling and old myths work similarly. The characters in mythology and folklore are not meant to be massively in-depth characters with detailed complexity. They are meant to be easily understood because they carry with them the importance of a narrative — the story of a place, or a people’s history, rather than their own individual journeys as a person. Similarly, a larger mythology may be possible to put in chronological order, but this is not necessarily how the stories are shared or experienced. The different tales are told out of order, and presented only when it seems important for the audience to experience them.

One of the reasons why Baccano is so enticing is because it replicates these more traditional types of storytelling. Its types of characters, story structure, and way of putting the story as the most important thing positions Baccano into a familiar way of knowing narratives.