With an alpine principality's worth of characters and more non-sequiturs than open mic night at the Cabaret Voltaire, it would be easy to write off "Durarara!!" as formalist wankery and an example of style over substance. Indeed, it's both those things, but gosh darn it, dad, it's ART. And it's good art: a welcome novelistic approach to televised anime (it's the "The Wire" of its genre) and a postmodern melange of fantasy and realism, eternal myth and technological ephemera, that has the good sense to ground its convoluted narrative in well-drawn emotions. It also helps that it shows you frequent glimmers of stunning beauty, eroticism, and humour. It's the kind of thing that's life-altering for some, and turns others on to reading Foucault and Paul Auster novels. It may not age well, but for now, "Durarara!!" is about as literate and exhilarating as popular art can get.
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