Azumanga Daioh is a 26 episode comedy anime based upon the four panel manga. There is no real theme to the anime; it is a slice-of-life taking place in high school. It focuses on a somewhat large cast which includes both students and teachers. The standout element here is that the personalities of the characters are out there and that is what makes them so unique. It plays on those personalities to get the humor aspect and it quite funny at times.
Chiyo is introduced a ten year old that is so clever and advanced that she managed to transfer to attend high school instead. She is portrayed as the main character as a lot of focus is placed on her. The anime often plays on the limitation of her non-academic knowledge at a ten year old level, so things can fly over her head. She’s also more gullible and naive than the others. Due to her young age, she acts as the cute one of the cast, and she can be extremely cute at times.
Sakaki is the most mature looking of the cast but she is also introduced as being scary to others. She’s quiet and keeps to herself, rarely displaying emotion. Then it is revealed that she likes cats and others quickly warm up to her. She’s also very athletic which means she pairs fairly well with Kagura, who’s main selling point is her athletic abilities (albeit not as great).
Tomo is the energetic overactive girl. She’s keen to challenge others, shout and cause a lot of disruption. She can be annoying due to her actions, but has her own charms. She’s not the most academically gifted though. Paring with Tomo though is Koyomi, who are childhood friends. She’s the only sane one of the group. Yomi puts up with a lot of stuff from Tomo, who constantly tries to tease and annoy her. Their interactions are funny and amusing.
Ayumu is also a transfer student and she unfortunately gets the nickname of Osaka pretty much immediately. Her nickname is based on where she is from but she has none of the stereotypes of people from Osaka. Osaka is very odd, she’s a bit of an airhead and you often cannot understand her thought process. She is the funniest character in the anime purely because of how random and unexpected her musings can be. Rounding out the cast are the pair of teachers, Yukari and Nyamo. Yukari is an English teacher while Nyamo is the PE teacher. They were high school friends as well so knows each other very well. Yukari is lazy while Nyamo is like the model teacher.
Each episode is separated into several sections, each with a mini theme to make it coherent and connected together. The anime on the whole can be very random. There are also some odd episodes where it seems like its on drugs with its content. You’ll have episodes that are relatively normal like preparing for the scholl festival to others where it’s showing the dreams of the characters (and being dreams, it doesn’t have to make sense). Since Chiyo skiped so many grades, she is missing out a lot of her childhood. And her friends, despite being high school students, are fairly childish themselves (as well as feeling nostalgic) and happily play with Chiyo.
Anything and everything is accepted as normal. This even includes the creepy teacher who admitted to the whole class that he only became a teacher because he liked high school girls. Just when it goes back to being normal for a while, it would throw a curveball out of nowhere and have you laugh out loud quite hard. It’s a feel good happy anime and some of the humor relies on puns, which naturally is difficult to translate over to English. There are some noticeable scenes where it reuses the animation or have an unusually long time of silence or non-movement. It happens just frequently enough that you notice it and feel that something is off.
The characters grow older and progress into the next grade. As the anime starts to end and the characters are nearing graduation, you feel sad at what you know is the upcoming goodbye. It’s more emotional especially since you feel you know the characters really well by now. It leads to a nice ending that closes off a chapter, which combines the emotions of a farewell with the hope that things will continue to be good. Overall, Azumanga Daioh still manages to be a great time many years later. While there were some weird episodes and a beginning that wasn’t as strong as later on, the anime managed to keep increasing the quality. It has distinctive characters and great gags that felt right at home with those characters.
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