he series Azumanga Daioh begins normally enough, with the minutia of the first day of a large high school's fall semester. English teacher Yukari Tanizaki is running late, and is typically hyper, selfish and unthinking in her efforts to make up for lost time. Her contemporary, phys ed teacher Minamo Kurosawa, acts as a sympathetic counselor to the students while trying to deal with Yukari's ongoing insanities. Chiyo Mihama, a 10-year-old prodigy being bumped to 10th grade, is cutely nervous, but cheerful and eager to get along. Incredibly hyperactive Tomo Takino is determined to be best at everything, whether she's trying to become the fastest runner or just get punished longer than anyone else. Dreamy animal lover Miss Sakaki seems standoffish, but secretly hopes for friendly overtures from her peers. And spacy transfer student Ayuma Kasuga vows to get her act together and pay more attention in class, which doesn't keep her from missing out on a classroom crisis as she focuses single-mindedly on the floaters in her own eyeballs.
Azumanga Daioh's initial five episodes introduce all these characters and more through a series of short, lively but evenly paced vignettes dealing with such gripping issues as Ayuma's hiccups and Chiyo's unusual habit of making her own box lunch. The most dramatic scenes on the first DVD volume come from an escaped cockroach in the classroom and a perverted literature teacher's unsettlingly unabashed efforts to spy on the girls during a swimming class. Mostly, though, the series focuses on little encounters and weird moments between the girls, in and out of school, and between Yukari and Minamo, whose teaching styles are as different as their personal styles.
The series does have a few outright fantasy elements—they're rare, but they provide some of the series' most memorable moments. In particular, Miss Sakaki's shy but obsessive attempts to make friends with a cute gray kitten lead to repeated strangeness, as it mutates into a forbidding, cartoony monster every time she touches it. In another key sequence, Ayuma learns that Chiyo's pigtails are detachable, and that she got a new set for Christmas.
Charmingly down to earth for a fantasy
The extras on Azumanga Daioh's first installment are unimpressive—an art gallery, textless opening and closing sequences and ads for other ADV product. But the DVD comes with a 12-page booklet that explains these episodes' Japanese-language puns, as well as its cultural references and background setting. The booklet isn't critical, but it's interesting and it's very helpful, given how much of the series hinges on the quirks of relatively normal Japanese students who aren't distracted by giant robots and telekinetic powers. The teenagers' day-to-day lives aren't exactly mundane, mostly since they're all such strange and colorful characters. But they're not out fighting off alien invasions and supervillains, either. They're mostly filling out career-choice surveys, commenting on comparative breast size, being baffled by their odd teachers, arguing about scholastic achievement and just generally getting through classes.
So where's the appeal in Azumanga Daioh? Partly in the sharp, simple, striking animation style. The colors are warm, and the images are crisp. Because the settings are generally simple, there's not a lot of complex detail to draw viewers' eyes, but the animators make up for it by paying a lot of attention to smooth motion—so much that slow, comedic head-turns and minute individual character movements (like Ayuma's floater-tracking behavior) become effective running gags.
But mostly, Azumanga Daioh is just funny and charming. The characters have some of the hapless youthful charisma of the stars of Alien Nine, and they engage in some of the super-deformed parody weirdness of Excel Saga, without going quite as far as either series. The down-to-earth high-school setting balances out the over-the-top humor, like Yukari and Tomo's separate shrill flailing. The slow, careful pacing of most of the segments is unique for a comedy series, and the characters' little idiosyncrasies are captivating. Azumanga Daioh is a show that works without gimmicks, familiar tropes, or comfortable cliches. That alone would make it stand out. But the fact that it does all this with such a quirky, unusual and appealing cast is what makes it memorable.
Apparently the individual segments of Azumanga Daioh first ran as four-minute filler bits, which were compiled into weekly episodes. Which helps explain the structure, and the tiny little unrelated stories that make up each of these installments.
— Tasha
Back to the top.
