Thoughts on Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

Don’t they all have the same facial expression?

Looks like I never got to talk about Anime in this blog. It’s time to start.

I checked Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei mainly because I thought I wouldn’t like it. In the world of animation, the art style is very, very important. Anyone who tells you otherwise just tries to be appear deep. If the design of the characters wasn’t important, you wouldn’t need animation. Anyway, I found the art style of SZS very unattractive but I also love to check things based on negative first impression just to see if I’m wrong, to make sure I’m not taking my first impressions so far. It turned out that the art style works a lot better on the screen than on static pictures, and it was the least of the show’s problems.

First of all, in the world of SZS everything is a caricature. You need this context. Now, Itoshiki Nozomu is a teacher (Sensei!) who gets depressed easily by even trivial things. His class is full of other caricatures. There’s a girl who sees the good in everything. There’s a girl who needs everything in order and exact. There’s an otaku (with glasses!) who doesn’t get enough screen time. There’s a stalker who ends up as a much less interesting version of Mizore, the purple-haired ice girl from Rosario + Vampire. There’s even a girl whose whole point is that she’s very normal.

SZS is a comedy that focuses mostly on randomness, but it has a unique way of achieving that. Its style is less similar to other comedies I’ve watched, but actually closer to the style of the American Crank films. If Neveldine/Taylor directed a comedy Anime with social satire and less shocking content, this is how it would like. It uses a lot of visual tricks. Before you think of “visual tricks” as the parts when one characters becomes chibi, its tricks are not like that at all. Instead, it uses all kinds of title screens that tell us something about what’s going on, the backgrounds switch colors, characters *suddenly* teleport to the place of events, and in one episode the characters are represented by cardboard. It’s a unique style, but it gets excessive. I laughed a lot in the first two episodes, and I still enjoyed myself in the next few, but somewhere in the middle it became overwhelming. The series was so frantic, like an IDM song that refuses to let even one sound appear more than once. Speed up Aphex Twin’s “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball” or any Protest the Hero song off Fortress and you will get a good idea how the worst episodes work.

I’m perfectly aware the characters are caricatures, but they also eventually got excessive and annoying. The two characters who were the most enjoyable actually got the less screen time. There’s a girl who is addicted to texting and can’t communicate any other way (She and Gin Rummy from The Boondocks will probably get along well), and I can’t think of one moment of her I didn’t like. The jokes involving her are also more mellow and less in-your-face, so it was better. I also wish we could get more of the otaku girl, since she was never turned into a complete caricature and actually felt like a real person. The normal girl was also a relief from all the ruckus.

Then you have the annoying characters. Chiri, the perfectionist girl, has one great scene before becoming not very interesting, and eventually annoying. I get her character and obsessive perfectionists can be used for good jokes, but she just so annoying. I don’t know why she pissed me off. Maybe because they didn’t use her in the right moments. Her one great scene has her trying to divide a cake with 4 strawberries for an increasing number of people. I can’t recall other specific scenes with her but I guess that if they used her in moments where perfectionism could actually be funny (Perfectionism can be funny when a perfectionist deals with something very trivial), then she wouldn’t be so annoying. I also couldn’t stand that hair. Am I the only one who abhors hair that is so straight, it goes down in 180 degree angles? It makes my eyes sore. We really didn’t need that terrible hairstyle.

I also noticed the girl with bandages who love animal tails gets a lot of screen time, and most of it isn’t about her character. Why? This time could’ve been better spent on the cellphone girl.  There’s also a kid who is ignored by everyone until some of his hair drifts and his baldness is revealed. What at first was fun turned into such a mean-spirited joke it lost its spark. Also, was this part about him being masochistic and getting the desired treatment from Chie Arai, the counsler, necessary (She’s a stereotypically beautiful character she becomes boring)? It was so off-putting. It was there for one sole reason and that is to push the envelope. That’s something that should have been in Crank.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is disappointing. The first episodes are good and it picks up a bit at the last two, but between it’s just one messy comedy way too frantic with too much energy that goes way too fast, so it can’t make the U-Turn and so swerves off the race course (That’s why I hate racing games where the road is open. Fuck those games). Should you watch it? I don’t know. I’m a completist but I’m really not sure I’ll check the other seasons. It just a bit too much for me.