Azumanga Daioh Class Album DVD Review

By sothis Published: September 28, 2005

PACKAGING AND MENU

9 / 10

I can’t help but love the packaging for the Azumanga thinpak release. The box is surprisingly sturdy and thick, and shows the girls in their gym outfits on one side, and the girls in their cat outfits on the other side. Chiyo, in her blue school outfit, graces the spine. A simple white background is behind all the imagery, and Azumanga Daioh red bubbles contain the text. The top of the box has the yellow cat. The bottom is easily my favorite part of the box, as it has the gray cat… eating the ADV logo! Ha! The individual DVD cases each have one of the five girls on it, and the disc has a different picture of the same girl. No inserts or anything extra were included.

The menus are static, but still great. A picture of the gray cat is attacking Sakaki, and that’s about it. The cursor is an outline of the orange stuffed cat Sakaki has while on the episode numbers, and turns into the hiragana character for “ah” with an exclamation point when on the text links. Due to the lack of features, the only other menus are for the language page and the ADV previews (on disc 1). The preview menu is surprisingly well laid out, with wonderful random graphics and lines to indicate each preview. The language menu has a comical shot of the classroom. These menus are also static images. I guess the one small gripe I have about the menus is that they were literally the same on every single disc. I understand that with thinpak releases, the extras and other “incentives” are stripped out because of the lower MSRP, but it still would have been nice (and probably easy) to have a different static picture for each of the five discs. That fact is the only reason I dinged a point from this section.

FEATURES

0 / 10

Like ADV's other thinpak releases, the Azumanga thinpak set doesn't have any extras.

VIDEO

9.5 / 10

The video for this thinpack is awesome. The colors come across warm and vividly, with no major noise in areas with solid colors. The picture is very sharp and clean with the absence of most typical video problems. Even the aliasing is really well done. It's only slightly noticeable with panning shots and some of the art that has very thin lines. In general it's nothing to complain about, and won't disrupt the enjoyment of watching the show.

AUDIO

8 / 10

We watched the DVDs in standard Japanese with English subtitles. The Japanese 2.0 was a perfect transfer from the R2 source. The audio was clean with no major issues. There wasn't much use of the right and left soundstage to add depth, but then again there aren't many scenes for that kind of effect to be used. Also watched was the English 5.1 audio, which was also very good. One comment I'd like to make is that ADV once again used a southern accent for 'Osaka' to represent the difference in typical anime Japanese to that with an Osaka dialect. They also did this in Abenobashi, and paying attention to this sort of detail and consistency earns high marks in my book. Aside from that, they made decent use of the 5.1 soundstage, adding ambient noises and music to fill in the sound.

CONTENT

9 / 10

Azumanga Daioh is a show about nothing, literally. Think of it like Seinfeld, but with high school girls and more hilarity, and you've got all the bases covered. The episodes revolve around six girls and their daily life at a high school, which always ends up being random in some way.

The comic formula is hilarious, and is almost flawless. Many scenes will make you scratch your head and wonder "eh?" while simultaneously laughing, while other scenes make you laugh by repeating the same thing over and over and over and over, far past the point where you think it should have just stopped the joke. The best comic relief was definitely the male teacher who was always hitting on the girls, who had a trademark jaw drop constantly. He would randomly be thrown into the episodes very spasticly, making anyone with a sense of humor laugh out loud. I think that's the beauty of Azumanga Daioh: it relentlessly attempts at making you laugh by throwing you off guard by whatever means necessary, and it succeeds. So really, don't go into watching Azumanga thinking you'll get any sort of a plot. There are only a few episodes that are linked somehow, but the rest do follow a timeline (the girls making their way through three years of school, up to the satisfying conclusion).

Azumanga has a very minimal style of animation, with not a lot of detail or shading, but hey, it doesn't really need it for the content involved. Randomness and humor abound, so there are a great deal of chibis and deformed scenes that take place. The spastic nature of the show is reflected in the spastic animation and color schemes, and it works very well. The emotions of the characters are drastically exaggerated by using huge eyes or ridiculously overdone expressions, and this helps the humor a great deal. There isn't much else I can say about the animation besides this. There is no CG used and no crazy special effects, just minimal shading and artwork, and tons of crazy scenes.

The character development was basically non-existant, yet I still gave this section a 9.5. Why? To put it bluntly, Azumanga Daioh has some of the most hilarious characters I've seen, who all fill their incredibly exaggerated role perfectly. Chiyo is the little girl who is the epitome of cuteness. Her voice helps with this persona, as well as giant watery eyes when she gets upset, and her little girl ways of doing things. Sakaki is obsessed with cute things and is super quiet, and always blushes whenever she sees a cat or dog, yet (for the comedic effect) she always is bitten when she tries to pet things. Tomo is the most obnoxious character by far and is always yelling and pissing people off. She's why I deducted the .5, as she was irritating as hell. Yumi is probably the least developed character -- her one quirk is that she is obsessed with her weight. Then there's Osaka, an extremely slow and stupid girl who tends to always make you laugh with the idiotic things that come out of her mouth. And finally, Kagura is athletic and competitive. These six characters are fairly extreme to begin with, but them morph into super extreme characters by the end of the series. Osaka seems slow at first, but becomes almost braindead by the end of the series, for example. It's like watching old Simpsons versus new Simpsons... Homer is way more defined and hilarious in the later series than the first, and Azumanga is the same. The entire series is about pushing the limits of comedy, and the characters help out with this immensely.

Azumanga is a great watch for any fans of comedy. Out of all the random series I've seen, Azumanga definitely has the highest concentration of randomness and laugh out loud moments, combined with hilarious characters and wacky moments alike. If you like comedy series, I can't see why you haven't watched this yet! And if you haven't, pick it up right now, since you'll surely like it. Two thumbs up in my book.