| Azumanga Daioh #2: Festivals! |
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| Thursday, 30 December 2004 | |
 It's the return of one of the most random anime series I've ever come
across. While a few more recent shows have tried to capture Azumanga Daioh's appeal, nothing has quite managed it. This volume starts off normally enough - every high-school show simply has
to have sports fest & culture fest episodes (there seems to be a
law about that somewhere...) - but from there, it gets very strange...6 - Sports Fest Let the competition begin, between Yukari & Nyamo, for whose class can win the first-year sports festival. Yukari has Sakaki on her team, but Nyamo's class has its own sports-mad student - Kagura. Which team will win?   7 - Culture Fest
8 - New Year's Dream Special
9 - Miss Sakaki
Not much to say about the festival episodes, as they've been done so many times in so many different shows that it's almost impossible for them to give the viewer anything new. The highlights of both episodes are Kimura-sensei's brief appearances ("I want pool water! That the girls have been swimming in!"), but apart from that they're pretty missable, especially by AzuDai's usual standards. At least they didn't put on a cafe for the culture fest - that would have been playing by the rulebook a little too much. The New Year Special is something entirely different, however, and manages to be the weirdest thing I've seen in a while (death by pigtail & a cat for a father? Poor Chiyo-chan...), and easily the highlight of the disc. The final episode is a 'Sakaki special' and brings a healthy dose of 'slice of life' to proceedings. Two out of four isn't bad, I suppose, but this volume, while having its highlights, wasn't as good as the first one. 'Average' by AzuDai standards is still 'good' by the standards of a lot of other shows, though, so it's still worth picking up. |
