Archive for the Azumanga Daioh Category


Yuri Anime: Azumanga Daioh, Volume 5

November 30th, 2004

More wacky fun, Yuri longing and Sakaki and Kagura looking incredibly cool. Plus a toy surprise!

Today’s review will be a quicky – the story in Volume 5 of Azumanga Daioh is pretty much the same kind of hijinks as in the first four volumes. Osaka is loopy, Chiyo-chan is adorable, Tomo’s a moron, Yomi’s pathetic, Sakaki’s cool, etc, etc.

Notably on this DVD is the fateful trip to Okinawa, in which Osaka gets to make a gazillion mostly untranslatable puns, and Sakaki befriends a mountain cat, thus breaking her curse and violating all sorts of wildlife laws all at the same time.

Much more importantly, in their final sports festival, we (along with a still-besotted Kaorin,) get to enjoy both Kagura and Sakaki in an outfit known as gakuran. The gakuran is really just a traditional boy’s school uniform, but it’s often shown as a longer jacket and with baggy pants, like a zoot suit – a look favored by gangs in manga and anime and assumably, in real life. The gakuran is often accompanied by sarashi, bandages wrapped around the chest for both guys and girls, although of the top of my head I don’t know why. In this case, the Red Racoon Dogs (the team name chosen by our intrepid athletes) wear sports bras. Amusingly  If you care, I’ve found an old black & white photo of a guy in the old style gakuran with long jacket and baggy pants.

Anyway, this volume is the usual four episodes, good liner notes with explanations of the puns (which are very necessary, let me tell you!) and a cloisonne pin of, as I predicted, the Otou-san cat. Whee. Now I have two cat pins I don’t want. Why can’t we get Sakaki pins, for pity’s sake!?!

But don’t let me get you down. In reality, this volume is another excellent entry into this always excellent and very funny series.

Ratings:
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Art – 8
Music – 7
Yuri – 4

Overall – 8

Really, is it too much to ask to get a pin, or doll or something of Sakaki in the gakuran? They made a gashapon of Kagura in the darn thing!

Oh, but look what I found while searching for one. This must have made by taking Kagura’s gashapon body and adding Sakaki’s head because I’ve never seen anything for sale like it. Now, why didn’t *I* think of that? ^_^

P.S. – Gashapon are little dolls, like 4″ or so, that come in pieces, usually from vending machines for a couple hundred yen each. You stick ’em together and they really look good. “The word is derived from the sound made by the machine when you operate it to win your prize (Gasha-Gasha).”





Yuri Anime: Azumanga Daioh Vol. 4

October 1st, 2004

The short version: It’s a story about a bunch of loopy girls in school with a few loopy teachers. It’s funny as hell.

If you have heard of Azumanga Daioh but don’t know why Yuri fans should care, read my original review of the Yuri content first.

If you know about Azumanga Daioh and are just considering buying the US released DVDs, you might want to read my initial reviews of Azumanga Daioh Vols. 1,2, 3.

Which brings us, at last, to Volume 4. I picked this up in time to keep me company on the train back from a work-related conference in Washington, DC. It was the perfect anime to watch on the ride home, since it appears to be the funniest volume so far…or so I inferred from my continuing hysterics for well over an hour. In fact, I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

To start, this is a 5-episode volume. I think that that should be the standard for a DVD, personally, with 6 from time to time as a bonus. Reversible cover seems to be the standard now – I approve. (Especially when one has gone and bought a box for the set – the reversible covers end up like little mini-posters that have some actual “keep and enjoy” value.)

Story-wise, Vol. 4 has alot to recommend it. It is, for one thing, insanely funny, and full of abundant cuteness provided by Chiyo-chan. On the down side, there’s a lot of Yomi-bashing, for some reason, which bothered me the first time around and isn’t any less irritating this time. I don’t really understand why fate keeps crapping on her, when Tomo is so wretched, but there you go, another mystery of life unsolved. But overall, this has been the best of all the volumes, with, perhaps (depending on who your favorite character is…) the very best yet to come.

The animation remains the same as the first volumes, of course. The DVD includes those amazingly detailed liner notes, but no toy surprise which was a bit of a bummer.

The sound quality kept fading in and out for me, but might have been any number of problems, including the earphones I was using, so I won’t hold that against the DVD itself.

And the translation is, at least, consistent. The honorific “-chan” is left as is, the others are ignored or translated according to some arcane alchemical formula which, assumably, is understood by the translators, (who feel that “Miss Yukari” can be an appropriate translation for “Yukari-chan”, “Yukari”, “Yukari-sensei” and “Sensei.” Do not ask me to explain – I do not know.)

So, I’m looking forward to the next DVD, as always, and have found that embarrassing one’s self by busting a gut in public is totally worth it when you are watching something as truly hysterical and wacky as Azumanga Daioh. ^_^

Ratings: Remain the same as previously. Overall 8, a must-have.

Oh, since *this* is the disk where Kaorin gets the rainbow jets and wedding bells (when she is recruited to do a 3-legged race with Sakaki-san,) maybe we’ll jump the Yuri rating to ‘8’ too. ^_^

Erratum: One of the liner notes in the first disk has a comment by a staffer that, after Chihiro’s first scene (she’s the classmate being helped by Chiyo-chan in the beginning,) she becomes background noise and kind of disappears into the story, never to be seen again, except maybe for one line. I am glad to report that he was wrong. I have been rooting for Chihiro since then, looking to see if she comes back and she does – repeatedly. She and Kaorin made the penguin costume Chiyo-chan wears, and she is also supposed to have been Kaorin’s 3-legged race partner. So, gambare Chihiro! Don’t disappear! ^_^





Yuri Anime: Azumanga Daioh Vols. 1,2, 3 (English)

September 13th, 2004

It’s always touch and go when an anime series that relies as heavily on puns and humor as Azumanga Daioh does is translated into English. ADV Manga tried to be too clever when they translated the manga, and as a result the first volume really lost some of the funnier bits…but I’ve been told that the problems were rectified in the later volumes.

Nonetheless, it was with some trepidation that I purchased the first volume of the DVD. In general I was pleasantly surprised.

Let me start off with the good – the liner notes. I have never seen such excellent liner notes *ever,* in any release. Not only do they explain the puns (and how they developed the English-language equivalents) they have fun comments from the designers and directors and other Japanese staff. Because a lot of these comments are silly and irrelevant, they fit with the general tone of the anime well. The liner notes also include character sketches, which I personally don’t care for much, but I’m sure some people would be thrilled with. (The killer for me on these was that for Sakaki-san’s character sketches, they completely don’t show her in the uber-cool gakuran she wears at the second Physical Fitness Festival. I mean – if we can’t see that, who *cares*? ^_^)

There wasn’t any “get” until the third volume – a pretty decently made cloisonne’ pin of nekokoneko. I wouldn’t mind a few more pins. (I’m betting the Otousan cat wil be one of them, though…sigh.) The DVDs come with reversible covers, which seems to be the norm now – I quite like that.

Of course, I wasn’t happy with the use of honorifics, or lack thereof, but at least they are consistent and explicable. Essentially, they left “-chan” the way it was, since they couldn’t translate it in any meaningful way, but translated “-san” as “Miss” or “Mr.” and “-sensei” the same way…mostly. It gets a bit uncomfortable when Tomo calls Yukari-sensei “Yukari-chan” and they don’t really translate that….

Again, I remain a purist on honorifics, because there is no English equivalent to the hierarchies implied by their use. PLEASE translators, leave them alone!

Because so much of Osaka’s dialogue is horrible puns, I have to admit they really went out of their way to figure out reasonable English equivalents, which was good, but…I was disappointed that they use the English-language script as the subtitle script. So we don’t get those complex puns as she says them – we get the made-up equivalents. The liner notes cover the puns, so you can learn what Osaka really says…but they could have just translated them directly for the subtitles. Oh well.

Lastly, in terms of number of episodes, this series is wildly inconsistent, running from 6 episodes to 4, depending on the volume. Which isn’t heinous. And getting 5 or 6 eps. on a DVD always makes me feel pretty good about the purchase.

In terms of story: this series still cracks me up every time I watch it. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, all while being pretty mild and goofy. I smile a lot at the characters involuntarily.

Kaorin is *still* hugely and openly gay. Her crush on Sakaki goes well beyond akogare/admiration. You can tell because of the rainbow colored jets and church bells and lily imagery that they shove down your throat whenever she has a Sakaki moment. ^_^ This is a comedy – she’ll graduate never having told Sakaki a thing, but you can be sure that Kaori will be wearing rainbow accessories in her future. ^_^

Ratings:
Art – 6
Story – 8
Character – 9
Yuri – 7, since Kaorin is just a side character.
Music – 7
Service – 3
Overall – 8

This is laugh out loud funny and a nice change of pace from angsty Yuri. A definite must-have. ^_^





Yuri Anime: Azumanga Daioh

February 2nd, 2004

Things I’m Not Going to Write About
Part 5

This week, we’ll continue the series of short opinion pieces on popular and well-known series with yuri content. Why not, eh? Next week, we’ll pick up with some older, obscure works.

Azumanga Daioh:
This isn’t a “yuri” series, per se. One of the secondary characters, Kaorin, is, however, clearly a babydyke in training. Her crush/obsession with the magnificently kakkoii Sakaki is *definitely* yuri.

The manga makes it plain that Kaorin worships and, at least in a vaguish sense, desires Sakaki. The anime loses any of the “vague” about it and makes it really, really obvious. (There’s the seven jets flying overhead with rainbow colored smoke and wedding bells ringing as they dance, or perhaps it was Kaorin’s New Year dream in which she was rescued from a girl gang by Sakaki on a white horse, awakened *just* as they are about to kiss…) The relationship is played for laughs since its completely one-sided, but the whole series is played for laughs, so that’s not a negative thing. This is a loopy, silly series that makes me laugh so hard I snort. And it has yuri. That makes it good in my opinion.

The manga is alreadyavailable in English from ADV Manga and ADV Films has the anime slated for a Spring 2004 release. The downside to this is that the English translation of the manga is pretty lame. For once, the translators kept the yuri intact, but the translation tries so hard to adapt the manga for an American audience, that almost all of the jokes fall flat. It was very disappointing, especially as the manga is really quite funny, at least in Japanese. Unfortunately, ADV decided that we wouldn’t “get” it, if they left Yukari-sensei as an incompetent English teacher, so they changed it to Spanish, thus rendering all of the gaijin and English-language related jokes completely meaningless. As a result, I hold low expectations for the dub adaptation of the anime, but they can’t really screw with the Japanese version, so just watch that.

On an entirely wacky note (as befits this series) my *biggest* complaint about Azumanga Daioh is the lack of decent yuri doujinshi. There are many, many doujinshi of this series – a side effect of the minimalist art, which allows many people to recreate the style easily – but they seem to fall into two categories: 1) sexless parody and gag and ; 2) appalling hentai. Most of the AD doujinshi I saw at Comiket were in the former category, which was fine. But the few hentai doujinshi I saw were just…yeah. I mean, Sakaki and the *cat*??? Chiyo-chan and anyone? Hello? What about Sakaki and Kagura or Kaorin and Sakaki? Sheesh, I would have even accepted Tomo and Yomi…and I’m really stretching there, I think. LOL But bleah…the cat. I swear to god, every series I ever like, the doujinshi pairings are always the most appalling…sigh. There is exactly *one* KaguraxSakaki doujinshi and everytime I see it on Yahoo Japan, it’s starting at $20. I’m just too cheap to spend that on something I can’t see first.

But this is all irrelevant, isn’t it? The series itself is hysterical and I encourage you all to purchase it (not download ripped files…go and get a job, become a productive member of society, pay taxes and support your evil habits honestly) and join us on the Yuricon Mailing List to chat about how funny it is.

Ratings for the Japanese version only: Yuri – 6, Art – 5 (it’s intentionally minimalist) Story – 9, Music – 7, Characters – 8, Overall – 8