And now for some cynical comments concerning Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. I’m sure Nozumu Itoshiki would approve.
If you were to condense everything down - the teacher does spew a lot of hot air - you’d be left with rants. It could be long, it could be short, but it’d be a pretty good rant most of the time. Unfortunately there’s only so much ranting I can take, so watching the last three episodes in a row? Not a good idea.
But I’m not going to knock the show on account of my viewing habits. The ranting is good, after all. I liken the way an episode progresses to a round of hilariously bad improv. It seems that’s how many good rants unfold, anyway.
When making stuff up on the spot, finding the next connection buys a minute or two of survival. Maybe. If it’s only the most tenuous of links and otherwise makes no sense, that’s about as good as a train jumping the tracks. In ranting, though, you want to see the train wreck, or the streetcar accident. The more absurd the outcome, the better.
By the end of a Zetsubou Sensei sketch, everything has spiraled out of control, and the path is some random collection of intermediate points strung together with different colours of lint. The students, the situations, are just fuel for the boilers. Even the subject matter.
But that’s no good.
True, the series goes where others don’t, touching on a diverse set of topics or observations that people recognize but don’t necessarily want to bring up in normal conversation. A lot of the commentary tends to be in the form of one-liners, or blackboard/sign messages that are QFT worthy when they aren’t random, but those are read in the same way that flavour text gets read.
Rather than smashing a topic with merciless satire, most of the effort is centered on maximizing the number of cheap jabs that can be placed in the span of an episode. So in the end Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei manages to slay very little, despite skewering everything under the sun at every possible moment.
It’s funny watching someone vent and run off on tangents. I just wish there wasn’t such a rush to get off tr - ooh shiny!
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I agree that there didn’t seem to be much substance to accompany the material later on in the series - once the quirkiness was stripped away all that’s left is one paranoid guy and his quasi-harem. I guess it is actually intended to be a string of cheap shots since the sharp social commentary thing is part of the humour, i.e. exaggerating his fears to comedic effect. The single funniest thing was Itoshiki-sensei with his outrageous behaviour and opinions. What a guy.
Even in the final episode it never failed to raise a few smiles though, plus there’s that gorgeous art style. When the comedy began to wear thin the visual prettiness was just enough to sustain it.
*nods* The visuals do keep me on my toes during those quiet moments.
This kinda floundered about towards the end for me, and took on an overt social commentary bent. Not like that’s a bad thing, but I felt that it never really managed to capture the fresh humour of the first few episodes.
Oh well, here’s to hoping Zoku SZS will give us something else. Maybe they need to introduce more new students all the time, as was the case with episode 12…