Ranked #174

Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

I wouldn't say that it's mandatory to have watched the first season prior to Zoku, but, then again, there's absolutely not a reason as to why you shouldn't. It's of roughly the same quality and an overall entertaining show.

This is a comedy/satire anime and the jokes are almost without exception based on the problems and absurdities of society and humanity as a whole. It's full of references to the anime industry: both to series, producers, seiyuus, stereotypes etc. To understand many of the jokes, you have to have watched a lot of different animes and know your terminology, otherwise you will instead of laughing end up with a question mark on your face. A lot of jabs are also aimed solely at recent and old happenings in Japan and are almost impossible for us westerners to understand if we don't have a profound knowledge of the Japanese culture and are up to date with what happens over there. This is not really a big issue, but it deserves to be mentioned.

The "story" revolves around a high-school class full of different, crazy students and their mentally unstable techer: Itoshiki Nozomu, Zetsubou Sensei. He sees everything in a negative light and always falls into despair when he thinks about all the everyday problems you face and have to endure. Together with his students and many other spaced-out charcters, he drives all the issues to their extreme and the end result is often hilarious. Some reoccuring jokes, like pants shots, become annoying after a while, but the diversity is still very good. Often, there are so many things on-screen that you have to pause to see them all, since the pacing is very high. This is one of the few flaws this anime has. There are very few new main characters, but there isn't a really a pressing need for any, because the cast is already big and awesome enough.

ZSZS sports the same innovative aestethics as the first season and the quality of art and animation hasn't improved noticably. It's hard to describe the visual style accurately, but it's generally simple and 2D-ish, with some interesting special effects. Throughout the series, there are however many different art styles utilized, enhancing the relative "drama" and sheer randomness of particular scenes.

The BGM is used nicely, and while not being particularily memorable, it does a great job of helping the jokes to be successful. As for the OPs and EDs, they're all great and suit the series perfectly. Kuusou Runba is undoubtedly one of the best OPs I've ever had the pleasure to hear and it fits the intro flawlessly.

To summarize, Zoku is an excellent second season that, in my opinion, surpasses the first season in all ways possible. While the episodes differ in terms of qualitative - and understandable - jokes, they're generally ingeniously executed and highly entertaining. However, this series does demand that you as a spectator has a decent knowledge of the anime industry and Japanese culture; if you don't, you will miss out on many of the jokes, jabs and puns. So if you for this - or some other - reason didn't like the first season, there's no reason for you to bother trying this. And vice versa, of course. I sincerely hope that a third season is already in production. read more

All episodes have their own stories, hardly connected to each other and the presentation style is no different from the first season. Lets just say it random.

Genres : mainly PARODY, it's also SCHOOL LIFE, so uniform fetish please notice it

this anime is an incarnation of newspapers' comic strip, it makes fun of any social event took place in Japan, that's why most of us hardly understand it


STORY 10
this should do, since it's the most attracting thing in this anime
characters' bio are also very interesting, did characters'bio counted toward story or characters ? i give 10 for both anyway

ART 10
see for your self, i'm not an expert (in english grammar) so i won't talk so much in something technical. It just brilliant, production do a hell lot of artwork every week, some frames are used less than a second.

SOUND 9
if everything was 10, it will look much like hoax, so i give one 9, i have nothing to say about sound anyway, if it about seiyuu, i would be more than happy to say that SHINTANI RYOKO, a super minor seiyuu which i like, is here

CHARACTER 10
the characters here are interesting by their name, not their MOEness, all characters have a name that has another meaning other than being a name, saying anything more will be a spoiler

ENJOYMENT 10
if i give it full 10 how could i not enjoy it

OVERALL 10
everything is good, except Lapisdragon's grammar, forget me and go dl some of this read more