Nozomu Itoshiki is a suicidally depressed teacher in a class of maniacs. You've got the psychotically cheerful girl, the hikikomori, abusive email girl, foreigner with dissociative personality disorder, and many other colourful characters. The characters are all pretty one-note, with no more than one or two incredibly exaggerated personality traits. However, the show manages to get a lot of mileage out of throwing all these stereotypes in a blender and seeing what happens. Overall, the first series is darkly hilarious, with the writers using a completely insane cast to comment on everything from morality through international relations to fanfic.
Unfortunately, it loses a lot of momentum in the second series, when dark comedy and social satire are pushed aside by more wacky humour and slapstick. This series felt very disjointed and pointless. Also, much of the humour that could be derived from the nutty cast had apparently dried up, leaving the writers with nothing more than bizarre and occasionally nonsensical sketches to go on.
Also, though it may hve been a case of bad translation, a lot of the dialogue seemed pointlessly random, consisting entirely of non-sequiturs and meaningless phrases.
The art style is unusual. Characters are drawn without outlines or clothing creases, while colourful text hangs in the air. Hair is mainly drawn as a solid black mass for each character. Backgrounds, and sometimes the entire screen, occasionally switches to psychedelic madness. This may not be to everyone's taste, but it does fit the tone of the show very well.
Overall, the first series is well worth checking out, the second, not so much.
One word of warning - the anime has not yet been released outside Japan, and is unlikely to ever be. Hence, you're stuck with fansubs.
If you like this, you might also like:
Pani Poni Dash - A similarly wacky school, but with humour as bright and cheerful as this is dark.
Johnny The Homicidal Maniac - Violent psychopath runs around killing people and pontificating about whatever comes to mind.
Deliciously dark humour
Imagine if Pani Poni Dash was written by Jhonen Vasquez. That's pretty much So Long Mr Despair in a nutshell.
Nozomu Itoshiki is a suicidally depressed teacher in a class of maniacs. You've got the psychotically cheerful girl, the hikikomori, abusive email girl, foreigner with dissociative personality disorder, and many other colourful characters. The characters are all pretty one-note, with no more than one or two incredibly exaggerated personality traits. However, the show manages to get a lot of mileage out of throwing all these stereotypes in a blender and seeing what happens. Overall, the first series is darkly hilarious, with the writers using a completely insane cast to comment on everything from morality through international relations to fanfic.
Unfortunately, it loses a lot of momentum in the second series, when dark comedy and social satire are pushed aside by more wacky humour and slapstick. This series felt very disjointed and pointless. Also, much of the humour that could be derived from the nutty cast had apparently dried up, leaving the writers with nothing more than bizarre and occasionally nonsensical sketches to go on.
Also, though it may hve been a case of bad translation, a lot of the dialogue seemed pointlessly random, consisting entirely of non-sequiturs and meaningless phrases.
The art style is unusual. Characters are drawn without outlines or clothing creases, while colourful text hangs in the air. Hair is mainly drawn as a solid black mass for each character. Backgrounds, and sometimes the entire screen, occasionally switches to psychedelic madness. This may not be to everyone's taste, but it does fit the tone of the show very well.
Overall, the first series is well worth checking out, the second, not so much.
One word of warning - the anime has not yet been released outside Japan, and is unlikely to ever be. Hence, you're stuck with fansubs.
If you like this, you might also like: