Paniponi Dash!

Pani Poni Dash is an excellent comedy that is a perfect match for Shaft. Its heavy use of non-sequitor humour and fast pace with constantly changing scenes fits well with shafts animation style allows them to go full out when animating it.

Content wise, there is essentially no overarching plot. Episodes may refer to each other, but actions do not have consequences and wierd things constantly happen that are reversed or never brought up later. The lack of plot structure is actually pani poni’s greatest strength as it allows it to have ridiculous events with no lasting consequences on the world or the ... characters such as becoming a mech pilot to fight a giant delinquent for one episode. The stories told are often vehicles for comedy and are not important in their own right, despite some being extremely heartwarming and serious. Pani Poni dash always straddles the line between serious and comedy and plays jump rope with it with great results.

Comedy wise, the main comedy is non sequitor humour and gags. This works very well in animation as there is almost always some sort of visual gag happening on screen demanding your attention. There is no respite to the jokes. However, you should have some tolerance for referential humour. This is probably the only part of Pani Poni dash I did not really like. There is a ridiculous amount of references in it, from popular anime, to kids anime you've probably never watched and even random video games and japanese culutural references. I personally did not find all of them that funny( among the ones I understood) and I think it would be hard to truly have the context needed to truly understand the references unless you were literally in japan and had been brought up in japan while it was airing. In a way, it shows its age.

Visuals are where this show really stands. Even among Shaft's works, which I consider to have great animation, Pani Poni dash is a level above. It may very well be my favorite work animation wise. The entire world looks almost like a dream with things popping in and out randomly. Characters will appear as animals, dolls and the classroom never looks the same. As I said before, the non-sequitor humour allows for shaft to constantly create interesting and weird things. In addition, Pani Poni dash is very fast paced with scenes flowing into the next at a rapid pace. One second, the characters are in Japan on an abandonded island, and the next they are across the world in Brazil dancing in a fair. The lack of structure and a need to adhere to a strict plot gives shaft the opportunity to go full out and show everything they've got. You will find some of their best shots in this show and you will definitely find their most interesting shots in it.

Lastly, lets talk about Characters. Pani Poni Dash is a very character driven show as the humour comes from the character interactions. This is a bit controversial subject as objectively speaking, there are a ridiculous amount of characters. In the first episode alone they introduce like 10-15 characters that will reappear in future episodes. The main cast consists of about 6 or 7 characters but many others return for a couple of episodes to almost every episode. This can make it a bit hard to keep track of characters visually. However, after a couple episodes, I did not find it very hard to keep track of them. This is because characters have unique personalities that are explored through the episodes, and often have gimicks like certain actions, or sayings. For examples, there is a character who says "Maho" a lot and "Thats omega-awesome" and such. Another character often says, Something-Something-"of the year". These gimicks are repeated throughout the show which reinforces them in your mind and really differentiates the characters. They all have very different personalities and after a couple of episodes I really appreciated them. I can also say that there was not a single character I disliked or thought was boring.

Overall, Pani Poni Dash, is a great character focused comedy with a lot of humour and a surprising amount of heartwarming moments. My only advice would be to give it a couple episodes to get to know the characters before judging the show, and to not try to hard to understand eveyrything. There are gonna be references and jokes you won't get due to not having the context, and if you focus on them you'll never get through an episode. Just wait a couple seconds and there will undoubtedly be another joke to laught at. Also, be ready to screenshot a lot. There are some seriously beautiful and creative visual shots. Oh and the OP's are great. OP 3 > OP 2 > OP 1 imo.

I love absurd comedy. I love Akiyuki Shinbo's shows.
But this doesn't work at all. I know that this show relies on the comedy of the absurd and that it is (mostly) episodic. I mean it has an overarching plot. So you can't judge seriously a comedy.
But is there any comedy? Sure you might find funny the characters' personalities and their interactions. It is good for 1, 2 even 3 episodes. But during all the show the jokes are the same. Take episode one and episode 26. Is there any difference?
No! I repeat each and every episode ... has the same jokes. When something repeats over and over it just gets lame and boring.
I had hopes for the show and on the mid point, there were 2 or 3 episodes that were better than others, but after that everything got even worse.
The best part of the show is the music. The OST is decent enough and it helped me finish the show. Endings were good too.
But the utmost value of the show are the openings. There are several and they all are amazing. I can't choose which one I prefer.
But was it worth to watch 26 episodes just for music?
I would recommend find OST in the internet and listen to it, but don't watch the show.

"Rebecca Miyamoto. Born of an American father and a Japanese mother. Graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the youngest graduate in the school's history. She then returned to Japan to become a highschool teacher. However, she was only ten years old at the time."

The success of a little manga-turned-anime you might have heard of called Azumanga Daioh spawned a long chain of imitators, eventually developing into the slice-of-life sub-genre that many of us know colloquially as the "cute girls doing cute things" genre. Pani Poni Dash is one of those shows, and that, coupled with the quote above, ought to be all I really ... need to say about the plot for you to know exactly what this show is like... notice I said ought to be. The show's creators decided that putting a new hat on an old face wasn't enough for them, and the end result defies concise classification, so I won't even try. What's really important is that this show is intended as a comedy, which is one of the most subjective genres in existence. As a consequence, it can be extremely difficult to give such shows an honest and fair critique. The approach I'll take for this review will be to look at what the show tries to achieve, how it attempts to make its audience laugh, and whether those moments "work".

I hinted that this show was rather unique, and that's partially due to the visuals. Production studio SHAFT and director Akiyuki Shinbo are known for blending standard animation with stop-motion photograpy, numerous art shifts, simpler color choices when they're effective... what I'm trying to say is that the look of the show is memorable, and this especially applies to the opening and ending themes. At its most basic the animation doesn't really impress and the moe character designs are pretty generic, but it always gets the job done, and when the show decides to try out a different animation style they consistently up the ante. The show also makes interesting use of the foreground, which adds an extra degree of expressiveness. If I have one bone to pick, it's that the extras are very, very ugly. Considering the extras in each classroom have different designs and they're all ugly, I can only assume it's intentional for... whatever reason. Overall, though, this show looks mostly fine. I've heard some people say that SHAFT's odd visuals are their way of saving money, and there may be a grain of truth to that, but it still leaves a definite impression.

The soundtrack is about what you'd expect from a slice-of-life anime: relaxed or quirky when it needs to be, a bit repetitive but never really jarring. This is in part because there are several episodes during which we're taken out of the typical classroom setting and into several more outlandish scenarios, and in each case the music adapts suitably. It's not particularly memorable music, but it's mostly fine and I guess that's all I have to say about it. "About what you'd expect" and "mostly fine" are also what I'd use to describe the Japanese cast, which is pretty much comprised of typical soft moe-girl voices. Never bad, but they don't impress either. The dub, on the other hand, was handled by the now-infamous ADR director Steven Foster. For those not familiar with his work, Foster has a tendency to take excessive liberties with the material he's given. This includes inserting profanity or mean-spirited comments in odd places, along with an uncomfortable combination of overacting and underacting. All his usual stuff is here, and in particular the voice acting in this show comes off as both high-pitched and wooden. There are several good voice actresses here, so I'm inclined to blame that on Foster. Still, it doesn't really detract from the show, and in a roundabout way it actually sort of matches.

So, even though Pani Poni Dash! is technically a highschool comedy, the show's situational humor has remarkably little to do with actual highschool. Its scenarios range from searching for a lost cowlick to fighting off alien mushroom spores to an archaeological dig to a battle against a giant comet in space, the list goes on. That's just the stuff that happens episode by episode; even the supposed "everyday life" at the school is filled to the brim with hidden rooms, weird animals, and some things I can't even identify, and there's almost always something happening in the background. There's a camera crew that seems to be recording the show (they obviously have no idea what they're doing) and a group of aliens who seem to be monitoring Rebecca and her students from orbit. This show makes enough references to stump even the most hardcore of otaku at least once or twice. The writers put so much effort into filling the school with weird and interesting ideas, in fact, that they completely forget to give any of them punchlines. Those are kind of important, guys.

The biggest problem with the situational humor here is that the writers make the common mistake of assuming that "weird" or "random" automatically equate to "funny", without anything clever or relevant to hold the joke together. This isn't high-class humor, but if it's handled with a good timing it can still work. The problem? Pani Poni Dash! has no restraint. It essentially fails as a comedy for the same reason that Hellsing TV fails as a horror: it can't set up its audience's expectations properly. It's one thing to hit us with something random and out-of-the-blue at the last moment we'd expect it, quite another to shove that kind of thing in our face all the time without ever letting us build up a sense of normalcy. Once the weirdness stops being unexpected, it's not fun anymore. A good portion of the stuff that happens we're expected to laugh at it because it's there and it's weird, and that's pretty much it. When the punchline to a good portion of the jokes is "I don't get it", you know you have a problem. The show will make references simply to make the audience say "wow, that sure is a reference you just made". I mentioned that the show makes frequent art shifts, which are handled competently from a technical standpoint, but the writers never do anything witty with them. If you're going to switch to an RPG-esque visual style, why not make it an episode about videogames? It's not that hard to justify these things.

Even if they don't handle their situational comedy well, some shows get by on good character-based humor, but that's not the case here either. Like many other shows of its ilk, Pani Poni Dash! basically revolves around the antics of a group of schoolgirls, with the added "gimmick" of a kid-teacher who tries with varying levels of success to act like an adult but still shows her childish side. Then there are the students, ranging from Himeko, a hyperactive girl with a hair problem and a verbal tic (maho), to Ichijou, the class representative who constantly straddles the line between evil mastermind and... Osaka, if we're making Azumanga Daioh comparisons. But that's just a tiny portion of the cast, especially if you bring in the students and teachers from other classrooms. With such diversity, this show should have the potential for a wealth of character-based comedy. But then the series completely blows the most important element of character-based comedy: making the characters likable and believable. There's not much character to like, seeing as a good portion of them are essentially comprised of one or two jokes, like the clumsy girl and the cosplay girl. Seeing Becky's rabbit Mesousa fail to pick up an object because he doesn't have fingers gets old really fast. There's also big, muscular, masculine-looking girl named Zula, and a cat who claims he's God, haunts vending machines, and happens to be another Azumanga Daioh reference. Once again, the joke is that they exist and that's it. This kind of half-assed, repetitive writing does not good humor make.

The show never gets its characters to play off of each other in any clever ways, either, often resulting in a reliance on out-of-character moments just to force out a joke. For example, there was one episode where everyone suddenly decided to take advantage of a girl for being "too nice", even the ones who aren't usually smart or mean enough to do such a thing. Worse still, some of the characters can be terribly jarring. Your mileage may vary, but it's hard to find Rebecca's "cuteness" endearing when she's so bitterly cynical all the time, and an eventual look into her backstory reveals that she was incredibly introverted and distant when she went to college, which make her occasional lapses into an innocent child less plausible, not moreso. As a result, most of the time she just comes off as a precocious brat. That's to say nothing about Himeko and her goddamn Maho, which can become positively unbearable. The reason I said the English dub didn't really detract from the experience is because there's really nothing to detract from--the characters already act so unnatural (and in many cases mean-spirited) that it can be hard to tell where the show ends and Foster begins.

Pani Poni Dash! is ultimately a series of missed opportunities. The few (and I mean very few) moments where this show genuinely managed to make me chuckle were when the show took a simple but neat idea and then followed it through to a weird-but-logical conclusion. It's not hard stuff, which makes the show's failure to pull it off all the more frustrating. This series does everything it can to get the audience's attention while failing to do anything to deserve it. It's immature, is what I'm getting at, and loud and obnoxious to boot. Just to clarify, I do not hate this show. At first I hated it, but as I neared the end all my rage had more or less burned out. That's not to say this show is an acquired taste, if anything it's an acquired immunity. By the time I finished, I didn't even care enough to hate this show, it had just become boring, which is the one thing I never thought this attention-seeking brat of a show would become.

This isn't anywhere close to the worst I've seen in an anime; I know there are some people out there who will enjoy this, and it should be easy to tell from the first episode or two whether you're one of those people. Despite that, I can't bring myself to recommend this show in any capacity, not even on a "give it a chance if it's put in front of you" level. What it comes down to is this: all of the shtick in Pani Poni Dash! I've seen done better in other anime, some of which can't even be considered good. That more than anything should speak for where I stand with this series.