Azumanga Web Daiou

Story: 7, good Art: 9, great Sound: 6, fair Characters: 10, outstanding Enjoyment: 7, good Overall: 9, great Well, I just thought I'd do a quick review on this. This is basically just Tomo playing around with a video camera, nothing special. It was very cute though, and abit funny, so I did enjoy it. If you like Azumanga Daioh or have nothing to do, I suggest you watch it.

This is one of the worst Ova(s) I've ever seen. It focuses on a group of high-school girls (ncluding a ten-year-old child prodigy Chiyo-chan) who have her bring her videocamera to school one day. Then the overreacting Tomo-chan comes and messes everything up (which is funny as the usual, but not here). Story: It still focuses on the group of high-school girls, but the story just wasn't my taste. It has the anime switching to video-game likeness and then realism, like it's flash-animated. And the story's really short like it should be a 27-minute special. Art: The art was amazing as it always was, but this oneis even more dreadful. The characters look sloppy and unoriginal and it just seems like a bad flash on Newgrounds.com. Sound: The Japanese dub was really annoying and irritating and where is the bouncy music they always play? it's like everything wound down and you're in the show. Character: I disliked Chiyo-chan, but there's not much of her in this. Characters are taking the videocamera all around the school and meet friends and it just seems like everything went too quick. Enjoyment: I never enjoyed this special. I was watching Lupin III while I was wondering why this pilot (or whatever) deserved so much hatred and I had to watch it and what a big disappointment it was. I was bored throughout the whole thing even the opening was too short and uninteresting. Overall: I don't think this is very violent or profane, it just seems like it should be rated G - for all ages. Well, everything was all messed up and all, but please do not watch this crap. It's as horrible as Winx Club.

While this really was cute and all, it really needed to be longer because I really did want more. The storyline was cute in that it was about a video time capsule and introduced almost all the main characters from the anime show. It was a great bit to see the different personalities of the characters in their more basic form. Some you really didn’t get everything that made them who they were but it was interesting enough that you may want to see the anime after this. The art style is very basic compared to its anime counterpart and yet since it was mostly in‘first person filmed’ mode, it didn’t feel to lacking. The jarring of the camera and the strange art styles they used once in a while was explained based on the camera settings and how the person holding it moved. The voices were cute, and though it was not dubbed like I would normally like to watch, the voices were not making my ears bleed. They were cute and fit the personalities of the characters pretty well. I’m not sure if the voice actors were the ones that did the Japanese dub of the anime but I really did like them.

This web special predated the main TV series and is a fun individual little story to bring the characters to animation for the first time. Chiyo brings a video camera to school and chaos ensues once Tomo gets hold of it. Tomo’s rampage is captured in a series of brief cuts. The use of the camera’s POV is interesting and well handled, and the very short runtime is used efficiently to cover most of the familiar characters, with everyone doing something characteristic. It’s stylistically somewhat different from the TV series, with a different cast so it has a different feel, and the punchline at theend is hilarious. This is definitely worth watching for fans and is even enjoyable as a standalone, but why would you keep it as a standalone?

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