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PaniPoni Dash: Complete Collection

Review Date: 2010 January 20 11:26

Reviewed by: Spike

Released by: FUNimation

Age Rating: PG

Region: 1 - North America

Length: 650 minutes

Subtitles: English

Audio: English 5.1 Surround
Japanese 2.0 Stereo

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Summary

The girls of Momotsuki Academy's Class 1-C are starting their tenth grade year with a brand-new teacher. The good news? The teacher is an MIT grad. The bad news? She's only 11 years old! So, while Becky Miyamoto may be an intellectual titan, this child prodigy is painfully ill-equipped to deal with a group of temperamental teens, especially THIS group. There's the bitchy heather, the ADD spazz, the angry nerd, the identical twins, the invisible girl, the freaky class president, the drama geek, the Nancy Drew, the gamer, and the princess! Whew! As if that weren't enough mayhemic potential, add a pathetic, perpetually abused stuffed bunny and idiotic aliens watching her every move. It's no wonder Becky's prone to crying fits, tirades, and flipping the class the bird. Now all 26 episodes of this classroom comedy that sets a new high score for zaniness and laugh-out-loud wackiness have been brought together in one complete collection. Paniponi Dash!

Review

Rebecca Miyamoto is starting out her new career as a high school teacher after graduating from MIT, unfortunately for her the fact that she's an 11 year old prodigy is the least weird thing going on at Momotsuki Acadamy's class of 1-C. From day one Becky has to deal with her depressed rabbit assistant, a magical girl, an ice princess, a hyperactive idiot, twins that came straight out of Tylor: The Irresponsible Captain, a cat-girl, a girl with an inexplicably shiny forehead, a detective, an invisible girl, aliens, and a cat that lives in a vending machine that thinks it's god. If you think that's hard to take in, that's just the first episode. Lock the door, close the curtains, and find something to bite down on to stop yourself swallowing your own tongue because PaniPoni Dash is going to make you laugh.

The characters are all skewed and exaggerated versions of people that many of you may have met in everyday life which makes them believable in a strange sort of way, there are too many to list individually but suffice to say that most of the show devises it's content from the wildly differing personalities of its cast, and the way they interact with each other, often with near explosive results. The show does have a slightly dirty edge to it, so don't be surprised to see a little fan-service now and again, I almost described it as Azumanga Daioh with panty shots but that's just wrong in so many ways.

Typical of this sort of anime the animation is all over the place varying from sketchy filler to high frame rate loveliness in a heartbeat, though one of the more pleasing features of this series is the fact that all the incidental characters are identical in a surprisingly amusing you-don't-care-about-them so we're-not-going-to-animate-them way. As this was one of ADVs titles there are no surprises as to the cast of voice actors. None. Unfortunately there are plenty of titles coming out that have been up rated from 2.0 stereo to Dolby 5.1 surround with little change in quality and no real use of the surround capabilities leaving the viewer wondering whether the production company has just used it as they have the Dolby license and they may as well. This is certainly the case with PaniPoni Dash.

There's nothing new about putting a range of bizarre characters in a home room situation although I can list on one hand the number of anime out there where it's pretty clear that the animation staff have been given carte blanche to do whatever they want and have just gone nuts. In fact I can go one better than that, if you took the creators of Azumanga Daioh, Cromartie High School and Excel Saga, and locked them in a room only to be released when they produced a frenetic high school comedy, this is probably what you'd end up with.

Don't expect much in the way of a plot, there are girls in school with a child teacher and Hijinks Ensues(TM), this is certainly the kind of thing you watch when you come home from a long day and just want to put your brain into neutral and relax. This is the Jordan of anime, fun to look at but not much between the ears. That said, I think this is a lot of fun and an anime that I'll happily watch over and over again.

Rating: 7/10

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