Nichijou is Kyo-Ani’s next show in the tradition of Lucky Star and K-ON, and I’m quite optimistic after watching this OVA about how it will turn out. We get three segments in this OVA: in the first, Mio (shown above) tries to trick her friend Yuuki into feeling positively after scoring a 1 / 100 on a test, complete with fishing imagery. I’ve been in a similar situation too many times to count, so this part hit home with me. In the second segment, Nano the wind-up girl together with her talking cat try to get a loli mad scientist to take her medicine. The third segment involves doing cartwheels and sleeping on an empty train.  I would say that the humor is actually more along the lines of Azumanga Daioh’s than Lucky Star or K-ON’s.

Mio and Yuuki were enjoyable to watch together and have a good chemistry, both in the first segment and the train segment. I didn’t enjoy the segment with Nano and the little girl as much – I think it could have been a bit shorter, and the jokes just didn’t have the same punch for me.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the TV show beginning in a few weeks and am planning to watch it. I doubt I’ll blog it though – I’ve realized I just don’t have as much to say about comedies (unless they’re bad *cough* onii-chan no koto *cough*). There’s nothing more boring than someone talking about what was funny.

This OVA was a worthy entry in the series, returning to the fast-paced humor of the first half which unfortunately dragged out in the second. We had the same levels of ridiculousness that made the first season hilarious.

Comedy, it seems to me, is something that’s very personal. From trying to write this blog, I’ve realized that I don’t really have much in the way of explanation as to why something is funny. For example, I’ve been complaining for a while now about how Iroha’s stalking in Onii-chan no Koto just isn’t funny anymore since it’s been overused so much. But is that really the reason? Baka to Test reuses the same jokes over and over again – Himeji’s deadly cooking, Minami’s chest, Yoshii’s cross dressing, Voyeur’s peeping, and Hideyoshi’s… existence. Yet it’s still funny every time. It must be something to do with the delivery – when the two punks claimed they had kidnapped the most popular waitress, it was patently obvious they were referring to Hideyoshi in spite of Yoshii’s belief to the contrary. And yet when they arrived to find him, playing the game of Life with his captors, I just cracked up. They go the extra mile with their jokes to put extra layers on them. Plus, the pace is too fast for you to lose interest.

I’m looking forward to the second season of Baka to Test, especially if it can keep up this pace, as well as the second OVA which is due in a month. In completely unrelated news, I figured out how to include subtitles in mplayer! (for the curious, use mplayer -ass -vf ass,screenshot)  We also learned this episode that Voyeur-kun uses *nix and python. Finally an anime character who doesn’t use Windows and silly GUIs.