Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

How would a stu­dio approach a manga known for its word­play and focus­ing on a depress­ively sui­cidal teacher, a manga that was notori­ously (even infam­ously) claimed to be untrans­lat­able? Surely even SHAFT, known for their off-the-wall adapt­a­tions of other, more straight­for­ward manga such as Pani Poni and Negima, could man­age such a feat? They did, and with such reck­less dis­reg­ard for obstacles such as plot, con­tinu­ity and san­ity; Say­on­ara Zetsubou Sen­sei is bizarre, satir­ical, cyn­ical and ram­bunc­tious and solid­i­fies SHAFT as a skilled and con­fid­ent studio.

“each epis­ode is a scatter-shot of styles and con­tent, the speed and vera­city of each bite-size skit causes as much humour as the sub­ject matter”

» Gal­lery

Describ­ing the premise of the series would never be enough to encap­su­late what it is actu­ally about: the his­tri­on­ic­ally pess­im­istic Itoshki Nozomu is at thwarted in his attempts to kill him­self by the out­wardly naive and inter­min­ably optim­istic Kafuka. This sat­is­fies the first twelve minutes of the series as it then goes on a jour­ney involving stalk­ers, hikkiko­mori, escape routes and court­ing rituals but most of the time it con­cerns itself with noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar: a mul­ti­col­oured col­lage of gags, per­cep­tions on life and ran­dom­ness. Say­on­ara Zetsubou Sen­sei has very little to say and has a damn good time say­ing it. The series doesn’t cover a spe­cific time frame or tell a coher­ent story, it is a stac­cato whimsy of word­play and won­der; a möbius strip of pop-culture ref­er­ences and banter on the thralls of mod­ern exist­ence. If all this sounds like the series occu­pies a dif­fer­ent exist­ence to the rest of the world, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. An epis­ode can focus on one spe­cific topic, often mean­der­ing along the way, veer­ing off on tan­gents of logic but ulti­mately dig­ging through an obscure sub­ject such as what can be accep­ted as min­imal cul­ture, or clear­ing away impur­it­ies or escap­ing from blame and respons­ib­il­it­ies. Other epis­odes which make up the major­ity of the twelve epis­ode bar­rage con­cern them­selves with frit­ter­ing away on whatever shiny issue takes its fancy, the open­ing epis­odes con­cern them­selves with intro­du­cing the core set char­ac­ters and their asso­ci­ated archetypal per­son­al­ity quirks then strob­ing fanser­vice, insults, fam­ily mem­bers and all points in between. Epis­odes are some­times over before one knows it, other times the clos­ing anim­a­tion can be just a punc­tu­ation mark before it con­tin­ues, seem­ingly unabated.

From a birds-eye view SZS is a muddled, chaotic show with no dir­ec­tion or over­all mes­sage, but the delights are to be found week by week rather than in a con­tigu­ous stream. SHAFT once again take up writ­ing incid­ental notes on the signs and pleth­ora of black­boards dot­ted around the back­grounds, the con­tents of which vary from other anime ref­er­ences to ono­ma­to­poeias. At times it seems like the show delights in naugh­ti­ness with the bond­age packed second open­ing to the blonde bomb­shell whose skirt has a propensity for blow­ing all too fre­quently in the wind; yet the show is all too aware of itself, some­times plas­ter­ing the face of (what one can only assume is) Koji Kumeta on sup­posedly racy parts and hav­ing the afore­men­tioned blonde threaten to sue when her under­gar­ments are inev­it­ably exposed. Given all of this it may be hard to see what allure the series has bey­ond its bizar­re­ness, yet it is exactly that which makes its exam­in­a­tions of life all the more adroit. Some­times these can be rapid-fire dis­trac­tions from the main flow of the epis­ode, other times like the concept of too much evid­ence or the cel­eb­ra­tion of innoc­u­ous attrib­utes they are the entire premise. Fault­ing the series inev­it­ably ends in split­ting hairs given that each epis­ode is a scatter-shot of styles and con­tent, the speed and vera­city of each bite-size skit causes as much humour as the sub­ject mat­ter. All of this is wrapped up in breath­tak­ing aes­thet­ics, never one to be pinned down by one style, SHAFT can some­times illi­cit fear and hor­ror as much as it can desire and lust, a remark­able feat given the rel­at­ive sim­pli­city of the char­ac­ter designs.

Say­on­ara Zetsubou Sen­sei rev­els in the small details, reward­ing sub­sequent view­ings and a strong pop-culture know­ledge with enough com­edy to keep one laugh­ing but never feel­ing slap­stick or belittling. It is peer­less in its present­a­tion and wit, and were it not for the train­ing runs the stu­dio seemed to do with Pani Poni Dash and Negima?!, the series would be unique amongst its fore­bears. While each epis­ode merges into the amorph­ous idea that is SZS, each concept stands out proudly and mem­or­ably and I can think of no other series that is more deserving of a second, than this one. There scant few words that fully encom­pass the caliber of work on dis­play, but one would be: genius. ¶