Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei (Goodbye, Mr. Despair)

 Anime Review by ShonenPunk

Black comedy is something rather hard to find in comedy anime and manga. Usually anime comedies are more upbeat and cheery, like the standard slice-of-life and romantic comedies that we’ve become accustomed to, but making fun of the darker elements of society is something that often doesn’t get touched on. One of the few anime that does is Welcome to the NHK, which I love more than you can imagine, but NHK wasn’t a pure comedy, and it often balanced comedy and drama. But for simply pure black comedy, the genre was pretty thin until Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei came along.

Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei has bits of slice-of-life in it, so there’s absolutely no kind of running plot to tie episodes together. What makes a slice-of-life show tick is highly interesting characters, and SZS is well-served in this regard as the cast is altogether brilliant. The show follows the life of Itoshiki Nozomu, a teacher who gives maniac depressive disorder an entirely new meaning. His students are all very unique, but what really makes them unique from standard slice-of-life anime is the fact that nearly each one of them is bloody insane.

I mean, it’s one thing if the girls in a cast each have their own little traits, and most of the entertainment from the show is gained from following those traits. That’s what makes show like Azumanga Daioh so fantastic, as the characters are each unique in very non-stereotypical ways, making for some actual character depth, and growing rarity in today’s anime. SZS accomplishes character depth in much the same way, except the “traits” of Azumanga has been replaced by a variety of mental instabilities and social diseases. Some of these are actually pretty tame, like the illegal immigrant girl, though that raises a whole new level of questionability, and some are just vaguely creepy, such as the girl who has a fetish for pulling animal tails, which isn’t bad unless you’ve got a card-carrying membership with PETA. But then there are characters whose possess mental states that can be kindly described as “disturbing”, and unkindly described as “requiring immediate psychological care.”


A girl who has difficulty speaking in public so she only communicates through text-messaging, but turns out to be horribly abusive in said text-messages. A girl whose desire for perfection in her life leads to the occasional psychotic outburst to make sure everything is done “properly”, along with the occasional random urge to kill. A girl who’s so cheerfully optimistic that she believes any of the bad stuff around her can’t possibly be real and comes up with bizarre explanations for them. The fact that they were able to find unique voice actors for each character, but that each one fits their character naturally is absolutely fantastic casting, and it all culminates in one of the best cast of characters I’ve seen in quite some time.

And as I said before, with the darkness of a lot of the subject matter and the brilliance with which it’s used, it’s definitely going to grab your attention. Let me give you a taste of what’s to come: the first five minutes of the very first episode has the main character attempting suicide by hanging before being saved by little miss optimism, who refuses to believe that he would kill himself on such a nice day and therefore concludes that he was obviously just trying to make himself taller, before launching into happy childhood memories of her father trying to do the same. I wish I could make shit like this up. Hell, start out with something as outlandish as that, and anyone will keep watching, just to see what the hell they’ll try next.

Unfortunately, this leads into one of the problems of the show. Once all the absurd characters are introduced and we’ve had time to get acclimated to each one’s unique insanity, a little bit of the novelty wears off. Episodes become somewhat repetitive, with some declaration of the despair-of-the-day being made by the teacher, and each of the side characters responding in ways that fit their psychosis. It still manages to be funny, because the uniqueness of the characters and the series never really wears off, but the later episodes don’t possess quite the same punch of the early episodes, when the characters were still fresh and unusual. Another hampering fact is the ending, because nothing really ends, since they had already started working on the second season which came three moths later, so the “ending” actually introduces more characters. Not that it isn’t done well, it just strikes me as odd that they didn’t simply wait for the second season to bring the newbies in, and try for at least a semblance of closure in this season.


And as far as the comedy goes, it’s for the most part very well done, playing off the various characters and their mental states. However, a lot of the comedy is rooted in satire of Japanese pop culture, society, and the wonders of the Japanese writing system. And outside of some of the anime references thrown out, this will fly over the heads of most American viewers. The good thing about this is that most of these points are never really crucial to the plot, and they’re mostly throw-away gags, good for a hard laugh if you know what they’re talking about. The main use of these is random writings on the class chalkboard, which change with every new shot and will contain some reference to some more-or-less popular anime, a favorite habit of the director, used in his previous shows, Pani Poni DASH! and Negima!?. This is good, because the few times were a gag does come into the plot makes it a little difficult to understand. For example, it’s hard for those of us living in a country the top soccer championships will never see the light of day outside ESPN2 to care about the failures and inabilities of the Japanese national soccer team, so making fun of their poor play won’t exactly resonate.

While I’ve admitted that I don’t like to talk about art of music in a show because I usually don’t give two shits, I pretty much have to in this case because of the uniqueness of the series, especially on the art front. The original manga for SZS is done in a style very unique to the author, mostly because it’s really not that good. The characters especially are rather strangely designed, with very little detail, though each one is more or less distinct from the rest by simple hair changes and effects like glasses. The anime, however, manages to retain the original character designs to the letter, while tweaking them slightly to make them more fluid. Throw in near-perfect animation, unique artistic and coloring tricks that are jaw dropping to say the least, and the way everything will shift quickly to emphasize certain points of dialog and characters, and what you have is a certifiable visual spectacle. Your eyes will literally roll out of your head by the sheer power of how damn pretty it is, and the series manages to maintain that same level of perfection throughout, making it one of the most aesthetically pleasing series since FLCL.

And while the background music is more or less forgettable, the opening and ending themes are anything but. The director of the series, Akiyuki Shinbo, has a habit for including absolutely fantastic music into the opening and ending themes of his recent shows, and he absolutely outdoes himself with the first opening song, Hito to shite Jiku ga Bureteiru, a driving hard rock number which roughly translates into Damn Twisted Person, which is a pretty good description of the series, and is set to either and all-text opening or visuals of sadomasochistic bondage, giving the dual emotions of pure terror and unrelenting awesome, again, a pretty good representation of the mood of the show as a whole.

In summation, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is a show that you really have to see at least once in your lifetime, if only to savor the incredible originality of the show. It’s a brilliant comedy from start to finish, and even getting a little rough towards the end can’t possibly make it any less fun. In an anime market where using nothing but the same old tropes that have gotten tired years ago but will still gain massive ratings is the favored path of many developers – looking at you, Lucky Star – a show as outlandish and brilliant as SZS isn’t going to come around often, so it’s best to savor it, because no one really knows when of if we’ll see anything like it again.