Pani Poni Dash Review

Pani Poni Dash is a 26 episode anime series focusing on a high school class.  The main character is Rebecca Miyamoto, a 10 year old genius who takes a teaching position at the school.  As you can imagine from a 10 year old teaching high school kids, things go out of control pretty quickly.  "Becky" (as her students call her) starts out well (by what I wanted to see, at least) by flipping the class the bird and yelling at them to shut the hell up.  That doesn't really work, but the teacher and her students all become friends anyway which leads to typical wacky anime adventures.  Or something.  Find out all of the details after the jump.

The rest of the cast is just plain boring and not really memorable for anything other than their archetype.  I couldn't tell you names of anyone.  There is a bookworm with a big forehead.  There is a bitchy, bully girl who also happens to have huge boobs and the best body.  There is a moe character whose only responsibility is to look cute and say unbearably obnoxious things (This is the most unbearably obnoxious character of the year for sure! ... you'll know what that reference means if you watch the series).  There is also a mentally challenged girl with an obvious case of tourettes, but instead of hilarious swear words all she says is "Maho".  I've since learned that a loose translation of "Maho" into English means something along the lines of "magical idiot".   And then there is the plain, boring girl who is bothered by the fact everyone thinks she is boring.

There are other characters from other classes as well, but they all pretty much suck.  The whole cast just gets in the way of the one true standout, Ichijo, the class rep.  Ichijo is legit insane and can be counted on every single episode to do something that royally fucks up everything for the rest of the class.  The things she does and says are easily the best part of Pani Poni Dash.  Ichijo is the absolute best.

But the rest of the series is stinky like poopy babies.  It thinks that being wacky and random equals comedy, but usually it is just stupid and hard to understand what is going on.  Little chibi characters are floating across the screen in the foreground constantly.  There are text jokes written all over the place that fly by so fast you have to pause the DVD to actually read them, and then they aren't all that funny.  And a lot of the jokes (usually the character archetype jokes) are re-used over and over through the series that they lose all impact.

It isn't completely bad.  I love Ichijo.  I like that some obscure jokes and references from the first few episodes (the ones they don't overuse) pop up again 10 episodes later.  I honestly kind of like the "Maho" girl even though she is stupid.  But the series overall is just too stupid and zany.  It was a struggle to even watch the whole thing (I nearly gave up after the first 7 episodes) and it is incredibly inconsistent.  Some episodes are good.  Most episodes are awful.  I'd probably split it 70/30 awful to good, which is pretty terrible.

The one truly bright spot (and a bright spot you can lean on YouTube for instead of actually watching the series) is that the intro music is awesome.  There are three songs used for the opening of the show, and they are all pretty catchy and amazing. I'll embed all three below.

Overall, I give Pani Poni Dash a 4/10, or 4 Ichijos. 

If you are still interested, you can buy the Paniponi Dash: Complete Box Set at Amazon.