If there was ever a love-it-or-hate-it anime, Azumanga Daioh is it. It's definitely not everybody's cup of tea, and most if not all of the jokes have bases in japanese culture, so you need a firm grasp of the culture in order to understand all of the jokes. Dragonball Z fanboys, be warned!

The art style used in Azumanga Daioh is nearly as cute as you can get. It's not Di Gi Charat cute, but it'll still make you utter a huge ka-wa-iiiiii when you watch it! The music is also as cute as the animation, and I really enjoyed all of it from the opening animation that's as hyperactive as the show to the calm and soothing ending theme Raspberry Heaven. All of it was very well used and it fit the show perfectly.

Each scene in Azumanga Daioh was filled with side-splitting laughter, the show was just hilarious. Each episode was different from the last, and each one was very memorable. It was a very rare occurance for a joke to fail, and those were usually ones that were meant to fail (such as Osaka's really lame puns). Unfortunately, at about the half-way point a trend starts to develop where most of the jokes used in the first half are reused in the second half. Sakaki's cat problem is shown to us in the very first episode and it continues on and on throughout the series, never getting resolved but still having a very nice ending to it. However, many times these reused jokes were even better than when they were used originally. The summer vacation trips to Chiyo's summer house, for instance, just got funnier and funnier throughout the series, even though they went there three times.

The characters in Azumanga Daioh are absolutely fantastic, though some of them may be dangerously unoriginal. When you think of an anime based on girls, you come to expect a certain group of characters to exist in it. There's Tomo, the genki girl. Sakaki is the cool and calm girl, Chiyo is the uber-kawaii genius, and Osaka is the girl who's just "out of it". Nevertheless, watching their antics each episode was very pleasurable, and I didn't regret a minute of it. Also, the character that I probably liked the most (with the exception of Osaka) was Yukari, though she really didn't get enough screen time. I really enjoyed her cruel and psychopathic ways, and she's an English teacher to boot!

It doesn't matter if there isn't a solid plot to Azumanga Daioh, an anime fan watches a comedy anime for its comedy, not its plot. The series has a very basic story, following Chiyo from her first day of high school all the way to her graduation, and we get to watch it all unfold.