Nichijou - Episode 21

So, I'm back from Ayacon and the unexpected expenses it brought my way - I'm absolutely knackered and haven't slept a huge amount over the past three or four days but hey, let's get my priorities straight and catch-up on some anime first!

As per usual, Nichijou gleefully jumps around all over the place for this twenty-first episode, starting with Yuuko thinking she'd gotten away with not doing her homework only to be proved very wrong in a fashion which was admittedly very funny as slapstick comedy goes before the gag was run well and truly into the ground - another case of this show needlessly elongated a decent joke until it isn't funny any more.  From here, Misato has her friends around, resulting in a discussion which invariably turns to boys before her so-called friend Fe makes one of those "you really didn't think about what you were saying before you opened your mouth" comments.

Teachers also feature heavily in this episode, with Takasaki getting overly excited (to an incredibly annoying degree) about meeting Sakurai by chance during a shopping trip, and also managing to charmingly destroy science teacher Nakamura's latest plot to kidnap Nano.  We also pay another visit to Yuuko's airship dream world, which this time sees Mio herself going in search of her missing wooden cubes.  It's only at the end of the episode where we get our (well, my) first laugh out loud moment of the week, as Sakamoto gets caught out unexpectedly by the Professor's genius in a smart little snippet of comedy.

I only wish that I could say there are more such snippets of comedy on show here, but generally speaking this was a bit of a dull episode in terms of humour - as always, its fascinating to watch as far as animation techniques and ideas are concerned, but most of the actual material simply doesn't seem to be that good.  Once again, it's the story of this series from beginning to end, more or less.