It’s time for every school slice-of-life anime’s cultural festival. We all love those don’t we? If you don’t, then pretend you do. Itoshiki thinks too literally into the “cultural festival” and deems the class unfit to act like cultured people when they are not. Chiri puts up the argument that all Japanese citizens have the Constitutional right to maintain a minimum standard of living and culture. He abides with the Constitution and orders the class to enter the cultural festival following the bare minimum cultural standard.

The class first attempts to put on a play. Itoshiki slams them by saying that the quality is too high to follow the minimum standard, despite the fact that every student contribution from the acting to the writing is extremely half-assed. Kaere puts on a terrible music performance which Itoshiki still deems too cultured. The rest of the students try their acts and fail when they exceed Itoshiki’s low standards. Itoshiki explains several examples of the minimum standard of culture to the class, and Chiri challenges Itoshiki to teach the class at a minimum standard which he gladly obliges to. So while the rest of the school’s classes have fun and exciting things to show, Itoshiki’s class presents a menagerie of elementary level science experiments for the cultural festival.

Moving on to part two, Itoshiki takes the whole class on a field trip preview of Kyoto. Because the trip is a preview he does not allow anyone to go sightseeing. He goes on a rant about how previews are important to prepare people for the real thing in various aspects of life. Chiri takes the initiative and presents her intricate travel itinerary of all the locations for the class to preview. They sort of take in all the sights and things that Kyoto has to offer before meeting a monk at a preview temple.

Itoshiki drops the bomb that he won’t even be going on the actual trip and explains that many things in life end with a preview. To supplement his explanation, the temple monk visits a porn site and only previews the images because the thought of subscribing is too scary. They then look at a stalker who is previewing love and a figure maniac that is previewing the female body. Itoshiki invites Chiri to preview the ceremony site, and she gladly goes there with him. To her dismay she finds out that he has taken her to preview his future funeral ceremony and grave site. Chiri goes insane and wonks him over the head with a gravestone. Itoshiki is rushed to the hospital and happily previews the afterlife. No worse for the wear, Itoshiki later returns to class and informs the students that they will all be going to Okinawa for the class trip. To wrap it all up, the episode ends with a parody fan response segment to poke fun at itself.

Thoughts on this episode. Definitely up to par on the comedy level. They really didn’t pull any punches in the first half with all the little text blurbs about mediocrity. I certainly hope I can wrap up the season 1 summaries before season 2 starts. There’s my subtle hint to the fansubbers out there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Anime, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.