Unironically, this was actually the first anime I fully watched. I've seen snippets of Dragon Ball and Detective Conan but never have I sat down and watched an entire anime series like I did with western cartoons until Azumanga Daioh. I fully blame it for making me an anime fan, and it's pretty impressive how fast it made me adapt to some shit anime tropes (Kimura should be imprisoned) but that's not what I want to talk about.
The cast of characters is amazing and they work off eachother amazingly, of course Ayumu Kasuga or rather Osaka is my favorite, you look at her for more than 3 seconds and her personality is immediately clear. She's fucking insane at times but also really cute and her design is peak. The other girls are entertaining too, my favorites being Sakaki, Tomo and Chiyo, Sakaki being this big girl that likes cute stuff like cats is such an endearing idea,
Spoiler, click to view
and I like the character development she gets near the end of the series !where she finally gets her own cat after getting bitten by them up to that point.Tomo is just batshit insane, she's always causing chaos and works off really well with the other students, she's practically the only one who gets Chiyo mad, speaking of Chiyo, she's a fun idea as a child prodigy and unexpectedly even plays the straight man of the group, she's very intelligent but to the point that she doesn't even know HOW she has all that intelligence. Yukari, one of the teachers is also very entertaining to watch and her banter with the other teacher Nyamo is hilarious, plus if you have her as your car driver, please exit immediately, I'm worrying for your health. The show has such a chill vibe and you can easily feel at ease and relaxed while watching it, and while it definitely isn't as funny as some other series, even other anime, it's still sometimes actually funny, it got a few chuckles out of me. Some jokes really caught me off guard, and the simplistic animation really helps, the show has kind of objectively unimpressive animation, but they hide it so well unlike some other shows by simplifying the character designs and making them go off model for some of the more off the wall humor. There's a lot of episodes I enjoy, like the one where everyone is having the weirdest dreams, the christmas episode and any episode involving sakaki. Also episode 19, which is one of the best episodes of the show despite being a filler episode. There are a few complaints I have of the show past Kimura, for example, I don't really vibe with the background style and shading all that much, it looks pretty dull and grey and while the character designs look good enough to carry it, it is pretty indicative of most early 2000's digital anime, doesn't help that this was one of the first of JC Staff's (the animation studio behind Azumanga) works done digitally instead of cels, but that's a very minor complaint that doesn't distract much from the show.