About

"Soramimi Cake" (Japanese: 空耳ケーキ; lit. "Ear-playing-tricks Cake") is an opening theme song for a Japanese TV anime series Azumanga Daioh. Its cute and well-made animated movie has been set to a subject for fan works and parodies on the Japanese web.

Origin

The TV anime series for Azumanga Daioh was aired in Japan from April to September in 2002, which was produced by J.C.Staff. And it had been also aired in other countries, later years. Its opening theme song "Soramimi Cake" is sung by Oranges & Lemons, a Japanese pop music unit consisted of Masumi Itō^[1] and Yoko Ueno.^[2]

Spread

Before video sharing sites like Nico Nico Douga (NND) became popular, one notable way of doing anime opening/ending parodies was via Flash videos. The famous instance in early days was a flash video featuring Monā, Giko and many 2channel Shift-JIS arts characters by hand-drawn animation, which was created by a famous 2channel flash video creator called 512kb. Its first version was posted to his website on February 26th, 2003, and the last version (shown below) was on October 2nd of that year.^[3]

However, this video was taken down by the author himself and there were few following creators. That's because Japanese internet users were very sensitive to claims from copyright collection agencies in those days. It came back to the spotlight again as a subject for parody videos on NND after 2007 when online video sharing services benumb people's sense of copyright. Although it's already a classic anime, NND has hundreds videos related to this cute opening movie and the song.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References

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