Bad Acting Followed By Bad Animation – What Is This?

Dimension High School Episode 1 Review

I’m kind of adding this one to my current watch list out of morbid curiosity. It kind of feels like a terrible Saturday morning cartoon from the early 80’s only we’ve got live actors exaggerating everything to the point where you have to wonder if they’ve ever seen a real human interaction or are basing their performance on having watched other people performing and then exaggerated it again.

Needless to say, it isn’t the most nuanced of openings as the main character, Shiroyama finds a weird rock outside the school and naturally picks it up. In the tutorial of four students and one teacher (because five is always how many characters you end up with in this kind of show), the rock suddenly reveals it is some weird magical thing and the group are transported to another dimension where incredibly terrible animation takes hold. I mean, I though Knights of Sidonia was difficult to look at and the character designs were creepy. This one takes it to a whole new level.

Once there and after the requisite freak out, is this a dream, kind of moment, the rock gives a non-explanation about the group being needed to save the world. It’s kind of surprised there are five as it was pretty sure they were four so I wonder if we’ll ever find out if that is significant. Anyway, before we learn anything of use a giant sphinx turns up and poses a puzzle for the group to solve.

Here is started feeling like Nazotokine in that the characters are given a riddle on the board and part of the fun in the first puzzle at least was figuring it out while the characters got totally stumped. Admittedly, the second puzzle relies on an actual knowledge of Japanese to solve so that one I had to wait for the characters to figure out.

Then the characters are sent back to the real world and the teacher finds out that having failed the first puzzle, he’s lost what is most precious to him and we see the one reasonably composed character of the story lose it. I’m guessing this was supposed to be funny but mostly it falls into the category of ‘what was that’ and then the episode ends with the main character looking after his plants.

Honestly, there’s almost nothing outside of curiosity to recommend this particular title and part of me just wants to see if it will get worse than this. The other curiosity is that MAL lists the episode duration at 10 minutes and yet this first episode was definitely standard length. It will be interesting to see if the next episode is actually only ten minutes because that might make the whole thing more palatable.

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S.H.FIGUARTS DETECTIVE CONAN: CONAN EDOGAWA

• Episode 1: Bad Acting Followed By Bad Animation – What is This?