Have you ever wondered what it would be like to attend art school? If you have, this isn’t the show for showing you what it is like. But if you like to watch young girls do silly things, you could do far worse than watch GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class.
What They Say:
GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class is a Japanese seinen yonkoma manga series by Satoko Kiyuzuki. The series was serialized in Heiwa Shuppan’s moe four-panel manga magazine Comic Gyutto! from its first issue on July 23, 2004 to its last issue (the third issue).
Afterwards a one-shot manga appeared in the August 2005 issue of Houbunsha’s seinen manga magazine Manga Time Kirara Carat, and started regular serialization from the November 2005 issue. Yen Press announced at Comic Con 2008 that it had acquired a license for English-language distribution of GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class in North America. A 12-episode anime adaptation aired in Japan between July and September 2009.
The Review: Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As you can already read from the “official” description on Crunchyroll’s page for the show, GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class is based on a four-panel manga by Satoko Kiyuzuki, following the daily insanity of a group of female high school art students. Being set in art school, or at least in a high school that has a dedicated art course, immediate comparisons will likely be made to other series that have taken art school (a setting that is likely more than familiar to people involved in the animation and manga business) for their locale, though obviously GA has more in common with Hidamari Sketch than Honey and Clover. While it has much in common with Hidamari, which also has its origins in a four-panel style manga, there is another show of similar origin that is perhaps also an influence here.
The characters fit into classic stereotypes: Kisaragi is very nice but airy, even though she wears oversized glasses. She also has a cat fetish; Noda is short and energetic and slightly loopy; Tomokane is somewhat manly in voice and mannerism; Namiko seems a bit older and more mature (in figure as well); “Kyouju” (a nickname meaning “professor,” she is always called Masa by Namiko, though her real name is Miyabi) is the monotone sideline commentator. While we do see the girls discussing art and design quite a bit, the point of the show is mainly to allow the various archetypes placed here on display to interact with each other, with somewhat predictable, but fairly often entertaining results. Of course, Noda goes off and does silly things, like eat the bread that is supposed to be used as an eraser for charcoal sketching, bringing along mayonnaise to make the bread tastier. Kisaragi tries to correct her, but Tomokane steps in energetically to insist that Noda is doing it wrong: not because she’s eating the bread, but because she’s using mayonnaise when she should use peanut butter instead. Cue laughter.
We get lots of short comedy set-pieces, as one would expect from a show based upon a 4-panel comic, which kind of requires a shortened set-up in order to deliver the punchline by the end of the fourth panel. At one point in the first episode, the five main girls become a sentai force, the “Color Warriors Irado Rangers,” who go to help another student who is unsure about how to carry out a class assignment. Of course, the colors assigned to each member fits their personality, and then their actions help to flesh out their character types. As it turns out, this segment was nothing more than a fantasy story thought up by Noda, but it helps to establish the characters better. Much of the first episode, naturally, is devoted to introducing us to the girls’ world and their personas. Things continue much in the same vein for the other episodes, as we continue to learn about the girls.
Noda’s playfulness, for example, comes out in the second episode when she takes advantage of Tomokane’s nap time to feed her unconscious dreaming with a dramatic storyline involving a secret society and a quest for revenge. The story does not come to a conclusion because the bell rings and Noda cannot continue feeding story arcs into Tomokane’s unconscious mind. This kind of abruptness is in some what emblematic of the show, which makes no attempt to sustain its focus for an extended amount of time, preferring to glide along from short comedy sketch to short comedy sketch, like a butterfly flittering from flower to flower.
In the third episode, we start to get introduced to more students at the school, including Awara, a third-year who is president of the Fine Arts Club, which is in danger of being disbanded because of a lack of members (this seems to be a running cliche in high school anime, the club on the edge of being closed down). Of course, one wonders why a school with a dedicated arts curriculum would have an art club, an issue raised by the members themselves. Awara is in some ways a slightly older version of Noda, filled with boundless energy but little common sense. After the expected running around, the club is saved not by recruiting new younger members, but by merger with another club, whose sole member is Mizubuchi, Awara’s classmate and friend who also happens to know Kisaragi well.
There is nothing very deep about this show. There are no great villains to conquer, no threatening danger. While it surprisingly imparts a fair amount of art and design information each episode, it does not do so in a didactic manner. In some ways, it plays out more as in-jokes that the animators, many of whom likely attended art school at some point, toss in as throwaway lines. I’m sure someone with a background in art will get more out of those parts.
Beyond the art-flavoring, the show has much in common with another school comedy that begin life as a four panel comic: Kiyohiko Azuma’s Azumanga Daioh, which also focused on a group of high school girls (who each fit a broad stereotype) going about their daily lives. Like that show, it offers a good number of non-sequiturs. At one point in GA, Namiko walks into the other girls discussing the power gained from drinks and says “I’ve walked into a conversation that makes no sense.” One gets the feeling that this happens fairly often. Your reaction to this show will likely hinge upon how much you like four panel comics in general, short vignettes with quick set-ups and snappy punchlines that can be rather hit and miss. On balance, I would say that GA hits more often than it misses, and the misses tend not to be spectacular failures, but instead merely times where you try to think why the punchline is funny, but cannot quite be sure that it is funny.
In Summary:
For fans of four-panel comics with quick set-ups and snappy punchlines, GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class will likely be a welcome addition to their viewing schedule. Those who enjoy the Hidamari Sketch franchise will also likely enjoy this show, though the humor does not match exactly, as the latter show is much more frantic and flat out weird at times, while GA, which has its share of zaniness, does not wander off into the far reaches of surreal. It is far more playful and at times imaginative, which reminds one more, at times, of Azumanga Daioh in terms of the spirit of the humor, not necessarily the content. If you did not like either of those earlier shows, and do not “get” the kind of humor that four-panel comics tend to employ, it’s unlikely you’re going to like this. If you need deep drama and want to force yourself to think while being entertained, this will not be the show for you. But, if you like to occasionally turn off the higher thought processes and just relax watching a group of girls do fairly silly things, you just might want to pay a visit to the art class.
Grade: B+
Simulcast by: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment: Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
