DIMENSION HIGH SCHOOL

DESCRIPTION

CAST

REVIEWS

• 

  Dunkan85

  18/100
  There are so many things I could've reviewed this season. For some reason I chose this.

  Well, Dimension High School was certainly unique, that you have to admit. I have never before seen a show that was one half live-action and one half 3D CGI. The problem here however is that there are two kinds of unique ideas: The kind that nobody has tried before because they didn't think of it and the kind that nobody has tried because everybody already knew how godawful of an idea it was. And DHS more than certainly belongs in the latter category.

  But let's take it from the top. DHS, in its essence, is a show about four guys and their teacher getting approached by a floating, talking rock and convinced to agree to be teleported into a CGI-version of the classroom they were in previously to solve riddles posed to them by what is referred to as sphinxes - but only consists of the head and front legs of said mythical creatures - in order to prevent those sphinxes from getting from the 2D to the 3D world and wiping out humanity. Every time they lose, the sphinxes absorb the soul of one of them, making them lose whatever they held dearest in the actual world as well as get one step closer to entering the third dimension. And if anything I just said makes sense to you, then I'm afraid I have bad news for you and your mental state.

  Here is how the overwhelming majority of the episodes play out: Most of the first half is a (mostly godawful) live-action skit of the cast doing whatever it is people in their thirties probably think schoolkids these days do when they're in school. During this time they then learn something (either randomly throughout the scenes or because the teacher mentioned earlier, well, teaches it to them), after which the talking rock appears and contrives another reason to teleport everybody present. The second half then consists of the currently active sphinx (of which there are four in total throughout the entire show) giving them their first riddle, which they invariably lose, making one of them get their soul eaten. The sphinx then poses forth a second riddle, which they invariably win (often by applying whatever it was they learned in half one), after which we return to the live-action world and get to learn what it was the one person who got soul-vacuumed lost. Repeat that process ad nauseam and you've got yourself a cour!

  Ridiculous repetition is not the only massive issue Dimension High School suffers from however, no sir! It also serves as a beyond perfect showcase of how very fking different anime and live-action are when it comes to what can and cannot work in a script. That is not to say that DHS's dialogue would've been good in a fully animated setting, god no, but the fact that all of the lines present are being spoken by what you can immediately perceive as a real person makes an already excruciatingly painful script even more unbearable and difficult to listen to. And it would appear that I am not the only person who found the dialogue to be a nightmare, because the actors deliver most of their lines almost as if they were forced to read them or have their puppies be shot. I can not remember a stretch of time longer than maybe 3 minutes going by without me noticing a line of dialogue that was brought across just as poorly as it was written. The most painfully obvious examples of this were the times when Ryuusei had lost what was most precious to him, his dignity, immediately turning him from a stereotypical 'smart no-nonsense' character into a goofy wanker, constantly spouting ”funny” lines 24/7
  Wow, I can't believe I just had to spoiler something in a review of Dimension High School.

  Anyway, what else is there to say about this anime? It's a terrible idea executed incredibly poorly. There is basically nothing redeeming about this entire thing. The most 'fun' I had throughout these 12 episodes was taking a few screencaps of lines that were unintentionally funny and that was it. There's nothing else to say here. If it hadn't been for Mahou Shoujo Tokushusen Asuka, this right here would've been the worst anime of a dreadful season.

  And to anybody planning to ask why I not only forced myself to watch this anime in its entirety, but also review it, I shall leave you with no doubt my favourite line from the entire anime that perfectly encapsulates why. Enjoy.

  
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• 

  RulerofPie

  100/100
  It might be garbage, but I can't get enough of it.

  Before we get started I just wanna drop a quick overview of the story just so you can get a feel for how insanely lucid this story is. There are also an abundance of spoilers in the overview and throughout my review but there are things I had to discuss because they just blew me away with how crazy they were.

  Four boys in an afterschool tutor session with their teacher get transported to a 2 dimensional world via a talking, sentient rock to fight off for the fate of the 3 dimensional world against sphinxes. The sphinxes weapon of choice is riddles and puzzles and if you lose you get the thing most precious to you devoured by the sphinxes. The ultimate goal of the sphinxes is absorb enough 3 dimensional energy to come into the 3 dimensional world where they will absorb EVEN MORE 3 dimensional energy to reach the 4th dimension to absorb time energy for the sake of gaining more intelligence. If you’re not excited to see how these events develop then you might not be human. Or I’m slowly losing my grasp of reality at this point it could very easily be that.

  The entire time I was watching Dimension High School I had this big goofy dumb smile on my face that I just couldn’t get rid of. That’s what was so baffling about my experience with this show. Every fiber of my being was telling me that this was bad. Everything about the production was poor to mediocre at best but every time we saw our characters it looked like they were having the time of their lives making this project. That’s what really captured me, I was lost in watching these people make something they were genuinely excited about and not caring about making it “professional”.

  The live action portions weren’t made well. The animated portions were sometimes just hard to look at. But each one of these segments have so much charm that feels lost when I watch most modern anime. The live action portions were majority shot on a drone making a lot of conversation in this looping and swooshing shot that just hypnotizes me. Our cast really only serves to check boxes for archetypal male cast of anime boi’s but I don’t think that's a bad thing in this show. They wear these cliches and personalities on their sleeves and never waver from it and they just come off as endearing, at least to me.

  I don’t really know what the story with the animation parts are but someone should tell whoever was in charge of the mo-cap that hands shouldn’t go through bodies. Despite the obvious issues with that Dimension Highschool takes full advantage of the fact that the animation side just doesn’t fully grasp how to make it work. So much in fact that it’s one of the best punchlines in the early episodes when we get introduced to the 3D classroom and is the focal point for one episode where we see our character glitched through their desks unable to move. Speaking of glitching through objects; the sphinxes. Every time they appear they just move through the walls. No opening animation, nothing changing in the wall, they just zoom on through it only showing their head and front paws. Midway through watching Dimension High School I thought “man how funny would it be if the sphinxes only had those body parts just kinda floating around. Well they are and it’s one of the best parts about it. That's the ultimate underlying tone here in Dimension High School. We have a staff that just can’t grasp the concept of basic production so instead of trying to bust through that ceiling they just warp the story and their vision underneath it.

  Also the final episode is a 10 year epilogue following the events of the story and is 99% improv and shot POV from the characters phones. Now I’m not an expert on the intricacies of the Japanese language but I think I can recognize bad acting and not great improv when I see it. But much like I mentioned earlier, I don’t care that that it’s bad this is just fun and seeing people have fun is fun. It’s these elements that seemingly cobbled together just because someone thought it was a good idea and everyone just ran with it. These things don’t need to be exist, and they don’t make sense they exist but it adds so much to the experience.

  I have been unable to keep myself to talking about this show amongst my anime friends and have easily convinced all of them to give it a shot and I hope I convinced you to give it a shot and not think too hard on it. Alternatively I have convinced you that I’m a crazy person who can only live in a garbage can. I’m fine with either honestly. I’m not kidding saying when I say I love this show. Much like someone can love a really schlocky horror movie or garbage tier mindless drama I love Dimension High School.

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