Fresh to television screens for this summer anime season, and based upon a four-panel manga series much like Hidamari Sketch, comes GA - Geijutsuka Art Design Class, which only really differs in its focus on account of being based at an art and design school, with ergo has a slightly different outlook to a more traditional art education establishment. Nonetheless, as a former A-Level Art and Art History student myself, I'm a sucker for this kind of series so I couldn't help but check it out.
Perhaps it's because this is only the first episode, but the first thing I noticed about compared to its contemporaries is its relative lack of focus on characters - Sure, the various characters all have their own personalities and tick most of the usual boxes, but there isn't a huge amount of weight placed upon those personalities. This feeling perhaps comes about because of the incredibly quick-fire nature of GA - While Hidamari Sketch in anime form tended to take its time and build up to punchlines in a gentle kind of way, and Sketchbook valued character-building over all else, GA looks to pack as many jokes (and a big chunk of education about art, by the look of it) into a single episode as possible.
In a way this is to the show's benefit - There aren't that many quality gags in this first episode, but much like buses if you're willing to wait a couple of minutes a few will suddenly crop up all at once. Thus, there were some amusing jokes and uses of pictograms, a generally smirk-worthy send-off of Power Rangers, and a few plays on words which always grab my attention. Overall, this made for just about enough genuinely funny humour to win me over... for this episode at least. Whether GA - Geijutsuka Art Design Class can hold that interest without the appeal of its characters like other series of its ilk remains to be seen.
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