About.com Rating



In a special academy where the students duel for supremacy using their scholastic abilities, one student is determined to climb out of the bottom rankings of his class and bring his fellow classmates with him. A clever and sporadically funny show is undermined by its own worst tendencies -- not least of which is smirking, sexist humor.

Pros

• An amusing premise that pokes fun at Japan's cram-school culture.

Cons

• Not witty or creative enough to be more than just a diversion.

• Director: Shin Oonuma
• Animation Studio: SILVER LINK
• Released By: Media Factory
• Released Domestically By: FUNimation Entertainment
• Audio: English / Japanese w/English subtitles
• Age Rating: TV-14 (comedic violence, crude humor)
• List Price: $69.98 (Blu-ray / DVD combo)

Anime Genres:

• Comedy
• High School
• Action
• Fan Service

Related Titles:

• School Rumble
• Love Hina
• Negima!

School's in, the fight's on

Fumizuki Academy brings new meaning to the term “special class”. Upon entering, each student is given a placement exam and sorted into one of six rankings based on their performance. The top-scorers enter Class A, where the furnishings put the Ouran High School Host Club to shame and every student has amenities that put Google’s employees to shame. At the bottom of the barrel is the dismal Class F, where the students use orange crates for desks and the floor mats rot away at the touch.

Things don’t have to stay that way, though.

Classes can battle between each other for the sake of better furnishings and study aides, with the combatants summing forth their “Avatars”—little cartoonish representations of themselves whose powers are a reflection of the most recent tests their wielders have taken in a given subject. Those who “die” during such combat get dragged off to the remedial classroom for makeup work, and the winners enjoy the spoils of victory.

Akihisa Yoshii is one of the Class F students, whose main traits are divided between being a not-terribly-good student (he’s in F for a reason) and having to subsist on a diet of little more than hot water and condiments due to his minimal budget. To his surprise, he finds one of the other F students is Mizuki Himeji, a sweet girl of normally excellent academic standing. She was ill the day she took her placement test, couldn’t finish, and ended up in the bottom of the ranking. Yoshii’s appalled by this injustice and is determined to use the test-combat system to put her in a better class.

From funny to unfunny in a few episodes flat

Baka and Test splits itself uneasily into two kinds of episodes. The first are marginally more clever and inventive, where they explore the situation that’s been set up and advance the story by playing the characters off that situation in creative ways. One of the better ones involves Yoshii having to send his avatar into the underground control center that governs the Test War system, which contains (among other things) a number of great in-gags for Evangelionfans. (The Test War system itself is mostly a contrivance, but it gets used cleverly from time to time.) I did smile at a gag where Yoshii’s sister places him on a diet of nothing but meal replacement drinks due to her own incompetence in the kitchen. And I liked the way the avatar battle sequences are pitched like video games, and the clever, sprightly visual design of the show.

But then there are the endless episodes that are mostly about Yoshii being treated as a whipping boy, which manage a laugh or two and then become unfunny variations on a theme. Most of those moments involve his complete lack of luck with girls: he’s all too likely to end up in a spine-splintering wrestling hold courtesy of Class F tomboy Minami Shimada, and he eventually has to deal with his own sister being entirely too affectionate towards him for his own good.

Fanservice gags like this quickly turn sour, in big part because the leering attitude the show has towards sex and women in general eventually calls too much attention to itself for its own good. It’s hard to put in those things at all without it becoming a distraction.

Too few laughs repeated too often

The other problem with Baka and Test is something common to a lot of anime comedies: it thinks if something is funny if done once, it’s absolutely riotous if it’s done a dozen times over across that many episodes. From the outside, it seems like that: after all, where would Trigun be without its gags involving Vash somehow always being present whenever destruction unfolds? But those things are funny because they’re the natural products of character, not because they’re imposed on the goings-on. Here, too much of the humor is forced on the players, making a number of things that actually are funny get run into the ground through sheer repetition. End result: the show becomes irritating and tiresome instead of clever and inventive.

I suspect most people who are simply in the mood for a good, silly laugh won’t have the same problems with Baka and Test. Yet at the same time, I know there are anime comedies out there which are not only funnier but a lot less mean-spirited towards their own cast. I mentioned Ouran and Trigun, and Princess Jellyfish also comes to mind—all funny because of who their characters are, not at the expense of them.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.