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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