3 Episode Taste Test: Baka to Test to Shokanju (Idiots, Tests and Summoned Beasts)

Leav­ing little to the ima­gin­a­tion, Baka to Test to Shokanju fea­tures pre­cisely what the title spe­cifies. The first three epis­odes are a grab bag of dif­fer­ent influ­ences that run the gamut from the quick fire rowdi­ness of Excel Saga to the fantasy-high school blend of Maburaho, suc­cess­fully mix­ing them all into a com­edy that hits more than it misses. It may have a tend­ency to grind some of its more luke­warm jokes into the ground, and many ele­ments of the paper-thin plot are obvi­ous to all those pay­ing atten­tion, how­ever it elev­ates itself above these faults with diversity and a pleas­ing cheer­ful­ness befit­ting its presentation.

“the tit­u­lar idiot Aki­hisa whose propensity for dim­wit­ted­ness keeps the entire affair tol­er­able if not predictable”

On the day of Fum­izuki Academy’s place­ment test, Aki­hisa isn’t doing well; one of the other stu­dents, Mizuki, how­ever is struck down with a fever and des­pite his prot­est­a­tions, she is awar­ded a zero for the test. Dropped into the worst graded class of the school, she joins Aki­hisa and fel­low under­achiev­ers Min­ami, an aggress­ive tom­boy who recently returned from Ger­many; Yuuji, one of Akihisa’s child­hood friends and sur­pris­ingly cha­ris­matic given his place­ment in class F; Hidey­oshi, an beau­ti­ful male stu­dent con­stantly mis­taken for a girl; and Kota, a serial per­vert who repeatedly tries to pho­to­graph under girls’ skirts. Together they try to elev­ate class F using the school’s unique sys­tem of com­pet­i­tion by bat­tling diminu­it­ive avatars whose strength is determ­ined by their summoner’s test scores.

The open­ing trio of epis­odes have a heroic share of laugh out loud moments and set ups, most of the time how­ever hangs on the pre­cip­ice of humour, run­ning the line between amuse­ment and tedium. Many sim­il­arly pitched series attempt to tip this bal­ance with a sus­tained caco­phony of smal­ler jokes or obscure chat­ter. Though still present, so far the series skirts this by stitch­ing together a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent styles that includes sight gags, par­od­ies and run­ning jokes; the lat­ter of which shows the most inspir­a­tion with the andro­gyn­ous Hidey­oshi who seems only mildly per­turbed at his con­stant depic­tion in starkly female cloth­ing. Bolted on to this piece­meal com­edy vehicle is a romantic sub­plot between the pink haired Mizuki, whose voice actor chan­nels ef’s Nat­sumi Yanase, and the tit­u­lar idiot Aki­hisa whose propensity for dim­wit­ted­ness keeps the entire affair tol­er­able if not predictable.

On first blush the art style and deliv­ery is remin­is­cent of SHAFT’s less recent works; not sur­pris­ing then that the dir­ector, Shin Oonuma, is a stal­wart of the stu­dio and has partnered with series com­poser Kat­suhiko Takayama who worked with him on the usu­ally misat­trib­uted ef duo of series. The res­ult is a dis­tinct­ive aes­thetic style that makes use of strong col­ours — Mizuki’s grad­ated pink hair is the most obvi­ous example — and a mez­zo­tint back­ground effect. Not as flag­rant as SHAFT’s best, but stu­dio SILVER LINK refrain from corner cut­ting and keep the kin­etic slap­stick look­ing clean and never less than passable.

Baka to Test to Shokanju is a routinely funny, sur­pris­ingly com­pet­ent series judging from its first three epis­odes; its vari­ety glosses over the jokes which fall flat or are oth­er­wise over­used leav­ing enough qual­ity mater­ial to believe that the rest of the series will fol­low suit. The nag­ging worry remains that it will peak too early and instead of main­tain­ing the furi­ous, devil-may-care pace, it will favour more sed­ate, straight-faced por­trayal of char­ac­ters like Mizuki and Aki­hisa. Or, like the pre­vi­ously men­tioned Maburaho, it becomes so head-scratchingly bizarre that any humour is irre­cov­er­ably doused. So far, the series shows none of these pro­cliv­it­ies and it remains a thor­oughly enjoy­able escapade that is self-knowing enough at one quarter through to allay fears for its future. ¶