GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class – 06

This show is schizophrenic! It may be called GA Art Design Club, but if it weren’t for that name you’d hardly guess that the main characters are indeed those five girls of the Art Design Club. This episode again was about the other art club, in which they turn their clubroom into a haunted house. Definitely not what I expected, but nevertheless this episode was a lot of fun. This episode starts out a small skit about Tomokane chopping up a asleep Noda. Next up we get a little skit about Tomokane returning a game that she borrowed from Noda. It was surprisingly quick, so Noda wonders what’s wrong. It turns out that Tomokane’s brother got hold of the game, overwrote all of her saved files and got much further into the game than she did. Only now I realize that this was a clever little bit of foreshadowing. The next scene properly introduces the real meat of this episode as we see the mysterious blue-haired boy, who turns out to have some sort of health problems, after which he enters the Art Club’s clubroom along with Yasumura. Uozumi also arrives. The clubroom seems empty, so Yasumura at first thinks that they have some kind of day off or something, but Uozumi reassures them that there are club activities that day. Which becomes all the more apparent when Awara is found under her box wrapped in bloody and nailed bandages. Yasumura doesn’t fall for it, though. Bluehair however is quite startled, and eventually Mizubuchi also manages to scare Yasumura by suddenly appearing in a room full of skulls. It turns out that Awara and Mizubuchi found some nice material made by some former club-members, and decided to give everyone a nice scare. Those former materials also include a daily rip-off calendar (or however you call that in English) of the Mona Lisa, who slowly turns into an old hag. It turns out that in their first year, Awara and Uozumi also were scared quite a bit by their upperclassmen. I have a lot of trouble following the names of this series around, because even the OFFICIAL SITE omits the first names of some of the characters. It’s therefore interesting to note that Yasumura(the red-haired guy)’s first name (or last name; Japanese names still confuse me) is Homura. Could be handy for the future. Anyway, it turns out that Bluehair wants to join the club, and Awara immediately jumps on him. A teacher then explains to some other teachers that Bluehair had a bad health and spent his first year with rather bad attendance records, so the nurse figured that it might help him to join a club somewhere. Anyway, then we see some scenes of Bluehair getting introduced to the club, and the basics get explained. Then the idea comes to create a haunted house with the things that they have lying around. In the meantime Samecha (the blond teacher) gets lured into the new clubroom. Mizubuchi meets her own her way out, and guides her in and she immediately gets scared by an overenthusiastic Yasumura. When Samecha goes outside, she runs into the Art Design club, who happened to be there. And they offer to get what Samecha was supposed to be taking when she visited the clubroom. It’s interesting that apart from Mizubuchi, the rest of the Art Club has no idea who they are. Anyway, next up they’re scared by some old ghost tricks like a wet sponge on a string. The haunted house continues for a bit, but the club members didn’t take into account that Tomokane wouldn’t be scared at all and instead would start to break everything. There are also some nice jokes, like Uozumi completely forgetting that he’s supposed to be a monster, and therefore trying to help Noda when she fell into one of the traps that were set up. Eventually, Bluehair also manages to scare Tomokane with a bunch of fake bugs. Eventually they get to the exit, which has two doors. If I understood correctly, then Tomokane choses the wrong door and gets overrun by some of the old stuff from the Art Club, and gets even more upset and starts wrecking even more stuff. Eventually Miyabi manages to stop her with the help of her fingernails and a chalk board. Since they forgot what they were supposed to get for Samecha, they just take out a bunch of random items that in turn scare Samecha even more. The episode ends with Bluehair’s official registration, and he turns out to be Tomokane’s older brother. Tomokane seems to hate him because he always beat her in whatever kind of game they were playing. By the way, it’s rather annoying that we never get to hear their first names. It’s going to be hard talking about them this way! So I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t much art design in this episode, but it nevertheless was a cute episode with as much energy as ever. There’s hardly a moment that leaves you dulled in. I especially like Awara as a character. Oh and on a side-note: I’m surprised that an OVA has been announced. It’s nice to see this show getting a bunch of extra episodes. And on another side-note: the art in this series looks surprisingly good, and I especially notice that when I take screenshots. This series likes to put as much characters on a screen as possible, and hardly ever makes use of close-ups that just focus on one person. That really gives off an interesting effect, and it does really well in making the characters alive, rather than posing for a camera all the time like what you see in for example an average Shinbo-series. It’s subtle, but it works really well. Rating: * (Good)]]>