Anime: Joshikousei: Girl`s High

Be careful. Stupidity is contagious, especially by watching stupid anime. Like this one.

Having read the manga before watching the anime, I was honestly amazed at how bland the animation was compared to the manga. Of course, having experienced the manga makes you more of a critic when watching the animated version of it, but of all the anime I have watched after reading the manga, this is one of the worst adaptions I have seen.

Animation: Bland animation, bland character design and it emits the word ‘Cheap’ in bright neon signs.

While anime often have the annoying habit of not using any consistency, lately they broke that habit. More and more anime keep in mind that scratches, wounds and all being conflicted in the beginning of the episode are still visible throughout the entire episode. But the poor animation here manages to forget all about it once the pun about it is over, which means the scratch/wound/etc already disappear within a few seconds afterwards. Poor animation is one thing, but poor consistency is another.

The character design is bland, which means that the characters have hardly any details in the face, even when there are different emotions. Of course that is not the fault of the animators, since the manga characters have that too, but it does add to the cheap image the animation already emits. Backgrounds are also often below the standard we know from anime as well, as if they really didn't feel like doing a good job on them.

Sound: Either the voiceactors or the scripts are subpar – but I suspect the scripts to be the bad ones.

Every now and then there are lines where the voiceactors sound as if they absolutely didn't feel like putting any effort into it, while other times the voiceacting is done normally. This makes it seem like the voiceactors aren't doing their jobs well enough – but actually I think that it might be the fault of the scripts. Sometimes the dialogues are just too cheesy or forced that it is not unthinkable to believe that the voiceactors don't feel like doing a good job on it.

OP/ED
While I personally kind of like both of the songs, it is obvious that both songs are produced without a soul. The melody and the voice singing are both without any feeling behind it, as if they were only doing it in order to pay the rent for next month.
The BGM is average; lots of silly-sounding music and sfx, but it suits the show.

Story: Episode-wise stories, which are displayed in such a forced way that they don't become funny.

Just like the title of the series already says, it's about highschool girls living a normal highschool girl life. But just like every class has some odd people, this class has nearly only odd students. The ‘story’ of this series is simply about how those idiot girls always get involved in idiotic issues.
Later on, there are also some more serious issues, but mostly it is just the regular fooling around and being utterly stupid. According to the mangaka (manga artist), all of these events happening in the manga and anime are all based on her personal experiences, which kind of made me wonder what the hell she has been going through during her high school days. Especially when you see that nearly every episode has at least some blatant odd ecchiness.

End of episodes
Note that at the end of the ED-song, there is still a sort of epilogue afterwards. Since one might not always watch ED-songs, one can easily miss those if they don't know there is anything left anymore.

The manga
I have been thinking a lot about why half of the jokes from the manga weren't executed as well as in the anime to become funny. They are the same jokes, they have the same characters and so they should be just as funny, right? The opposite is true. A lot of the jokes in this series get too dragged out in time to be funny. Whereas the manga relies a lot on one-panel (one image) jokes, in order to animate those, they'll have to stretch the jokes for a longer time. This often means that the joke gets dragged out too much, resulting in a not-so-funny joke.

Characters: Lots of weird characters who never really become funny due to the bad animation, bad voiceacting and a bad adaption of the script.

There are 3 main characters in the series, alongside a few supporting characters. Sometimes they make you smile a bit due to their silliness, but usually they are just being silly. They're ‘kind of’ likeable characters, not because they have great character development, but rather because they're fun to see. Or annoying, that's possible too, if you don't like the silliness of the Moron-group.
They give some info throughout the series about their past, their hobbies and such, so you do get to know them, and that's what the value of the characters is. Unfortunately, the focus is too much on the extreme ecchiness and the stupidity to really appreciate the characters.

Value : The manga has more value.

I don't like to use such a blatant advertisement as the above catch-phrase, but really … this anime fails at every single turn and seeing it being such a poor adaption of the manga (which was really fun, imho) I would say that this anime doesn't have any value to watch. I would recommend reading the manga instead.

Enjoyment: If you like forced funny anime, watch this.

This series is probably nice for people who like a lot of ecchi in school-anime, but if you like good animation, fun jokes or even a decent anime, this one isn't really what you're looking for.

Here's an early preview of High School Girls since nothing else has been presented at this point (and I believe I know why).

So far I've watched 5 episodes, and trust me when I say this, I really want(ed) to like this show. On the paper it features alot of those genres that I like: Lots of school girls, ecchi and comedy. If done right, these shows can be real masterpieces; and of course I was also hoping for some lovely lesbian tendencies. The anime also starts out really promising, we see one of the 6 main characters screaming out of her window, "I'm a high school girl" and then the shot changes to the kitchen where her mother ensures her little brother that it's perfectly normal for her to do such a thing, so he should just leave her alone. I liked that.

BUT...slowly the mainstream humor and ecchi starts kicking in, you really realize how much whipped cream with no substance underneath this is show is. Ecchi can be something else than pantsu and almost-bare-boob-shots, but not in High School Girls. It is the MAIN focus, and when it calms down a bit, the humor is absolutely boring and predictable. In fact everything from the ecchi to the comedy and story itself is one big fluff, only created to satisfy the ecchi-otakus.

Take the 6 main characters. 4 of them are your standard crazy teenage girls and you can easily switch their personalities without people realizing it. Then one of them is your shy romantic dark-haired girl with big glasses, yes you know the type and you know exactly what she looks like. The last is your off-the-shelf chibi naive innocent girl that can't even figure out what is going on when she's taken into a love hotel and a boy is making moves on her. Yup, they are just there to play video games and wait for other people to arrive.

Storywise, as I said, there isn't anything but your mainstream incidents and after 5 episodes I can't find any signs of story progress, only episodic things so far. It starts out with 3 girls arriving at a new school, where they sneak into the actual school building the day before school-start. They brought their new uniforms and for some reason they all end up cutting their skirts so short that you can easily see the pantsu underneath even when seen from the front. Seconds later one of the girls trips, falls down some stairs and lands directly with the you-know-what directly placed in the face of another girl. This is how the horrible ecchi and humor starts out..

The animation however is certainly above average, and even if they don't behave it, the characters certainly look cute with the chibi girl excluded. The 90 second long opening video is just the 6 girls running around with flashing backgrounds, I have never seen anything this uncreative. The ending video also has the girls goofing around but in an actual environment with background animation. However what I really want to point out about the ending video is the way their faces and especially eyes are animated. Something like Mezzo forte/DSA -if you ever watched those- sharp facial structures and hypnotizing eyes that really suck you in. I wish the actual anime was like that, at least there would be some eye-candy, no pun intended.

The sound is with one word unmemorable, both the OP and ED is nothing I would ever get on CD, and while the voice acting is pretty bad, it's still fitting to the shallow characters.

So in the end if Ecchi is the main and ONLY thing you're looking for in a show then you might want to pick this show up. Oh, I'm sorry about the amount of stupid ranting, but when I'm disappointed in a show, I tend to get like that...