Girl’s High
Guilty Pleasure without all that bothersome pleasure.
Let me preface this whole thing by saying that Girl’s High is a dumb series and I didn’t care one iota when it ended. It’s dreck, for the most part, and if they bring it back for a second series I’m not sure I’ll care enough to watch. So, if you don’t want to hear me talk about how much it sucked, stop now.
Story & Characters
Girl’s High is kind of what it sounds like — it’s a slice of life “comedy” about six girls in high school. The supposed appeal of the premise is that the show subverts your given notions about sweet young girls, the kind perpetuated by this very medium much of the time. And that, to me, is great. Fighting, scheming, menstruation talk, inappropriate places to leave pubic hairs, and more than a couple f-bombs make for an atypical experience. But it’s all a pretty transparent picture painted on a terribly empty canvas. The problem is, rather than go with the time-honored practice of short-cutting characters by giving them usual anime archetypes, the writers elected to leave personalities out of the equation altogether. Who are these girls again? There’s the regular one, the short one, the other regular one, and one has glasses. Wait. No, that was the regular one.
On second thought, the problem is that the humor just isn’t raunchy enough most of the time. I don’t know if it’s cultural, if something’s lost in translation, or if most people don’t hang out with the kind of females I know, but this shit was tame as baby kitties most of the time (I’ll reiterate most of the time because it has its moments, like the wrong-as-hell final episode, but that was just too little too late).
No, think again, maybe the problem is that just when they’re onto something funny, the writers think they have to drop a serious drama-bomb on the series and prove that they couldn’t write their way out of a bento box. The biggest problem with the “serious” stuff is that the girls get themselves into difficult situations because they’re apparently too stupid to see around blatant attempts to get raped or manipulated. Better writers could have easily made these situations possible and thus watchable, but these writers know tit jokes and not much else.
There are at least three episodes where something made me laugh out loud, and those were all well-written payoffs to fairly long jokes (the singing of the school anthem at Kouda’s “death party” is really one of the moments the show exists for). But they’re too far between.
Animation
Wow. I mean, I know comedic anime neither gets nor requires big budgets like robot or sword shows, but seriously. These producers whipped out every cheap trick in the book (bouncing a waist-up still picture up and down to illustrate walking, that sort of thing) and still can’t manage to get smooth movement or worse, consistent character design.
I’ve been trying to raise the fan service issues in most reviews, but it’s really a special case here. I can’t figure out if this show is actually for girls or boys. It seems like it should be girl-focused, and in the really lame world of anime aimed at girls, it should be a step in the right direction. But Jesus fuck, there are just so many panty shots I can’t quite keep my mind around that theory. Yes, they use their feminine wiles to get ahead with teachers and boys, who are all portrayed as complete tools, but still… I think the only time that any care went into the drawing was when panties were on screen.
Credits & Music
The opening music is inoffensive, the opening animation is boring. The closing animation is one of the best parts, and not just because you know you’re closer to the series being over: a very sweet J-pop tune bounces along behind individual animations of all the girls doing little dances. It’s actually really cute and seems somehow more “real” than the show itself. For me, it’s suddenly become one of anime’s great mysteries how this great closer ended up on this mostly-lousy show.
Incidental music is of the worst kind: you know those shows where they seem to have one little tune to fit any particular mood? InuYasha comes to mind. There’s the action theme, the comic relief theme, the traveling music, and the foreboding ominous whatever. It’s like that, except every type of music is goofy. Rumbling tuba sounds, honks, and even fart noises permeate nearly every intolerable second of the irritating soundtrack. To top it off, the voice actors lack personality to the point where I can’t always tell who’s talking. There’s no dub in existence, and thank God for that: the voice actor unfortunate enough to be the second person to utter any of these lines is a sucker.
Bottom Line
I don’t know what more I need to sum up. If you’re really itching to see this show, go for it, but if other reviews have made it sound entertainingly raunchy and shockingly crass, it’s not. It’s lame, tepid humor loaded down with bad slapstick and bodily function stuff. And while I can appreciate that when it’s done well, it’s just not. You want a genuinely funny high school anime show? Try the deservingly-hyped Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya instead.
[...] shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve seen Girls High or even read what I had to say about it that the high school comedy genre is not highest on my hot list, and slipped even further after [...]