Ijime: Ikenie no Kyoushitsu

Ever wonder what an anime version of an after school special was like? Well, I admit I haven't seen an after school special, especially those from the 70s and 80s, but if there could be an anime version of one, Ijime would be the closest thing I can picture as resembling one. It'd be one thing if it was good, but after watching it, I declare: it's horrible!! Absolutely, gutwrenchingly horrible in every single way possible! Prepare for riffing, people! So basically this OVA is about bullying. Normally I like stories about bullying, as I've been through some of it myself, but never to the ridiculousextent it's portrayed here. Seriously, some live action shows I've seen portray bullying better than this! Normally if a popular girl hates someone, it's either because she hates the way someone dresses, or maybe someone crossed her in some way like catching a boy's attention or getting better grades, etc., and people can relate to that! I don't mind stories like these if they're done well. But here? The whole thing is played for extreme melodrama, and not very well! All of the events that happen in here are so stupid and so petty that it makes me cringe! So, there's this rich girl named Sera who is the queen of the school, and she and her classmates pick on another girl named Fumika over stupid things. Why you ask? Because Fumika bumped into her and crumpled her shirt sleeve! Okay...what?! That is the most unbelievable and stupid reason ever! Couldn't they just forget about it, because those are NO reason to pick on someone, especially if they go as far as dump trash on her, cut her hair, and kick her around EVEN AS THE TEACHERS ARE WATCHING!!! Good lord, these girls are more melodramatic than the plastics from Mean Girls, and Mean Girls was a heck of a lot better than this piece of garbage! I'm not gonna lie, the animation and character designs are awful. Even the manga's art is creepy! Those eyes! They're too big! The character designs are completely bland and uninspired, the animation is stiff, there's no life or expression to them, their eyes are so big they completely consume their faces, far more so than normal anime eyes, and it relies too much on typical cartoon tropes to get its point across, like chibified characters or random jump cuts. Everybody has the exact same face. If you change their hair and eye colors, they'd all look like clones of each other. The music...I don't remember much. It was uninspired and not the very least bit memorable. The characters are obviously the worst part of this anime, because they pretty much have absolutely no character at all! They're just one-note caricatures who are just there to either punish someone or be victimized for absolutely no reason than cheap, pointless melodrama that could easily be avoided, and none of them even behave in rational ways. Sera's the annoying alpha female cranked up to eleven who victimizes someone just for...bumping into her and crumpling her sleeve, and then the show turns up the angst and expects us to sympathize with her in the end, which doesn't work because we had no reason to care about her, and we still don't! And because none of the other characters have any personality and do nothing but hurt people, they're basically nothing but mouthpieces who are used to move the story and shove the moral down our throats, and people claim MY characters are nothing but mouthpieces! Seriously, I can write a better bullying piece than this, with better characters! Also, no real person behaves the way these characters do, and the characters change their behavior every other scene, and that's not how you write a character or a story. The amateurish, melodramatic voice acting also doesn't help either. It's short length also doesn't do it any favors either. It's one episode of fifteen minutes, and had it been expanded, it could have been a lot better. Sorry. This is just awful. Bad animation, bad characters, bad storytelling, it's basically a really bad, overly preachy after school special, only much worse. Seriously, if I had to chose between this and Lady Lovely Locks, I'd pick LLL, because this is just terrible on every single level. Nothing can salvage it. This is indisputably the worst anime I have ever seen.