Soooooo... why is this a thing? No really, why is this a thing? Now to give you some context, I HATE Highschool Musical: Live Action. I was in the demographic that Disney was trying to cater too when it first came out but I was so oversaturated with it from friends and peers that I couldn’t even watch the first part of the show. I still hate it even now and all the milking Disney has done for this series. That said, I heard that it was only 10 pages long so I figured I was going to check it out and see if it was any better and how they made an hour and a half long live action into 10 pages… they didn’t.

The story is basically a gutted version of the actual live action, with only an introduction to the characters which feels extremely forced and bland. It follows token boy jock (I refuse to even put energy looking up their names) who just won his basketball game with his token friend and are celebrating. He sits with his token girlfriend (were they even boyfriend and girlfriend in the beginning of the show?) talking about collages. I am not going to lie, there is no musical and there is no theatre, so why the hell is this even called a High School Musical? They left out the Musical part and just gave us a very bland story of high school that went nowhere.

I do have to give the anime props to some extent; the artwork is actually very good. It’s definitely Shoujo style with a lot of bloom lighting, pretty boys and girls, a lot of details, and nice screen tones. The artist really pushed themselves to make it look really good even if the characters didn’t look like the live action versions. I understand some liberties had to be taken because it’s not colored, but the only dark skinned guy looked as white as everyone else. I feel like there could have been a screen tone or something that could have helped with the ONE image of him in the manga.

To be fair, the only reason why this is getting any sort of rating from me is because of the artwork as the story is bland, doesn’t have any of the basic points to the show, and just feels like a waste of time. That was like 5 minutes I will not get back. Even putting my opinion of the source material aside, I don’t think fans of the show would even like this manga.