Princess Sara

Absolutely awful. Let me start off first by saying that I've read the book several times and watched several of the other more popular versions. They are some of my favorites. There is so much wrong with this adaptation that I could go on and on but I'll keep it short. The characters are characterized as weak and stupid. Sara herself is basically purity sue. She is perfect and all the others either lover or hate her. Aside from that, she is an incredibly passive version of her book self. She spends much of the series crying, ... given a limited amount of dialogue which consists of mostly "Yes, Headmistress." The other characters always come to her rescue. The whole point of the book was how she overcame her struggles through her incredible imagination, which we see very little of in this version.

The villians in this all don't seem to have lives. They are never shown doing any work despite living in a huge establishment with a skeletal staff where there would be a TON of work to do. They only seem to exist to make Sara's life miserable. Miss Minchin was a credible, shrewd villain in the book. She hated Sara but knew that she could be quite useful as an instructress as well as a help in the kitchen, a maid and errand girl, after she loses all her fortunes. This Minchin is incredibly shallow. Furthermore she is given a five minute Freudian Excuse for her behavior during a later episode. And at the end we're supposed to just forgive her nasty behavior for 20+ episodes because of it.

Lavinia was barely a side character who occasionally made trouble for Sara, not the front and center bully like she is in this. She also wasn't American in the book. None of the cast was.

There's also a potential love interest whose existence throws in a major plot hole to the whole plot.

The animation is weak even for 1980's standards. The characters make strange expressions and you can't tell what they're feeling half the time. It's also incredibly redundant. I don't need to see Sara ironing and washing dishes for eons in each episode before the head housemaid comes in and screams at her.

Please skip this and watch any of the other versions. If you're a diehard fan, then watch it, but don't expect much. The 1986 version with Amelia Shankley is the closest version to the book imo and way better than this version which, I don't think even tried.

You can cut this anime series down to 30 episodes (mostly from the middle of the series) and STILL display enough of Sara's suffering to make a point - that it's a hard-knock life, for .... uh, ahem...that song does stick doesn't it?

It's dragged out way too long and I ended up skipping through part of several episodes just to get to the conclusion.

It started out as something interesting, but became something rather painful and aggravating to watch. The balance is off. Extremely cold-hearted, evil people all congregated under one building and supportive characters that lacked voice and power to make much of a ... difference during most of the anime. The ending is not satisfying. I understand the important message where "we can all get along" but there's a point where you draw the line to certain people.

It's a decently made anime, but it has too many 'stressful' scenes to watch. I didn't enjoy this anime. The anime itself is a 6.5, but I got to give it a 4, it was more pain then pleasure.

This anime is basically the slowest something could be in the first place, and the plot after the first 10 episodes of everyone jizzing over the mc is her being tortured after that. The plot is mostly the other workers telling them (the 2 poor tortured girls) to work hard as those other workers slack off and large amounts of time being spent for the other characters to say yes to working harder even though they were already working hard, or the headmistress making some unreasonably bitchy complaint accusing someone of doing something they did not do that the headmistress knows that other person did ... not do, followed by a large amount of time being spent for the character to say yes and "accept" blame. Seriously that is the entire core plot, and it is so slow and takes so much time (if you have a brain in your head but still decide to watch this based on the relatively high rating, please keep that finger on the fast forward button).

But what makes this quite simply the worst something could be is when MCmctorturedgirl is EXCITED to see the girl who spent the entire anime torturing her the most (ep 33?) and then calls her, and not just to not get into trouble, her fucking friend (ep 34?). Like I get that the point was to make her a messiah figure but this was the biggest, most poorly written stretch of all time.

(the music is great when not being badly repeated, usually is badly, relentlessly repeated)