Hidamari Sketch (S1) Review

Slice of Life is a special genre to me. Nichijou was the anime that truly got me into this wacky, weird otaku fantasy world that is anime. I know a lot of people who hate Slice of Life. Gigguk from The Anime Zone is a more well known reviewer who really hates the Moes Slice of Life genre, having released a review of K-On that really expressed his hate for the genre, as well as in his rant video “New Anime Sucks”, which he made so long ago that he no longer sees that as relevant, but that’s besides the point. He did make a very good point though: 2012 was absolutely riddled with these animes. K-On was only the instigator of the Moe Moe riot. While most of these animes were mediocre at best, there were a few gems that shined through the rubble.

But the one I’m talking about isn’t a 2012 anime, it was a 2007 anime. This anime is no other than Hidamari Sketch, an anime based off of a 4-Koma of the same title by Ume Aoki, produced by Shaft and directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and Ryouki Kamitsuo, which ran for five season. And in my opinion, Hidamari was not only part of the beginning of the Moe Slice of life genre, but is the best Slice of Life anime I’ve ever watched. Shall we see why?

Story

Just to clarify, I have only watched the first season of Hidamari Sketch, so all opinions are for season one and season one only. I’ll release my thoughts for the other seasons once I finish them.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in. As some of you know-it-all otakus might know already, Slice of Life isn’t a genre based around an overarching story. The best way I can describe the story is this: Yuno is a first year student at Yamabuki Art High School who live in the eccentric Hidamari Apartments, and apartment building a minute’s walk away from the school. She and her friends Miyako, Sae and Hiro all live out their daily lives as art students, and their lives are shown through the anime’s episodes, all ending with Yuno taking a bath and letting the audience know her closing thoughts.

The anime is straightforward, except the episode order is strange. The episodes are out of order in the way they were released, much like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, except in this case the episodes are sometimes titled the date of the year. And like Haruhi, I watched it in released order. I actually liked the strange time jump from Summer to Winter or Spring to Fall. It seems to represent the passage of time, and how quick it all seems. In fact, while watching the episodes I never felt time pass at all. Before I knew it the episode was over and I had started the next one.

This is one of the key reasons why I think Hidamari Sketch is the best Slice of Life ever made: It is life. It’s not like Nichijou, where everything that happens is beyond impossible. From the characters to the events that take place, everything is entirely possible. It really is an anime about the mundane, yet pleasing side of life. It demonstrates the side of life when we’re spending time with friends that really mean something to us, who we actually care about. And I love that, since it’s so hard to portray that without causing it to be a boring mess. It’s really hard to portray the fleetness of life, just as hard as portraying the elegant flow of an unfocused converstation, which Hidamari Sketch also does, but I’ll bring that up later. And trust me, I know. I specialize in writing dynamic dialogue in my fiction writing. It’s freaking difficult.

Characters

In season one there are four characters that are most important, and they all live in Hidamari Apartments. These characters are the aforementioned Yuno, Miyako, Sae and Hiro. The story revolves around them and their lives, so obviously I would go over them.

 

Yuno is the character the story is “told: through. We only hear her thoughts, and every episode starts with her waking up. She’s a good artist with almost no confidence in her art and has no real goal in life. In the first season she’s searching for her dream, stemming from seeing a former Yamabuki student who acheived her dream of becoming a director. Oh, and she mishears a lot of things.

Miyako is a first year student like Yuno who loves to eat and is always smiling, always eating. Seriously, there are very few cases where she is not all smiles and sunshine, even on rainy days.

She is a good artist and an even better singer, as she is able to imitate even a bad singer’s voice if she wants. She’s also pretty silly, taking a hammock once and messing around with it as if it was a toy, once pretending it was a ladder. She also plays the role of the poor character, as she doesn’t sleep on a futon or a bed, but indeed the hammock I mentioned before.

Miyako is the best character ever, by the way. Don’t try to argue with me.

 

Sae is a second year student who, unlike everyone else in the show, is already in a profession. She’s a published light novel author, writing romance stories under an unknown pen name. Sae is easily the shyest, most easily embarrassed character in the show, and she gets embarrassed by the smallest mention of one of her stories. She’s seen as the more mature character in the show, as all dark haired glasses girl characters are. Very little is known about her artistic talent in the first season, other than that she cannot draw animals for the life of her.

Hiro is a second year student that’s really good at cooking but really conscious about her weight. If you know Megumi from GJ Bu, you know what I mean. Despite not being overweight in the slightest, she’s often going on diets, but failing miserable because she’s just too good at making cake. We know less about Hiro’s artistic talent than Sae’s, as she is better known for her cooking skills. She’s also really kind, so there’s that.

Every one of these gifs are from Hidamari Sketch Hoshimittsu, mind you, so I’m cheating a bit with my images.

Notice how little I wrote for each character. The characters are all really simple, with very little depth to them. But that’s fine, because it’s their conversations that matter most. Every episode is simply a long, flowing conversation with no order to it. Ume Aoki must have extensive knowledge of idle conversations, because she portrays them flawlessly, which is beyond difficult to do especially in 4-Koma. The way her characters talk to each other about the smallest, most unimportant things, getting occasionally sidetracked by things like Yuno and Miya’s teacher Yoshinoya-sensei’s crazy antics and the wild rumors surrounding her, is so realistic. A real conversation has no set order, and is easily side-railed. Sometimes when I talk to someone, we get so sidetracked we have to consider how we got there and what we started with. That’s the beauty of dialogue, something as insignificant as a conversation with a friend can be turned into a artful and beautiful thing. And Ume Aoki did just that, and she made something out of it, and it was through her characters, even if they may be simplistic in character depth.

Art and Animation

The art is a really strong point of the anime; it looks damn good. Hidamari Sketch has one of the best color palettes I’ve seen in a Shaft anime, Shaft being the company known for their amazing looking animes. It uses colors that could be in a painting, and the art itself has a flat, minimalistic look, and it’s appealing. The tones from the manga were transferred well to the anime, and don’t look out of place. If anything, they add to the mood of the anime. Most of the artistic design choices set a good mood for the show, keeping the standard relaxed feeling in place that makes the anime what it is. The character design is great too. Every character is drawn really well, especially in their Chibi form. The anime uses the Chibi art style often, and damn does it fit. If Ume Aoki had a hand in the art design of the show, I would not be surprised. She did voice her Metapod persona in the anime, so it isn’t farfetched.

 

(Example of the Chibi art style above. I know, it’s Miyako again. Get used to it)

 

The animation is the only okay thing in the show. Now, I did consider the year this was made, but that still didn’t adequately defend the subpar animation. There just isn’t enough of it, making the anime more like a motion manga with slightly better animation. And it being a Slice of Life anime is not a good enough excuse, because Nichijou has some of the best animation in anime, and that looked fluid and fit really well. But, I won’t rate animation as low, for I never really noticed it and was too occupied in loving everything else I saw on screen, especially Miyacchi. So it’s fine Shaft, your animation doesn’t have to be perfect all the time.

Music

So, uh, the soundtrack is composed by Tomoki Kikuya, who’s done the OSTs of Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko (Good anime, go watch it), Nisekoi, and Squid Girl. Christ though, I’ve seen a few of the animes he’s composed music for, Nisekoi twice, and I think this is his best work. He captured the feel of the show flawlessly, using a relaxing theme to form a perfect mood for the show. I can remember the OST in Hidamari Sketch better than any of the themes from the other shows he’s done, and I think his musical style works so well here.

The opening theme is fantastic. It’s such a pleasant song, and fits the anime well, as it’s about art. A Slice of Life opening should give you a taste of what you’re going to see in the anime, what the anime should be like. Two especially good examples are Nichijou and Azumanga Daioh (Another 4-Koma), which both have openings that give you what you’re going to get from the anime. Hidamari Sketch’s opening does just thism and just works. It’s also just good.

As for the ending theme, I don’t usually listen to those. But it this case I went to listen to it on its own, and I thought it was great. Ending themes are not really my thing, and I rarely like to listen to them or watch them. But with Hidamari Sketch, I’d at least listen to it. It’s also a pleasant song, and is more relaxing than the opening is. So yeah, the ending theme’s great too.

Ending

This is a Slice of Life anime, is the ending really all that important?

Well, it turns out that in this case it is. Rarely is the end of a Slice of Life anime good, as either they’re not conclusive or they are far too conclusive, as if you can really ever end a Slice of Life. Life does not simply stop, and any friends that leave you will soon be replaced, but the memories won’t. Hidamari Sketch has a perfect understanding of that very idea, and even though no one is really leaving anyone, all the residents of Hidamari Apartments are going home for the holidays and won’t be seeing each other for a while. However in reality, we know they are all coming back, because the first episode was in January in the next year. So I think the order they released the episodes in was the order it was meant to be watched in. If you were to watch it chronologically, then where’s the ending? There wouldn’t be one, and we would be left with no conclusion to all we have seen. But in its released order, there is a conclusion, and it hints at more. Surely enough, Hidamari Sketch did get mroe, and that’s what’s great.

Conclusion

Hidamari Sketch is a well written, visually impressive anime with a brilliant soundtrack, and I cannot say that in better way. I enjoyed every minute, every second of this anime, despite the fact that not much happened in the show at all. Looking at the kind of Moe Slice of Life animes we have today, with shows like Kiniro Mosaic and K-On, I wonder how many of the fans of those shows have seen Hidamari Sketch, one of the pioneers of the genre and, in my opinion, has not yet been topped. Because when you bring so much enjoyment to a person who hated Lucky Star because he thought there was no purpose to anything that happened, and you manage to do it with an anime that had even less happening, then you’ve done something right. You’ve done something really, really right.

9.5/10, Ultimate Recommendation. That means go watch it, now.

Hidamari Sketch is produced by Shaft, and is licensed by Sentai Filmworks in NA, and licensed by MVM Films in the UK. The original manga is written and illustrated by the brilliant Ume Aoki, and is currently still ongoing (More Hidamari Sketch seasons in the future, perhaps?). Currently there are five seasons of Hidamari Sketch and 8 volumes of the manga, so get to it!

Can you see how many different names I called Miyako by? Look back through, I called her three different names if I’m not mistaken.

So sayonara guys, my next review is The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, so be ready for that!

One last gif of Miyako.