Sentai Filmworks has finally completed the entire run of Hidamari Sketch with this blu-ray release of the final two OVA episodes of the series. Does everything wrap up with a nice warm feeling of fun and friendship? Let’s dive in and find out!
The first episode finds the oldest student residents of Hidamari Apartments, Sae & Hiro, cramming for college entrance exams in the hopes they’ll be accepted to the school they really want. As the rest of the Hidamari girls struggle with saying goodbye to their friends, they put on an outwardly brave face and help them study like nobody’s business. In the second and final episode, the gang says goodbye to Sae & Hiro as they prepare for graduation and reminisce about how they first met. It’s a time of tearful farewells but optimism as they look forward to a bright future.
For those of us who have actually stuck by these characters through the last four seasons, this two-part OVA offers a pretty solid sense of closure to the series with some laughing, crying and an actual ending that closes the series out in a reasonable way. Given that the whole show has been a mildly comedic slice-of-life series about girls enrolled in an art school who all live in the same apartment complex, there’s obviously not a big epic climax that it has been building to or anything of that nature. But fans will find enough to enjoy it despite my reservations about the decision to release these on their own blu-ray instead of being included with the Season 4 disc like Sentai did with Season 2. Another positive is that the animation itself remains quirky and interesting, arguably one of the more unique things about the series, and the character designs look a little more polished and less dated than they did back in the first season (we are talking about a series that started back in 2007).
The technical specs are as one would expect from a Sentai release. The transfer is crisp and clean with the DTS 2.0 audio track (Japanese with English subtitles) being just fine (I mean, this isn’t the kind of series with lots of explosions or gunfire). The extras just amount to the usual clean OP and ED themes with some other Sentai trailers. Honestly Sentai, if you’re going to charge us for a whole separate disc for two bonus episodes, at least put some kind of meaty extra on there. We’re talking about a series that ran for six years. Surely there’s something out there that could’ve been included.
Despite my concerns about the extras and release strategy of this one, the episodes themselves offer a satisfying end to a cute series that should please fans of slice-of-life anime.