Aaah, Hidamari Sketch. SHAFT’s rather long-running, heart-warming, relaxing series about a bunch of cute highschool girls doing cute things. I’m a big fan – it’s a perfect way of unwinding, with its relentless optimism, cheerfulness and wideface, and manages to be visually distinct through the fantastic use of various artistic techniques and motifs in the presentation. Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb represents the fourth TV series in this franchise and, let’s be honest here, by this point you fit into one of three camps.
The first: you’re a fan of Hidamari Sketch, in which case you’ll likely end up watching this at some point if you haven’t already. The second: you’re not a fan of Hidamari Sketch, in which case nothing I have to say about the fourth bloody season is going to change your mind on the franchise. The third: you have no real opinion on the series, because you haven’t watched any of it before and to which a review of the franchise as a whole is probably more worth your time (the tl;dr of that is: if you don’t massively dislike the cute-girls-doing-cute-things genre, check out the first season and know that each season is better than the last). So what’s the point of this? There may well be a contingent of people who have watched Hidamari Sketch up until Honeycomb, but aren’t big enough fans to watch another series, and will want to know if it’s actually worth their time. Beyond that incredibly small number of anime fans (of which approximately none read this blog, statistically speaking), this post will largely serve as a bit of a discussion on what I enjoyed about it, and how it fits in with Hidamari Sketch as a whole.
There’s something to be said about Hidamari Sketch as a franchise: each series genuinely is an improvement on the last. It started out fairly cheap, with the unique visual quirks and direction as a clever cost-cutting measure, banking on a surprisingly suitable stylistic streak over technical proficiency. This paid off, and the series went on to be a pretty big success, allowing for greater and greater budgets with each passing season. SHAFT becoming a bigger and more successful studio certainly helped with that as well, though. There was definitely a feeling in the first series that they were trying to get the feel and approach of the show down properly – a certain unevenness and slowness. But with Hidamari Sketch x 365 there was a greater sense of confidence in what they were producing, that they had really got what the show was meant to be like down. This carried on over into Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆, where they were now in a position to introduce two new characters to the core group in a naturalistic manner that didn’t disrupt the fabric of the show. Not to say that Hidamari Sketch was getting stale, but it did bring about some welcome freshness into the formula. And this led on into Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb, where having spent a season introducing and familiarising the two new girls to the audience, they feel as much a part of the apartment as the original four – a situation which allows for even greater scenarios, where Nori and Nazuna are no longer branded the ‘new’ ones.
In not so many words, Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb is the best Hidamari Sketch has ever been.
Everything that defined Hidamari Sketch is here and made more significant. The girls are cute as all hell, there are more utterly heartwarming moments than ever before, the yuri subtext (should you choose to read that into the series) is somewhat more obvious, the animation is absolutely fantastic (thank you Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Bakemonogatari for making SHAFT super rich), and the faces are wider than they’ve ever been.
This does however also translate into some of the more… questionable aspects of the franchise too. Most notably, Yuno’s end-of-day-reflection bath-time. The camera angles, the posing, the cuts, it all feels a little more… lascivious, I guess? It’s curious though – I don’t find myself perceiving these scenes as fanservice. Perhaps I’m just used to them after so many episodes featuring it, perhaps it’s the because none of them have shots that could be described as ‘male gaze’, and perhaps the fact that the Blu-Rays add more ‘censorship’ to these more potentially risqué scenes, undermining the notion that they were intended to be fanservice, but I felt they were closer in spirit to ‘artistic nudes’ than cheesecake shots. Then again, I could just be overreaching and overthinking this.
Either way, seeing wideface Miyako from behind doing a handstand in front of her friends in the public baths totally butt naked kinda destroys any sex-appeal that situation may have had.
While it has all so far essentially been “more of the same, but more so” there is one major addition that has been made to the Hidamari Sketch formula: a greater sense of maturity, wistfulness and even sadness.
Hiro and Sae are in their third year of high school, meaning that they will be graduating in not too long. This is not glossed over in the least; several episodes have this impending reality as their focus. Be it Hiro losing sleep over the uncertainty she has in what she wants to do in her future, Sae having second thoughts about her plans despite her desires due to not wanting to have to split from Hiro, or Yuno becoming down at having to watch two of her closest friends, the two people that helped her settle into Hidamarisou, leave, Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb doesn’t hold anything back when it comes to portraying and discussing these difficult times. While it fortunately doesn’t descend into melodrama, which would be hilariously ill-fitting, there are extended moments of melancholy. But it is in these moments that we get a genuine feel for just how close these girls are and for just how hard it must be for them – it uses the prior three seasons of development and familiarity to ensure we’re attached to them, and then gives us these situations to help take them further, to make them feel more real. While the resolutions to these concerns and issues they’re having are never sad, they’re still only on the sweet side of bittersweet. They will still have to graduate, the friends will be split up after years of practically living together, but they find the conviction and strength to accept this and greet the future with characteristic optimism.
If you’re a fan of Hidamari Sketch thus far, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t enjoy Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb. Everything that was good about the franchise is back and even better, and the addition of having the girls face some real, major problems really helps bring some greater depth to it. As the girls are growing up, so is the show itself, and I think it is this side of Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb that truly elevates it, that makes it the best it’s ever been.
9/10
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