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The Specials

[Rating:3/5]

This pleasant, charming, and always funny slice of life anime franchise returns to Blu-ray with these two, roughly twenty-five-minute OVA “specials” that capture the girls of the Hidamari Apartments, revolving around the diminutive Yuno, and how they spend their summer vacation. In keeping with the laid back and nonlinear fashion of the series, the episodes jump around, and follow Yuno, her friends Miyako, Hiro, Sae, and the two new junior students Nori and Nazuna on a trip to the art museum, a day out swimming at the public pool, washing their curtains in the backyard, having a pajama party, and indulging in an all-you-can-eat buffet courtesy of the landlady.

While the fifty-minute runtime is over far too soon (and may very well be overpriced at a list price of – drum roll please – $24.98) these two episodes still fit quite nicely into this thoroughly inventive anime franchise, although they do not progress the story along in any way. It is still a pleasure to sit through the almost improvisational-styled artwork  and revisit these immensely likable, moe characters.

Video Quality

[Rating:4.5/5]

A clean and crisp transfer of the digital animation on Blu-ray is offered for these two Hidamari Sketch special OVAs on Blu-ray from Sentai Filmworks. No evidence of noise, stairstepping, or aliasing crops up and the colors look quite consistent with how the series has been up to this point. The episodes are provided in an AVC/MPEG-4 1080p encodement.

Audio Quality

[Rating:4/5]

A more than adequate Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (48kHz/24-bit) audio track is provided of this very enjoyable voice cast. The dialogue is full and clear and there’s a strong sense of stereo separation and dynamic range.

Supplemental Materials

[Rating:1/5]

• Clean Opening Animation
• Clean Closing Animation
• Sentai Filmworks Trailers

The Definitive Word

Overall:

[Rating:3.5/5]

These two episodes probably could have been offered on another Hidamari Sketch collection to make it more of a value, but if you want to complete your collection and you love this series and these characters, as I do, then you won’t be disappointed with these two OVAs. And, they can be had for a somewhat reasonable $15 at Amazon at the moment.

Additional Screen Captures

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