I am stealing this article from Jiji's blog. Hope you like it :)



Yuno has been accepted to her dream school: Yamabuki Arts High School. To attend the school, Yuno moves and starts to live in a small apartment building named the Hidamari Apartments located near the school. Once there, she starts making new friends like her classmate Miyako and the second year students, Hiro and Sae. Surrounded by good friends, Yuno starts moving towards her dream of being an artist.

Now, if you think that description sounds familiar, in fact–hey, it’s from the ANN encyclopedia!– you’re right and that’s because I wrote it. So there. Now, you should know that my interest in anime has to do with 1) culture and 2) cuteness. This is why I am a slice-of-life anime and manga fan, and also why I tend to like moe a LOT. Hidamari Sketch has both. How could I NOT like it?

The apartments are a bit of an oddity to people in the West, so let me explain a little: Being an Arts School, and thus fairly unique, Yamabuki attracts students from all over the place, some of them from far enough away that a commute is impossible. The school purchased a block of flats across the street and now leases them to students who are in need. Over the years, what with high school students living on their own and all, the Hidmarai apts have garnered a reputation as the place where the truly weird live. Miyako fits that mold perfectly, I think.

The weird little creature in the anime has a lot of people confused, so I’ll let you know that it’s Ume Aoki (the original creator) in her cute little disguise that mangaka often use. It’s supposed to be a caterpillar. Ume-sensei’s voice is used in the anime, as the caterpillar and there is a fair amount of evidence that the story is auto-biographical. To be sure, Ume-sensei is really tiny, even by Japanese standards, and is a talented artist–just like Yuno. I’ve got a strong suspicion that Ume-sensei knew people just like the other characters when she went to a specialized arts high school.

Yuno is, in two words, freeken adorable. I have never felt that elusive emotion of moe more strongly than I do for this cute little girl. (Yes, I know she’s not real—shut up.) Like a lot of anime characters, she’s a bit lacking in character as the main character, but this allows the audience to sympathize more with the “blank slate” they see on screen. Her description on the official site says something about having a good connection between her left and right brain. The “left and right brain” thing is more in the zeitgeist of Japan than the West, so for those who don’t know; people with more coordination between right and left hemispheres of the brain, are seen as a bit smarter and better able to co-ordinate their creative and logical sides. This would make a great artist, among other possibilities.

Miyako is Yuno’s close friend, classmate, and next-door neighbor in the apartment building where they live. She has an active personality and is always trying to have fun with her friends. Her exuberance frequently borders on the childlike, but she is undeniably creative. She loves to eat and has frequently asked for Hiro’s leftovers when she is on one of her diets. She sometimes points out that Hiro may be gaining weight, which earns her a thump on the head by Hiro. Miyako’s energy is frequently excessive and misplaced. Her rent is 5,000 yen cheaper than that of the other girls because her apartment is in poor repair, which is fortunate because she has less money than the other girls most of the time. She has an eidetic memory。

Hiro is a year older than Yuno and Miyako, living directly under Yuno’s apartment. Although she tries to be a supportive senpai to the girls, she tends to worry excessively about her weight, causing her to go on diets for periods while occasionally binging on sweets. A childhood friend of Sae, but despite tons of fan speculation, there’s no evidence that she and Sae are lovers.

Sae is an upperclassman and good friends with Hiro. Her artistic specialties are photography and fiction writing; she writes fiction professionally under a pseudonym and enrolled at the school specifically so she could learn how to illustrate her own works. She takes her role as sempai seriously and has a habit of giving Yuno just enough warning about potential problems for the younger girl to fail to avoid them. Sae is very masculine in all kinds of ways and is easily embarrassed for being thought of as kind or soft in any way.

SHAFT did amazingly well with this short anime, although they were running behind quite a bit and the regular TV broadcast was sometimes little more than still frames with dialogue until a week later when the widescreen broadcast came out and they had it fixed. Their style was often artistic to the point of almost avant-garde, so it makes me wonder if there will be further refinements to the animation when the DVDs come out. The episodes are one day (or so) a month for 12 months of the year, but out of chronological order. Little changed with the characters in that time (there’s no “character arc”), so it’s more fun to show things in a random order. After all this fanboy-ism, do I need to point out that it’s wonderful? Go download it and watch it.