天下制覇

Hiro, you chubster.

Impressions:

You know we’re going places when one of the first jokes is about Hiro being fat. This was a little more undirected than most Hidamari episodes (aside from the presence of bikes in most scenes), but was still pretty good all around. The end got a little clumsy once they realized that there were only two minutes left and they hadn’t shown three of the major characters so tried to cram all of them in and just got three thirty second little segments where the characters showed up and then almost immediately ran off again. Most of the rest was still solid enough, but I’m never going to be all that happy with an episode so light on Yoshinoya.

I think what surprised me the most about this episode was how well it was animated given Shaft’s recent… shall we say… production difficulties. This was significantly better animated than most of the rest of the series. I do wish we had gotten a new OP and ED out of it just because Shaft always does a really good job on those, but I suppose that I’ll survive. I could also just be misremembering, but most of the background music was new as well, so it’s nice to see them going the extra mile here after how lackluster Shaft’s been for the last couple seasons.

Preview:

LET MY PEOPLE GO!