Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 5, 2020

Though you may have been granted a temporary reprieve due to a certain pandemic circling the globe, my hunch is at least some of you who work in office environments may refer to your jobs (and let's just say it's under duress) as a “living hell”. But what if hell were your place of employment? That’s the basic underlying premise of the often wryly amusing Hozuki’s Coolheadedness, an anime which sees its second season being released on Blu- ray almost four years after the first appeared. And vis a vis that debut year, in our Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Complete Collection Blu-ray review*, I joked about how a lot of anime feature setups that have been described as “slice of life”, wherease Hozuki’s Coolheadedness is really a “slice of death”, finding its titular protagonist caught in what amount to “office shenanigans” in hell as part of his afterlife.

* Though it was perhaps misleadingly titled Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Complete Collection, which it may indeed may have been when it was first released, that 2014 Blu-ray release in actuality was only the complete Season One of the series. It appears there have also been a few OVAs produced in the interim between the first and second seasons that don't seem to have made it to Blu-ray yet.

In what might be thought of as the Japanese anime equivalent of some of the conceits in the credit sequences of some American animated fare (notably Matt Groening efforts like The Simpsons and Futurama), some elements of Hozuki’s Coolheadedness’ opening credits change every week, among them utterances from supposed “head honcho in hell” Enma, who in this season’s opening episode asks incredulously, “What? We’re doing this again?”, which may be a cheeky comment about the lag between the series’ two seasons. In that same regard, and perhaps for that same reason, there are attempts to “re-introduce” Hozuki early on in this season, including episodes offering some background about his human life and his early appearances as a demon in hell.

Each episode here is typically divided into two often linked vignettes which feature a huge panoply of supporting characters. This season has a number of whimsical presentations of the “office” atmosphere of hell, but this season really tends to play out as a series of vignettes rather than any real “story” as an organic whole. Some episodes have a certain “meta” aspect, as a late one featuring Hozuki back on Earth in a real office experiencing more or less exactly the kind of “living hell” I referred to above. There's also a Halloween themed episode that kind of felt to me like the flip side of Coco, in terms of how it mixes living and dead characters around the holiday(s) dedicated to spirits.

This season may not have quite the breakneck pace of the first season, either in terms of a certain ADHD sensibility (which this season still does offer, albeit arguably slightly toned down) or in terms of the references the show throws out, which are often accompanied in this version with explanatory English text. That may actually be a plus (I had to repeatedly pause the first season to read everything and take a minute to understand, and there was less of that this time), but on the minus side the English subtitles seem like they were generated by some translation algorithm that might have still been in a beta testing state (that’s a joke). There were numerous instances where there were sentence fragments or odd uses of words where I wasn’t exactly sure what things were supposed to have meant, but that perhaps added to the sometimes surreal ambience of this series as a whole.

It was actually a lot of fun for me to revisit this series after such a long interlude, because it reminded me of how often visually arresting the first season of Hozuki’s Coolheadedness had been. That continues unabated here, with a number of stylistic conceits that can at times mimic things like woodblocks or silk screened artwork. It’s one of the more colorful and kind of visually ebullient anime that I’ve enjoyed recently, and I’m sure those with more of a grounding in Japanese myth and folklore than I personally have will probably only enjoy the visual element even more.

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This season is another near psychedelic trip through the Japanese underworld (with occasional journeys "northward", so to speak) that offers a nice variety of both animation styles as well as an often gorgeously suffused palette. Some of the character work is actually almost on the minimalist side at times, but in the series' more expressive moments, things can erupt into near mandala like assortments of both mythic characters and almost graphical elements. All of that is rendered beautifully throughout this presentation, with excellent suffusion and clear line detail. As I mentioned in the Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Complete Collection Blu-ray review with regard to Enma, there's an at times kind of Hayao Miyazaki-esque look to this anime that might appeal to fans of the beloved icon.

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix in the original Japanese with English subtitles (and English explanatory text at times, so do have the Pause button on your remote handy if you're not a super fast reader). Like the first season, this season features a pretty busy sound mix a lot of the time, with both dialogue and effects kind of spilling over each other. As mentioned above in the main body of the review, at least some of the subtitles didn't make a ton of sense to me, but the general flow of the show is always (more or less) clear, and the track itself is energetic and fluid sounding, without any problems whatsoever.

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animations (1080p; 4:36)


• Clean Closing Animations (1080p; 21:41)


• Japanese Promos (1080p; 2:10)


• Disc Credits features a text page.

All of the above supplements can be found on Disc Three of this three disc set.

Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It was kind of an unexpected pleasure to watch Hozuki's Coolheadedness: Season 2 Complete Collection, because I had frankly forgotten about this show after so many years since the first season came out on Blu-ray. This season didn't quite have the consistent dark comedic undertone that the first season offered, but it's still often wry and it's almost always visually inventive, with some really cool looking stylistic variations that crop up in virtually every episode. This three disc set offers solid technical merits, and while there aren't a ton of supplements, the Clean Closing Animations in particular offer another really interesting array of styles. Recommended.