6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Misaki Ayuzawa has enough problems being the first female student council president of the formerly all-male Seika High School. So when cool, aloof and oh-so-handsome Usui Takumi discovers that she's also a waitress at a local maid café by night, things are going to get very interesting, very quickly! Toss in an organized crime cartel, a handful of extremely annoying transfer students and the inevitable trip to the hot springs and everyone is bound to end up in hot water one way or another. But Misaki isn't going to let any of that stop her from maintaining order in the classroom and taking orders in the tea room. It's a triple serving of romance, comedy, and school house drama, with a dash of danger for flavor. And it's all served with a smile in Maid Sama! With a new English dub featuring Monica Rial as Misaki and David Matranga as Usui!
Starring: Ayumi Fujimura, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Kazuyoshi Shiibashi, Kana Hanazawa, Yû KobayashiAnime | 100% |
Foreign | 95% |
Comedy | 28% |
Romance | 24% |
Comic book | 24% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Three-disc set (3 BDs)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Is cosplay simply a practice for those who feel the world is woefully underserved by the single day celebration we call Halloween? Adherents of cosplay are frequently the butt of jokes coming from those who feel dressing up like a character from a television show, film, book or some other medium should be relegated to Halloween, but the popularity of cosplay conventions only proves how ubiquitous this relatively recent trend has become. I must confess that not only have I never engaged in such activity (probably not surprising, given my curmudgeonly demographic), I also had no idea prior to watching Maid Sama! that Japan is evidently home to actual cosplay cafes, including so-called maid cafes where, yes, women dress up as maids to serve their “masters” (e.g., paying customers) in shops that are deliberately set up to resemble the interior of a private home. The fetishism of maids is certainly nothing new for anime fans, for buxom, at times just barely dressed, domestic assistants have been a staple of the idiom and its frequent progenitor manga for untold years. Maid Sama! takes this somewhat peculiar fact and attempts to build a probably overstuffed anime out of it, with a young high school girl named Misaki Ayuzawa forced to work in one of the establishments to help pay for school and her family’s life, after her Mom has been left more or less destitute by some bad dealings by her (now missing) husband, Misaki’s father. That alone would probably be enough to wring at least a little content out of a premise, but Maid Sama also presents more traditional shōnen elements in its depiction of Misaki’s school life, where she is one of a minority of female students who have relatively recently matriculated to a formerly all boys’ school.
Maid Sama! is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Many recent anime have exploited a kind of washed out, contrast deficient ambience to delineate flashbacks and the like, but Maid Sama generally looks like it's been boosted in terms of brightness, something that robs the palette of much immediacy and which tends to wash the image with a kind of haze a lot of the time. The animation aesthetic is not overly developed to begin with, and when added to the brightness issue and lack of solid contrast, the result is something that's certainly watchable, but which never really pops in any meaningful way, and which tends to look pretty soft most of the time. (If this weren't of such recent vintage, I'd be prone to say this looks at times more like a relatively good upscale, rather than a bad native high definition transfer.) This tendency is somewhat mitigated when the anime relies more on graphical elements or exploits an overall darker color space (contrast screenshot 5 with screenshot 2).
Maid Sama! features lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mixes in both the original Japanese as well as an English dub. Once again it's the Japanese mix which sounds slightly more vibrant here, with a very incremental but noticeable (to my ears, anyway) uptick in midrange support. Dialogue is very cleanly presented, though the show tends to be pretty noisy at times in both languages. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is relatively wide for a show that really doesn't have huge sound design ambitions to begin with.
The best way to describe Maid Sama! to the general public (as well as discerning otaku) is to compare it to a kind of midlevel romantic comedy, something that, say, doesn't quite have the finesse and hilarity of a When Harry Met Sally..., but which provides a generally consistent amount of gentle humor and decent characters. While there's nothing very innovative or ultimately even very memorable about Maid Sama!, there's also nothing outrageously horrible about it, either. Even fans or those who like romantic comedies may want to peruse the screenshots before plunking down their hard earned cash.
甘城ブリリアントパーク
2014-2015
2008
2014
Chuunibyou Demo Koi ga Shitai! | 中二病でも恋がしたい! | Collector's Edition
2012-2013
けいおん!!
2010
Classics
2006
言の葉の庭 / Koto no Ha no Niwa
2013
Season 3
2012
2012-2013
D-Fragments! | ディーふらぐ! / Diifuragu!
2014
2013
2008-2009
中二病でも恋がしたい! 戀 / Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren
2014
Classics
2001
2012
2012
Season 2
2007
2022
Essentials
2015
2010