Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Maid-Sama!: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 18, 2015

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.

It’s that school life which is front and center as Maid Sama! opens, with quick superimposed titles that introduce various characters and let the viewer know what the characters’ places in the story are. Misaki it turns out is the first female Student Body President at Seika High School, an institution which only relatively recently went co-ed. The boys who have so long considered Seika High a kind of glorified frat house now have to contend not just with the new female population in general, but with Misaki herself. Misaki does not suffer fools (by which is meant most males) gladly, and she is shown in the anime’s first few minutes to be something of a martinet, running around the school screeching orders at various people in order (to be fair) to keep the place looking nice and the social contract functioning more or less organically.

That approach tends to make Misaki a kind of unlikable character, something that the series attempts to correct, somewhat at least, with a more sympathetic portrayal of the girl once she finally gets home and it’s revealed that her Mom is in dire straits and that Misaki is pretty much supporting the family herself at the maid cafe. But here Maid Sama! makes another rather odd decision. Misaki is totally freaked out that someone from her high school might see her in her job, something that would jeopardize her standing as the moral force to be reckoned with at her school, but within seconds Misaki is seen first by a supposed nemesis named Takumi Usui, the preternatural BMOC at school, and then later by even more kids. That at least gives the show the opportunity to explore the somewhat odd relationship between Misaki and Takumi, an element that tends to inform much of the rest of this collection, but it also means there’s not much suspense left after this opening gambit, and that proves to be something of a problem in that the series continues on for many more episodes.

While there are shades of a tsundere like demeanor in Misaki, Maid Sama! never really goes the distance in that regard, and instead fairly early on starts to detail first a grudging admiration and then (of course) much more than that between Misaki and Takumi. This is one of those middling anime that at least has the benefit of a weird basic premise, but which then tends to kind of coast on the admitted affability of its lead characters without ever really doing very much with them.

There’s probably little doubt that Maid Sama is a so-called shōjo entry designed to appeal to younger females, a demographic which will probably be pleased with the story’s romantic angle and not overly concerned that there’s not much else really going on, despite the kind of frenetic underpinnings of any given episode. Maid Sama! is undemanding fare, but it’s not objectionable in any major way and provides a baseline of humor along with its generally interesting characters.

Maid-Sama!: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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!: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Maid-Sama!: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Clean Opening Animation (1080p; 1:32)


• Clean Closing Animations (1080p; 1:32, 1:32 and 1:32)

Listed on the back cover as an official supplement, but included here as the last of the "episodes" on the Main Menu is:

• Omake Dayo Short (1080p; 14:22)

Maid-Sama!: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.