Shining Hearts: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Shining Hearts: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie Review

Time to go on a low carb diet.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 15, 2013

Spice and Wolf managed to build a lot of its story around Medieval economic theory and ideas of barter and exchange, certainly odd elements for an animated enterprise, so perhaps—perhaps—it should come as no great surprise that Shining Hearts spends an inordinate amount of time in its twelve episodes dealing with—baking bread. That’s right, bread. There are no metaphors here (at least that are readily discernable), and much like Freud’s iconic cigar, this bread is just bread. It’s tasty, popular and comforting, as newly baked bread almost invariably is, but there’s absolutely no subtext involved here, unless it’s that all sorts of cosmic problems can be solved by a nice, toasty loaf. Shining Hearts was originally part of a Sega role playing game franchise, and it’s to the credit of the game that it emphasized positive interactions with characters as it did more familiar tropes like incessant battling. Some of that “kinder, gentler” ethos has been ported over to this anime adaptation, and in fact the series takes several episodes before any serious conflicts, let alone battles, begin to enter the fray. We’re introduced to baker Rick, a sweet young man whose proclivity with bread baking has made him something of a sensation on the island of Windaria (transliterated as Wyndaria in some online sources which refer to the original video game versions). Rick works for three extremely amiable young women, Airy, Amil and Neris, and despite their rather pulchritudinous charms, Shining Hearts stays fairly resolutely away from any hints of being a harem series. Instead, while the women are interested in Rick (and there are a couple of quasi-doubles entendres that may or may not have been intended), the driving force behind the early episodes at least is simply Rick’s skill with dough and ovens. It’s a frankly perplexing way to start an anime, and will no doubt turn off some fans who want more “meat” and less “filler”. Starting with the third episode, though, things take a somewhat more sinister turn when a mysterious stranger washes up on the shores of Windaria, and we finally begin to get more of Rick’s own enigmatic back story.

The really odd thing is, as many other elements as Shining Hearts throws into the mix—pirates, elves, witches, magical portals to other dimensions, giant aliens who look like mutant Godzillas, amnesiac characters with hidden pasts and eventual superpowers—the series really only manages to rise (sorry) above cliché ridden status with its ultra-weird baking focus. Over and over in virtually every episode, some calamity, whether real or imagined, will be solved by a simple sampling of Rick’s bread of happiness. This is truly one of the most peculiar tropes in any recent anime, but for better or worse, it’s probably Shining Hearts’ most singularly memorable element.

The first two episodes in this already fairly brief series rather quickly introduces the focal quartet of Rick, Airy, Neris and Amil, and throws in a few hints that Rick may be a relative newcomer into the mix. There are also passing references to a sort of aged sorceress-baker named Madera, and a couple of forest elves who are supposedly members of a much larger tribe, a tribe which is supposedly threatening in some way, which actually boils down to merely being curt on occasion. But these elements are thrown out in such a willy nilly fashion that it’s hard to make much sense of them, especially when the series kind of wanders aimlessly between segments, with only the—yep, you guessed it—bread angle tying everything together.

Things start to kick into somewhat higher gear toward the end of the second episode, and then much more in the third, when a huge storm augured by a gigantic red moon devastates Wistaria. In the storm’s wake, a comatose girl is found on the beach. She turns out to be named Kaguya, and the island’s doctor slowly nurses her back to health, though he can’t help her recover her memories. At this point, it becomes clear that somehow, someway Rick and Kaguya are linked, and a bit more of Rick’s mysterious back story is revealed. At almost the same moment, however, a horde of pirates shows up to muck up the works, evidently intent on capturing Kaguya.

Personally, I almost always think it’s a dicey proposition to base an anime on a video game, and in the case of Shining Hearts, it seems positively peculiar. I frankly have never played the original game version and so am probably manifestly unqualified to voice any kind of meaningful opinion, but from what I have read about, hardly any of the “heart” based storyline has really made it to this anime. There’s certainly a lot of chitchat about emotions binding the characters together, as well as a sort of quasi-philosophical blather that talks about heart power as a sort of ether or force (in a Star Wars sense) permeating Windaria’s environment. Instead, this series seems intent on throwing so many competing ideas, characters and unrealized plot developments at the screen in the hopes that something will stick, that it’s downright perplexing how slow so much of Shining Hearts is.

Shining Hearts does feature a very nice design aesthetic, with some wonderfully realized characters and beautifully lustrous backgrounds. But it often seems like window dressing surrounding the most mundane of everyday objects—namely, bread.

Shining Hearts: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shining Hearts is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1080p. Original game designer Tony Taka also did this series, and the show's look is probably overall the single greatest reason to watch Shining Hearts. Colors vary from bold primaries, to some really gorgeous pastels, especially once the alternate worlds and Rick's past as a swordsman come into play. Some of the purples and teals in this series are really exquisite and pop brilliantly in this high definition presentation. While line detail is sharp and well defined, the series has an odd tendency to look soft some of the time, some of which may in fact be intentional. For example, the big final showdown between Rick and one of his nemeses which fills up a lot of the last two episodes, almost looks out of focus at times, which might be done to differentiate this realm from Windaria. But even on the island, things sometimes don't pop with the same precision, especially when the series deals in some of the seaside environments.

Shining Hearts: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shining Hearts has two lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 options, one in the original Japanese language, and another English dub. As seems to be the case with these tracks, the English track is substantially louder, not only with regard to dialogue, but also music and effects. This show is awfully talky, at least in its early going, and these lossless tracks support that aspect very well. One the middle episodes come along and the pirates and then other battling entities enter the fray, the sonic activity picks up quite a bit, and while these tracks don't even offer huge stereo separation, things sound clear and clean and never overly crowded. Fidelity is excellent and when considering the series as a whole, dynamic range is wide.

Shining Hearts: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

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


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


• Le Coeur Travelogue is a bunch of brief featurettes called "Bonus Theater" with chibi versions of the characters engaging in various adventures.

  Part 1 (1080p; 2:41)

  Part 2 (1080p; 3:17)

  Part 3 (1080p; 2:30)

  Part 4 (1080p; 3:53)

  Part 5 (1080p; 2:40)

  Part 6 (1080p; 2:05)

• Expressing My Heart—Shining Hearts Picture Dramas focus on various characters in the anime, each of whom share stories or reveal secrets about themselves. All of them of course begin by thanking everyone for the gift of such good bread.

  Amil (1080p; 3:21)

  Neris (1080p; 3:48)

  Airy (1080p; 4:07)

  Xioamei (1080p; 3:48)

  Rouna (1080p; 4:13)

  Kaguya (1080p; 5:06)

Shining Hearts: Complete Collection Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

While there are some interesting enough characters in Shining Hearts, the series is incredibly slow going, especially in the opening few episodes. Things do tend to perk up once Kaguya shows up, but even then information is doled out in dribs and drabs, and a lot of the series seems to be nothing more than padding. The weirdest element—the almost fetishistic focus on bread—is in fact the one thing that most people are going to remember about Shining Hearts. Fans of the role playing game may well want to check this out in any case, as the animation is quite beautiful.