Review for Maid Sama Part 1

Introduction

This is somewhat atypical for UK anime. We’re getting a show that is five years old. Usually the aim of most distributors is to go for the latest thing, which in the case of anime’s life-cycle of broadcast, license, dub, and release, usually means shows that are between 12 and 24 months old. At the other end, the last few years have seen something of a retro movement springing up with companies looking for classic shows that we might have missed out on originally, or relicensing shows to give them a new life on Blu-ray, shows which are ten, fifteen, even twenty years old. But usually there is no centre ground, new-ish shows that we miss out on usually stay that way, and I have a long list (getting longer) of shows like Tegami Bachi, Book of Bantorra, Natsu no Arashi, Fairy Musketeers, and Saki that I’d love to own but have slipped through the UK, or in some cases US and Australian cracks as well. Then again, Maid Sama is a something of an odd case, as while it was broadcast in 2010, and released as a subtitle only title by Sentai Filmworks in 2011, Sentai went back and created a dub for it in 2014, and it was re-released on DVD, and for the first time on Blu-ray. In the anime life-cycle, that dub is only 12 months old, and it’s that which is coming to the UK courtesy of these DVDs from MVM. It’s going to be released in two parts first, but MVM have already indicated that when it will come to the show’s complete series release in 2016, it will come on Blu-ray as well at that time.


Misaki Ayuzawa is a hard working high school student, the first female student council president in her school’s history, which is understandable given that until recently when it went co-ed, it was a boy’s school, and even now the girls are outnumbered by the boys by five to one. However it was a degree of misandry that motivated her to get elected, so that she could crack down on perverted boys, and protect the girls in her school. It didn’t hurt that the rest of the student council are ineffectual, so even if she has to do most of the hard work, it does mean that she does earn her reputation as a strict disciplinarian, able to turn even the toughest boys to quivering messes.


You’d think that she’d be riding high, but her home life is a lot more difficult, skirting poverty thanks to a father that skipped out on her mother, her, and her sister Suzuna, leaving them saddled with debt. So Misaki works a part time job in a maid cafe, playing the ideal subservient maid to otaku clientele. It’s a personality that is directly opposed to the front that she shows at school, which is why she made sure that the cafe was in the next town over. It was all going so well, until Takumi Usui walked into the shop, a particularly annoying playboy from school who she has marked down as a menace to fawning girls. Now that he knows her secret, her life is about to get a whole lot more difficult, if interesting.


Maid Sama Part 1 offers 14 episodes across 3 DVDs from MVM.

Disc 1
1. Misa is a Maid Sama!
2. Maid Sama at the School Festival
3. What Color is Misaki? Natural Color?
4. Net Idol Aoi

Disc 2
5. First Time Minding the Shop
6. Men and the Ayuzawa Cram School!
7. Enter the Student Council President of Miyabigaoka
8. Misaki Goes to Miyabigaoka
9. Maid Sama Does Momotaro

Disc 3
10. Sakura’s Indie Label Love
11. The Secret of Takumi Usui Approaches
12. Maid Sama and the Sports Festival
13. Idiots and Juveniles and Heroes and...
14. Soutarou Kanou of Class 1-7

Picture

Maid Sama gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer, progressive of course, as I’ve come to expect from modern anime releases in the NTSC format. It’s also another pleasing presentation on disc, clear and sharp throughout, with a minimum of visible compression, and as you might expect from a comedy romance, replete with bright, primary colours, a minimum of digital banding too. The character designs are agreeable if generic, the animation is fluid, but comparatively simplistic, and you get the usual comedy tropes of deformed characters to emphasise jokes. This show also has a fair bit of on screen text, almost like manga sound effects, to explain character motivation and the like, and it’s all translated in the subtitles.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 English and Japanese, with optional subtitles and signs. I went with the original language and the dialogue was clear throughout, the comedy action presented well through the stereo, with some agreeable music supporting the story. It’s fine and unproblematic just as you would expect from an anime release these days. The subtitles are accurately timed, and are free of typographical error, and this is a show with a whole lot of on-screen text to translate, although you won’t need to press pause too often to read it. One slight issue was the final screen caption of episode 10 lingered on until the first lyric of the end theme. As for the dub... 30 seconds was my limit. See if you can bear it for longer!

Extras

The discs present their content with static menus and jacket pictures. Each episode is followed by a translated English credit scroll.

Disc 1 offers trailers for Outbreak Company, Engaged to the Unidentified, The World God Only Knows: Goddesses, and Golden Time.

That’s your lot. Surprisingly there aren’t even textless credits with this release.

Conclusion

That was surprisingly more fun than I expected from an anime romantic comedy. The main reason is that it eschews the modern format of sticking a milksop male in the midst of a harem of females conforming to the current trend in moe/tsundere stereotypes, and instead offers something a little more traditional and conventional. It’s a show about the potential romantic relationship between two, and only two people. Shocking! I’m being facetious of course, and anime does do monogamy in its rom-coms quite often, most notably Toradora. Maid Sama is no Toradora, but it is still fun, and I have to admit that I was looking forward to each new episode of Maid Sama mayhem in a way that I haven’t in quite some time. I was getting the same kind of feeling that I did the first time I watched Love Hina all those years ago, although Love Hina hasn’t dated all too well, and I hope that isn’t a precedent for Maid Sama.


But yes, two people. There’s the Maid Sama in question, Seika High School’s Student Council President, Misaki Ayuzawa, and her eternal bugbear Takumi Usui. Misaki is the protagonist of the show, a girl who burns the candle at both ends. Her family being abandoned by her father may have made her distrustful of males, but going to a boys’ school recently turned co-ed (because it was affordable) seals the deal on her opinion of men. She wants the school to be a nice environment for girls, which isn’t easy to accomplish in a school mostly full of hormonal males. It’s that which causes her to run for and become Student Council President, so that she can lay down some law and protect her fellow sisters. It doesn’t hurt that the mostly male student council is incompetent, but it does mean that she does the burden of the work. On top of that, to help her family make ends meet, she has that part time job in a maid cafe, where she has to show a diametrically opposite side of her normally rambunctious (and occasionally violent) personality, that of a subservient and fawning maid. Naturally no one from school must know about the job, which causes all manner of mayhem when Usui finds out.


Misaki has Usui pegged as a player; as he gets a whole lot of female attention in school, only to ‘callously’ shoot the confessing girls down. She thinks he’s merely toying with their affections when the truth is that he’s just not interested. He does become interested in Misaki when he finds out her secret, but rather than blab it to the school, he keeps it quiet, although she thinks he’s doing so just to torment her. That he has the kind of personality that teases people, the kind of boy who’d pull a girl’s pigtails just to show he likes her, confuses the issue. In this case, he becomes a regular at the cafe just to get Misaki’s personal service.


Of course it would be a pretty thin anime with just two characters, but there is a broad supporting cast as well. Misaki’s home life includes her mother, and her frugal sister (she loves entering prize draws), while at school her best friends are the outgoing Sakura, and the quieter Shizuko. The student council is mostly anonymous, except for poor Yukimura, who gets utterly confused by Usui’s behaviour, and starts on a path of cross-dressing as a result. There’s more personality in Misaki’s co-workers at the cafe, particularly her boss Satsuki, and the confrontational Honoka. Then there are the three idiots, three delinquent boys who Misaki confronted in school, and then who looked to turn into bullies when they discovered her maid secret, only to be shown the error of their ways when Usui did his knight in shining armour thing (something he does often in this series). Thereafter they become fans of Misaki as maid, and spend even more time at the cafe than Usui, saving up their hard earned yen for the special service, only to be disappointed each time.


The series plays heavily on the comedy side of the rom-com in Part 1, with Misaki and Usui’s relationship occasionally sparking when the two are usually arguing or annoying each other, and one of them says or does something that gives them pause to contemplate, or just blush. It’s very much the ‘will they won’t they’ phase of the relationship as they slowly edge closer to becoming a couple. Otherwise the show splits its mostly episodic stories between school and the cafe, with episodes focussing on Misaki’s student council duties, working the school festivals, dealing with boys, trying to make the school more amenable to girls, and episodes dealing with the cafe theme days, worrisome customers, a cross-dressing relative of the manager and so on.


There are a couple of two part stories, with one involving the student council president of a nearby elite school, who has his eyes on Misaki as a potential recruit to his school, even offering her a scholarship, but it turns out that he has ulterior motives, an obnoxious enough villain for Usui to do his knight thing again. This half of the series also ends on a cliff-hanger, as a misogynist student of Seika wants to undo Misaki’s plans to get more girl students, and he goes about this by first hypnotising Misaki into embarrassing herself, and when that fails, he hypnotises her into hating Usui.


If Maid Sama has a weakness at this point, it really is the character of Usui, which is pretty thin and single note. There’s not a lot to him other than the occasional heroic act, and the penchant for teasing and being a bit of a jerk. You’d think that the Secret of Takumi Usui episode would fill in some gaps, but that episode is even more of a tease than the character himself. Not that it matters at this point, but if the relationship is to develop, the show really needs to flesh Usui out.


At this point in the show, Maid Sama is a whole lot of fun, with likeable characters, and a story set-up which is perfect for the comedy. It makes the most of that set-up too, delivering gags that had me laughing out loud more often than not, where most anime comedies that I review never get me further than the odd smirk, the rare knowing chuckle. I really do appreciate shows that get me guffawing, and Maid Sama is definitely one.