Di Gi Charat Ohanami Special

I don't have any history with DGC besides visually recognizing the characters from when I was little. I recently started watching it just out of curiosity, and it's a fine show: beautiful aesthetics, immaculate character designs, and an OST with several highlights. Its shorter format (3 to 11 minutes episodes) helps keeping it passable. The humor is hit-or-miss, the gags are very 90's. Overall, a lot of the experience is aesthetically pleasing if at times somewhat forgettable. A decent 6 or 7 for me.

But I specifically came to write about Ohanami Special, because I was as amazed for it as I was that no one ... had written about it yet. I'm going to keep it short: episodes 1, 3 and 4 are nice additions to the DGC filmography. If you enjoyed the show so far, you will get more of it.

But it's episode 2 why I decided to write my second ever review in MAL. It's the actual Ohanami episode. The girls go to the common spring activity of sakura viewing: they settle under a tree and wait for the rest of their friends to come. This is definitely the most different DGC ever gets: there are a couple of gags, which primarily are there as a way to keep it feeling coherent as a DGC episode, but they also serve to punctuate the still imagery that floods its 11-minute runtime of the characters just waiting, contemplating, relaxing and slowly falling asleep. The direction clearly was very focused on evoking a sense of the mundane and of staying on the presentt. (If you have watched/read Yokohama Kaidashi, it is THAT feeling).

At the ended, the episode closes with the ending song Sakura Sakura, alongside beautiful still images of the girls sleeping.

I didn't expect DGC to make me cry, but here we are.