Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! (the title is excited) is an odd duck of an anime about, oddly enough, the one thing that any anime studio should know pretty well: the process of creating anime! The basic pitch is that a trio of high-school students with a passion for the art of animation form a film club and use it to produce anime and… that’s about it.
Yeah, this is very much a slice of life show. It is held together by three broad story arcs, around the first three productions by the club, but the “story” isn’t so much the point as it is an exploration of the characters and a window into both the fluffy and technical sides of the creative process. Because of that, I’ll be doing this review a little backwards from how I normally do it, starting with commentary on the show and its structure while saving plot summary largely for the end.
So, let’s talk about the three girls who are our main characters. The first is Asakusa. Asakusa is the “dreamer” of the lot, and has her strongest note being creating detailed fictional worlds with information down to the nuts and bolts of how everything works. She also ends up serving as the group’s story-person, but she’s much more a director, concept artist, and worldbuilder than she is the kind of writer who focuses on plot… which is probably a mercy seeing as the animation the club produces is student projects, and wouldn’t exactly have room for detailed stories. Asakusa’s strength is her vision. Her weaknesses are her unreliable creative ability (familiar to anyone who knows creative types, she tends to work more in intense bursts than on a steady schedule) and to a lesser extent her focus on technical details limiting her ability to conceptualize truly “out there” ideas. Asakusa is also fairly shy and conflict-adverse, which can kind of hurt her ability to lead the club.
Then there’s Mizusaki. Mizusaki is an amateur model and the daughter of a famous acting couple, but she’s much more interested in the pure and deliberate motion of animation. As such, she does most of the technical “animation” (creating character movements and the like) but initially has to deal with the fact that her rich family doesn’t necessarily approve of the direction of her interest. She’s also a perfectionist to a fault, who wants to do everything by hand and in high detail, which isn’t precisely compatible with little things like deadlines. She’s friendly, but also quite capable of being bull-headed and stubborn.
Lastly, we have Kanamori. Asakusa’s friend (sort of), Kanamori isn’t exactly interested in animation. She is, however, interested in money, and sees a way to make some through the club. Being a practical type, rather than a creative, Kanamori largely reins in the faults of her compatriots, keeping them on-task and on schedule as much as is humanly possible. Kanamori is also the focus of a lot of the show’s interest and humor, with her cutthroat Yakuza-like demeanor and ruthless underhanded dealings providing more of a plot to what would otherwise be a moderately dry “making of” sort of affair.
Over the course of the three production cycles, the girls learn a lot about how animation is done, and put what they learn into action. That is, honestly, where most of the focus in the show is. For instance, the first arc features an exploration of digital tools to move between key frames, and Kanamori blackmailing Mizusaki into accepting using such shortcuts. During the second arc we have a good deal of focus on sound, and how that’s handled. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to go into detail on this; I’m trying to review Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, I’m not running a con panel on animation production.
Speaking of animation, though, one thing that viewers will almost instantly notice is that Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! Has some very… different animation. I wouldn’t call it bad but it is very different from the typical modern anime style on just about every level. The most notable is sure to be character design, but even how the characters move and how the backgrounds are handled is… different.
This is an anime that takes place in a fairly modern high school. If you look at most other anime in the last 20 years or so that have that common school setting, you’ll find a lot of commonality. There’s an order to how the school looks, in order to communicate that this is a school. There’s an expectation of how the characters look, so that they read as high school students and also look good to most people. This show… doesn’t do that.
Overall, I think that ends up being to the show’s credit. Some properties that try to buck the “generic cuteness” of standard character designs go to far in the opposite direction, and end up displaying ugliness without any real sense or motive to it and without any charm or likability to make up for it. Eldlive was a prime example of this. It spared the main characters, but most of the rest of the world was… not great to look at. Here, however, there’s a bit of an inversion. The main characters are, by in large, not spared. Asakusa is a short little figure with a gravely voice who could easily be mistaken for a boy to the audience. Kanamori is super tall, but in a way that looks kind of ghastly, and she sports stringy hair and this near-perpetual toothy frown (when it’s not a dangerous toothy smile or shouting) that’s very signature but not at all what even a gloomy greedy high school girl in another show would look like. Mizusaki is almost anime-normal, but remember she’s canonically gorgeous and exceptional. Which, in the context of this show, she is.
But at the same time, the way these characters are stylized and exaggerated, while not traditionally “cute” isn’t exactly ugly either. They don’t suck to watch. And the world they inhabit is nonstandard the other way. Their school and their town are both very quirky, with a lot of strange connections and moving parts that inspire Asakusa and give it a lot more local character than “Everytown, Japan” where a lot of these school stories seem to take place.
So, since it’s the main point of the show, let’s talk briefly about the “How anime is made” aspect. Honestly, both the specific character elements regarding the creative process and the technical elements are well-done and interesting. There’s both some degree of investment in what the characters want, and the more relevant interest in the technical side.
When it comes to the character stuff and the creative process, both Asakusa and Mizusaki are almost painfully relatable. If you know creative people, you know those people: Asakusa for getting hung up on specific details in her vision, and Mizusaki for being unwilling to compromise even in the face of great need… but on the more positive side you could say that Asakusa is recognizable for her sense of wonder and Mizusaki for her burning passion for the craft. Both sides exist.
For my part, I know enough about creatives to guess that, with how accurate that feels, the technical parts are probably fairly on-point as well. Assuming that’s true, they’re fairly clearly explained and reasoning is shown.
Now, we might as well talk about those arcs.
The first arc is around founding the Film Club and getting it accepted and budgeted while making anime, which the administration doesn’t exactly like. This results in the production, for an event where Clubs try to show off to the student council, of “Hold that machete tight!”, a short featuring a girl fighting against a tank. It’s brief and silent, but after everyone manages to pull together and finish it (with the digital tricks needed to do so on time), it wows the audience and sees the uncertain future of the “film club” look a little brighter.
In the second arc, the club is commissioned by the Robotics club to make a mecha short for the culture festival. Kanamori has to fight hard to keep everyone on topic, they need to recruit voice actors and bully the sound club into submission (again, largely thanks to Kanamori), and Asakusa has to deal with executing someone else’s vision to their satisfaction as well as hers, even if something as irrational as a giant robot is involved.
The resulting short “Pistol Crab Battle” (due to the robot’s enemy being a crab kaiju with abilities based on the Pistol Shrimp) does its job. What’s more, Mizusaki’s parents, who had been against her pursuing animation, attend the screening and come to accept their daughter’s own unique creative passion after seeing her touches in the final product.
The third arc is “Shibahama UFO Wars”, a much more major and ambitious production from Asakusa’s vision, with the backing of the broader city even against the interests of the school, which Kanamori has a plan (harried though it ends up being) to market at a thinly veiled stand-in for Comiket. Much of the interest in this arc is following the characters, though there are also some good pictures at what happens when there’s a hitch in production. Most critically, a late delivery of excessively melancholy music forces a rewrite to a different ending
All in all, while I don’t think I was that overly enamored of the show when I was first watching it, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! has really grown on me looking at it in retrospect. For slice of life, there’s a lot of motion and interest. For a technical piece, there’s plenty of character and comedy. It’s well-balanced to maintain interest, and I have to say I was pretty glad we got to see the productions that the kids worked so hard on.
All in all, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! is a show I feel is worth an A. It has ambition and a superb execution, and is certainly one that’s worth watching if you’re at all interested in the technical side of animation or in seeing some creative characters go through the process. Even if that doesn’t sound like it would be entirely up your alley… check it out. Unless you really despise Slice of Life, I think you’ll find something here to enjoy.