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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Buy | 8 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 8 |
 Ggultra2764
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[series:3785#1552] |
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Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken was a unique little gem of the Winter 2020 anime season focusing on a trio of oddball high school girls who team up to form their own anime club, while maneuvering around students and school faculty to realize visions for their works. The fun of the series comes from the chemistry between our three female leads within Eizouken. Kanamori typically serves as "straight man" to be realistic in the club's efforts and usually snaps Asakusa and Mizusaki back to reality when they get too immersed into envisioning their ideas. The imaginative spots with Asakusa also serve as the creative highlight of the series as they offer a fun and immersive experience for getting into her head with sorting out elements of any animated work she wants to put together. Outside of this, the series also does a believable job with depicting the challenges that the trio get into with creating their works that helps add a bit more dimension to Eizouken. Elements of the creative and collaborative process with putting together an anime short film are believably depicted with Asakusa and Mizusaki starting off rough with developing their works in a believable time frame for upcoming events. Collaboration with other clubs leads to additional complications as Asakusa has to learn to collaborate with others she's not comfortable being around and there is usually miscommunication between the Eizouken Club and other clubs involving elements of animated projects they are putting together. A particular element to the series that may be divisive for some anime fans is Eizouken's animation style. Normal scenes with the characters are depicted to be pretty simple in detail and animation being nothing too out of the ordinary. However during Asakusa's daydreaming, the series gets quite experimental with its animation as it depicts different animation styles that are deceptively more elaborate and fluid with their details and movements compared to the mundane scenes within the series. Also, the characters are drawn with a variety of looks and facial expressions that make them look more diverse and not simply having the same type of facial design with different colors for eye and hair color. For example, compare Mizusaki looking more conventionally beautiful in appearance compared to the plain appearances of Asakusa and Kanamori to catch my drift. If you're a fan of anime creation and have interest in titles that dabble into such realms, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is a fun comedy anime to get in to thanks to the chemistry with its three lead characters, Asakusa's imaginative daydreams, and the believable developments the series gets into with the trio trying to create animated projects. I'd at least implore fans of this realm to check out the series at least once. Last updated Sunday, March 22 2020. Created Sunday, March 22 2020. | ||||||||
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 Stretch
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[series:3785#628] | ||||||
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(Watch+ or Rent-) (All episodes watched): Episode one gave me the impression that this was a fanciful, colorful show about three girls forming their own anime club (even though their school already has one) and brainstorming what an anime they hope to make might look like. Very artistic--it might be that the show's entertainment value is primarily supposed to come from what the viewer sees rather than what the characters say, which is unusual. I sort of worried that maybe there wouldn't be much of a plot at all. As it turned out, the show wasn't as unconventional as it first seemed; these wild flights of fancy don't occur in every episode. It was a little hard to believe that the three girls found just the right equipment they needed sitting unused in a school storage room, but in general a fairly interesting story was moving forward and I was curious what sort of anime they would try to create and how they would do it. We learn a good deal about how anime and manga are composed, which is good since the jokes are not really LOL funny. The mercilessly realistic Sayaka drives Midori and Tsubame to complete a credible short anime in time to apply for club funding from the student council, even though that means cutting a lot of corners. The scene where it is unveiled to skeptical fellow students was genuinely funny. Afterwards the robotics club commissions them to make a short anime and imagination runs wild. We learn something about what producing an anime requires, including cooperation with experts in other fields and getting people to work together smoothly. The characters get a little philosophical in episode seven, pointing out that animation is an art form after all. But I was getting a little tired of all the wishful thinking and fanciful projects and was impatient for something really intriguing to happen. I couldn't help feeling that something was missing here; perhaps a major conflict which would have to be overcome. The girls manage to deliver their finished works just in time, and dodge the suspicion and red tape that the school hierarchy imposes on them, but I never really felt that there was any doubt that that would happen. Maybe we haven't really gotten to know the three girls well enough to care about how things work out for them, though we have gotten a good idea of the contents of their imaginations (or at least Tsubame's). And again I wish this show was a little funnier; after watching one episode I couldn't remember a single LOL joke from it. The hijinks that were required to overcome the school security force in episode eight sort of made me roll my eyes; I could not take them seriously. I guess these girls are so free-spirited that they feel that there might as well be a heavily-armed army occupying their school, or something like that. In the end, Eizouken seemed not funny enough to be a pure comedy but also did not have enough of a plot to be a pure drama. Better to be a good comedy without drama, or a good drama without comedy, than a lukewarm version of both. Last updated Tuesday, March 31 2020. Created Tuesday, January 21 2020. | ||||||||
Other Sites
| Name | URL |
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| Official Japanese Series Web Site | http://eizouken-anime.com/ |
