Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! vol. 1

This series received a very well-liked anime adaptation last year.  I haven’t got around to watching it yet because reading comics and playing videogames still monopolize the majority of my time.  (Though anyone who has a Netflix subscription should check out “Dorohedoro” if they haven’t already.)  If you’re familiar with how I operate, then it shouldn’t surprise you to know that I was planning on picking up the manga it was based on after Dark Horse announced that they would be releasing it over here.  So while I can’t comment on how the manga compares to the anime, I can say that this first volume is very good on its own terms.

So you should all go out and buy a copy (or two) of it RIGHT NOW to ensure that the entire series is released over here!

I will say that not watching the anime for “Eizouken” does feel like my loss at this point.  That’s due in part because this is a series all about what it takes to make an anime, as dramatized through the efforts of three schoolgirls.  We’re introduced to two of them right off the bat with imaginative image board artist Asakusa trying to convince her friend, tight-fisted money manager Kanamori, to accompany her to the school’s anime club.  Asakusa wants to make anime herself and she figures seeing what the club has to offer will be a good start.  Though they do make it to the club, the screening is interrupted by a girl who’s being chased by some shady guys.  This girl is Mizusaki, a popular influencer who also attends school there, and she borrows Asakusa’s swamp hat in an effort to escape them.

Long story short, the three of them wind up together in a laundry room and find out that Mizusaki has also wanted to make anime.  Even better is that she’s good with characters, which complements Asakusa’s ability to draw backgrounds.  Kanamori is even interested in this because she figures that Mizusaki’s popularity can be leveraged to help make their anime a profitable investment.  Thus, Eizouken — The Moving Pictures Club — is born!  Now, they just have to decide on what kind of anime they want to make and then make it.

Which is a task that’s easier said than done when you consider that the girls’ enthusiasm and ambition greatly outstrip the resources available to them.  Mangaka Sumito Oowara isn’t here to tell a tale of how the anime version of “The Room” gets made, however.  He just wants to show the readers what’s necessary for the medium within the scale and setting of a high school club.  So most of the story focuses around our three protagonists doing mundane things at first like cleaning up their warehouse deathtrap of a club room, securing an animation board, actually drawing the anime, compromising their vision when they realize they’re running out of time, and dealing with the student council and their budgeting issues.

This may sound like relatively dry stuff, but Oowara invests it all with some real comic energy courtesy of his leads.  The girls all have distinct personalities that play off each other well.  Asakusa and Mizusaki are the idea people whose boundless creativity is only capable of being reined in and directed by Kanamori.  While the latter may be in this for the money, she also happens to be really good at managing these two and getting them to do some actual work.  Asakusa may have a bigger imagination than Mizusaki, but the rich girl has all of the social graces that the other two don’t as well as access to some really swanky furniture.  Even though there’s a prickliness to some of their interactions, it feels understandable in the context of what they’re doing.  It’s so that each of the girls’ personalities feels like they complement each other and they feel like a genuine team here.

The other thing that Oowara does to liven things up is to visualize Asakusa’s boundless imagination.  When I said earlier that it was a failing on my part that I hadn’t seen the anime yet, I was referring to this as well.  Asakusa’s visualization of the worlds she draws is rendered as if it’s actually real.  So when she’s showing off her image boards to Mizusaki for the first time, we see all three girls flying through a massive Miyazaki-esque cityscape in a spherical fly-winged flying machine.  It’s a great visual representation of what’s going on in Asakusa’s head that also serves as a way to communicate the excitement it inspires in Mizusaki and Kanamori.  This is a common motif in the chapters which follow, but what’s even better is when we get to see the girls pull it off in real life in the volume’s final chapter.

As far as I’m concerned this is a great start for this series.  I could nitpick to find some issues people may have with it:  Maybe some will find the girls to be more annoying than energetic.  Maybe you’ll think that their success is down to luck rather than skill or hard work.  Maybe you’ll be put off by Mizusaki’s one-percenter financial perspective.  Maybe you’ll find Kanamori’s “nothing but teeth” mouth to be more disturbing than interesting.  There could be other things, but they all feel irrelevant to me after reading this volume.  Vol. 1 of “Eizouken” is a great tribute to the power of imagination in animation and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

So please, PLEASE buy a copy so that it doesn’t wind up having to go on hiatus after vol. 3!