Anime Review: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Episode 1

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Genre: Adventure, Comedy

Studio: Science SARU

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Midori Asakusa fell in love with animation at an early age, after discovering anime, and now in school, this passion hasn’t diminished. She spends most of her time drawing the convoluted and ridiculous architecture in the city she lives in, dreaming one day of creating an anime with it as a setting. Along with her money-hungry friend, Sayaka Kanamori, and semi-celebrity but budding animator Tsubame Mizusaki the dream might have a chance of succeeding. But can three girls alone really create an anime?

Keep your hands of Eizouken! is one of the more unusual series of this current anime season – the premise sounds fairly average but it’s clear very early into this first episode that this anime is very different from the typical school slice-of-life shoe we commonly see. The animation is incredibly distinctive, with character designs more reminiscent of older anime style which seems like a deliberate choice. The three girls are all unique and quirky in their own ways and the specific art style works well with this – they feel like real people, not tropes. They’re not traditionally attractive but again, this works well for the medium they sit in. Animation-wise the first episode showed a surprising amount of versatility from the subtly cool opening to the drawings of Midori which transform into a new world around the trio. It really gets across the magic and joy of creation and the enthusiasm of the characters is infectious.

The voice acting in this series is also a particular highlight, particularly in the case of Midori’s actor (debut actress, Sairi Itou) whose description of the animation scenes throughout really adds a huge degree of personality to them. The fantasy element of having the three characters actually taking part in the adventures they’re creating really gets across the magic and how entranced they are with their story-telling and it sweeps the audience along with them. The setting of this series is perhaps one of the most intriguing parts – it’s clearly set somewhat in the future and there’s just enough oddities to really make the city the characters they live in come across as something exciting in its own right. It’s easy to see how Midori could have become inspired by the world she lives in to create her own within her drawings.

The first episode of this series is exciting, vivid and ultimately, a huge love letter to anime itself. There’s something truly magical about Keep your hands of Eizouken! and I’m certainly going to be along for the adventure…