The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

What's It About? 

Midori, Tsubame, and Sayaka are an energetic trio of first-year high school girls who come together in the Eizouken (Video Research Club) to turn their anime dreams into a reality. Midori is nervous to create an anime alone. She meets Tsubame who appears to be a well-to-do girl but she really has artistic dreams of being an animator. Midori's best friend Sayaka has the financial sense to bring the project to fruition and joins the pair on their quest.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is drawn and scripted by Sumito Ōwara. Dark Horse Comics has released the first volume of the maanga in print for $12.99. The manga has inspired a 12-episode television anime by Masaaki Yuasa and Science SARU that premiered on NHK General on January 5 and was streamed by Crunchyroll, as well as a live-action film and accompanying live-action mini-series adaptation that premiered on September 25 and April 5 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Like the anime it inspired, this is not going to be a series that works for everyone. It's busy, packed with both plot and animation information, and the intense use of gray space can make it a little difficult on the eyes. But I'd argue that it needs to be all of those things in order to really capture the twin magics it's trying to portray: the art of animation and the power of imagination.

Even if you aren't interested in animation, anime or otherwise, there's a real sense that this is an ode to the ways that animation and imagination work in tandem. The way that the girls of the Eizouken use one to power the other is probably my favorite aspect of the book. All three have very active imaginations (a necessity in any creative field) and the way that they live what they're trying to create is both very true to life and a statement of the power that putting your games down on paper (for lack of a better term) can have. These aren't just fantasies that they're enacting as they run around the school or the town; they're blueprints for who they want to become. I don't mean that they aspire to live in a broken dystopia or want to be engineers who create propeller skirts, but that they strive to be people who can put their dreams on film and share them with other people.

Which sounds excessively grandiose, although I suspect we've all gone through the “excessively grandiose” phase of teenagerhood. But that seems to be how the girls see themselves as they wholeheartedly embark on making their anime a reality. The scene where Kanamori out-semantics the student council's budget committee is pure gold and does an excellent job of showing how she doesn't just think she's better than them, she knows it and has the brains to pull it off. The way she turns everything around on the school is fairly spectacular, and it shows very nicely that the girls aren't all talk – they're talk and action, which is necessary to get anything done.

For all of its strengths, I do find the art a bit crowded for easy reading (although it honestly may not want to be easy reading), but considering that the anime unfortunately triggered a headache for me, that wasn't entirely unexpected, no matter which version came first. (The manga did, incidentally.) Kanamori is also something of an acquired taste as a character; it really took until that scene with the student council to make me appreciate her. But none of those things are quite enough to make this not worth picking up, especially if you liked the anime.

As a final note, the English-language volume is dedicated to the late Zac Bertschy. That's not important to the story, but it is nice.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

Did the anime of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! really come out this year? Back before to go outside was to risk your health and others'? When Zac was alive to rave over it with his trademark enthusiasm? Forgive the cliche, but it really does feel like years ago that I first met Midori Asakusa, Sayaka Kanamori, and Tsubame Mizusaki and the quirky little club they formed to make the anime called the Eizouken.

If you were one of the people with the good sense to watch the anime adaptation, this manga volume will offer little that's new. Science SARU was extremely faithful in their rendition at least up until the point this volume covers, maintaining the manga plot beat-for-beat while adding the touches that only anime can include: voice acting, music, color, and most of all, motion.

For newcomers or those who prefer manga over anime, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! tells the story of a trio of high school students who form a club to create anime, and discover how both incredibly difficult and rewarding the act of creation can be. It is a love letter to animation and how it can bring boundless imaginations to life. It predicts the often-disappointing nature of collaborating to create a work of art, with all its practicality and compromise. The three main characters are all distinct – in personality, appearance, and priorities and goals – so there is inevitable friction between them as they work together.

One of the story's features is Asakusa's flights of fantasy, inspired by old science fiction anime like Future Boy Conan, but Sumito Ōwara's reimagining of the Japan she inhabits is no less stunning. It's set slightly in the future, where cities have been rebuilt around flowing water channels and greenery, and Japan is a much more ethnically-diverse country. It's gorgeous and optimistic and a tempting vision to hope for.

Still, it's hard to fully recommend this volume to people who have already watched the anime. As I said, the story is nearly identical, and it's a little awkward to read a story about animation without any actual animation. However, since the manga is still ongoing and the anime is concluded, I'll likely keep reading just to see the story continue.