English Dub Review: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Season One

Overview:

High school can be hard enough when you can’t find your people. Thankfully for Midori Asakusa, a girl who has more friends within the margins of her sketchbook than she does in real life, finds common ground among Sayaka Kanamori and Tsubame Mizusaki. Midori, Sayaka, and Tsubame are united through their love for art, animation, and their unique talents put them in a special position where their creative dreams can become reality. Midori, Sayaka, and Tsubame quickly learn that becoming the next anime auteurs isn’t going to be easy, but that’s just part of the fun.

Our Take:

“Sakuga” is a term that simply translates to “working drawing” or “animation,” but it’s become the shorthand term for those eye-popping visual displays in anime that make the medium feel unlike anything else. Masaaki Yuasa is a master of sakuga whose varied works include Ping Pong The Animation, Devilman Crybaby, The Tatami Galaxy, Kaiba, and a multitude of fantastical films like Lu Over The Wall, Inu-Oh, and Ride Your Wave. Yuasa’s oeuvre works incredibly hard to not just be style over substance and deep emotions are at the core of his most successful works. In animation, “Concept is everything,” insists Midori Asakusa. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! stays true to that pledge. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is a deceptively simple 12-episode anime about three teenage girls who form an anime club with the grand goal to create their own piece of animation. In telling this story, Yuasa creates a staggering monument to sakuga, mundanity, and everything in between that highlights the true power of animation.

This is not the first anime series that’s about the act of anime production. Other anime like Shirobako are out there, but Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is different from past anime through how it meticulously recreates the unadulterated joy that audiences experience when they’re wowed by animation for the first time. Eizouken! strives–and succeeds–to repeatedly recreate that high in every single episode through a level of visual magic that’s only possible by someone like Masaaki Yuasa who’s toiled away in animation for more than two decades and painfully understands the detailed intricacies of storyboards and the endless grunt work that’s necessary to create animated beauty. 

There’s a stunning moment in Eizouken!’s first episode that recreates the detailed visuals from Hayao Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan that’s a sight to behold and a visual marvel that recontextualizes this iconic animated moment for a modern generation. It’s a powerful ode to an animated classic that’s no doubt inspired Yuasa just as much as it has its trio of intrepid beginner animators. It’s impossible to not picture Yuasa in the place of each of Eizouken!’s wide-eyed protagonists, but the same is true for every single audience member. We are all those inspired, overwhelmed viewers. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! distills anime’s impossible feeling through several meta layers of animated bliss. 

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! has been out for three years in Japan and many fans had given up hope that it’d ever receive an English dub. Fortunately, English Eizouken! was well worth the wait and Monica Rial (Midori), Olivia Swasey (Sasaki), and Jessica Boone (Tsubame) all shine in the anime’s central roles. There’s such delicate, loving direction from Kyle Colby Jones here that makes it clear that Eizouken! is a passion project for everyone involved and not just a compulsory feature in this Blu-Ray release. Eizouken! is full of many cultural intricacies and this dub never short-changes those moments or loses anything in translation. Audiences can confidently watch Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and know that they’re getting the full experience that rivals that of the original.

In many respects, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! feels like the passionate culmination of Yuasa’s career and it would have been a fitting note for him to go out on. All of his trademark tricks, as well as an important degree of restraint that’s only learned after decades of honing one’s craft, are on display here. There’s the patience and joy of Ping Pong the Animation and Kaiba as well as the visceral, messy emotions that fuel Devilman Crybaby and Tokyo Sinks 2020. Each episode tackles a different facet of animation and production that turns imagination and ambition into the various “monsters of the week” that tax this trio of creators. It’s cathartic to watch these teenagers realize their passion, but Eizouken! also celebrates the joys of proud parents who watch their children artistically flourish and chase their dreams, whether it’s been with their help or not. 

Midori, Sayaka, and Tsubame oscillate between the real world and the animated universes of their own creation. They invade their own art and challenge the limits of creation in a bold, lawless fashion that feels like vintage Looney Tunes. This exciting chaos grows even stronger once Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! starts to incorporate mixed media and art styles, like watercolor and sketchwork, into its repertoire. This experimentation is dazzling to watch, but it never feels gratuitous. Variety is in service of the joys of creation, inspiration, and to truly lose oneself in passion. The opening theme song to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, “Easy Breezy,” has received a lot of praise and is the ultimate earworm. Not only is it a catchy song, but it’s an excellent distillation of the series’ playful, unabashed enthusiasm that’s an important reminder at the start of each episode. Skipping this opening is sacrilegious.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! features complicated animated showcases, but it’s also full of smaller visual details that are just as evocative. The anime dwells on close-ups of hand calluses and scuff marks, for no other reason than to highlight the battle scars of the creative process. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! doesn’t forget that art takes a physical toll on someone as much as it is a mental pursuit. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! will undoubtedly resonate more with anyone who’s ever created something creative and poured their heart and soul into it. That being said, the message in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is universal enough that it will connect with absolutely everyone. It presents anime and the act of creative expression to be as essential as oxygen, but to Midori, Sayaka, Tsubame–and yes, even Masaaki Yuasa himself–it truly is. That feeling permeates through every frame of Eizouken! and there’s no better love letter to this medium’s endless freedom.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is mandatory viewing for anyone who’s ever been moderately interested in the art of animation, but also just for anyone who’s ever bonded with strangers through pure passion. Some may find the technically-small-scale storytelling in Eizouken! uninteresting, but the power of this anime is that a night of revised storyboards can be akin to a trip to outer space or a robot apocalypse. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! transforms the mundane into the magical and it’s low-key one of the strongest and most important anime of the decade and thankfully this exceptional, loving English dub will help it reach the widest audience possible. Who knows who Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! will go on to inspire, just like Future Boy Conan before them.