Reviews

Mar 23, 2020
Eizouken is a blast of 100% DIY, punk rock energy in anime form. Once the first notes of “Easy Breezy” play, you know you’re in for something genuinely different, and things just get better from there. The three high school girls of Eizouken, determined to make anime at any cost, embody in every line of their animated existence an irrepressible energy that can’t help but translate into an emotionally moving and compulsively watchable journey for anyone willing to jump on board for the crazy ride.

And a wild ride exactly what you get. While Eizouken doesn’t wave away the details that go into making animation, it’s not too concerned with the day-to-day operations (unlike the exemplary series Shirobako). Instead, Eizouken is more focused on the intense drive to create, and the frustrations that inevitably arise when irrepressible imagination confronts implacable reality. Luckily, a lot of Machiavellian scheming and some old-fashioned blunt coercion on the part of Kanamori Sayaka, who takes the part of the team’s producer, keeps things careening along towards their goals.

Meanwhile, on the fully unhinged side, we have Asakusa Midori, the character who’s really the driving force behind the whole crazy anime project. She regularly pulls ideas out of her notebooks and engages her friends in absolutely joyful flights through imagined landscapes, improvising wildly along the way. As these fantasies unfold, the focus is on how all three girls contribute to create a shared, vibrant, and cohesive world. Technical problems are solved (or cleverly “explained” away), and everyone has a role in getting to the “end” until it all starts up again the next day.

While Asakusa’s imagined world is lovely, and highly reminiscent of Miyazaki Hayao’s sketches, the actual world of the characters is just as compelling in its own way. Canals run through apartment complexes, the high school’s faculty office room is an abandoned swimming pool, and the city in which our characters run riot exists as a chaotic warren of narrow passages, secret escape routes, barely stable architecture, and tantalizing vistas of a semi-drowned metropolis. It’s our world in a way, but beautifully transformed. It teases familiarity while always reminding us that something’s just not quite right. Mostly, it makes me want to go exploring. It doesn’t even matter if I never figure out the mysteries of Eizouken’s world; isn’t it enough to just visit and maybe make some new friends?

Preferably, it’d be nice to make the acquaintance of Asakusa Midori, the impossibly electric creative talent; Kanamori Sayaka, Asakusa’s affectionately cynical and practical-minded best friend; and Mizusaki Tsubame, who’s determined to become an animator despite her rich parents’ objections. The show wastes little time on polite introductions, overly complex back stories, or endless complications based on contrived misunderstandings or the dreaded “character who’s so shy it takes 12 episodes to get her to smile” trope.

Instead, we get three unique individuals who just decide to say “what the hell” and see what happens. Interpersonal conflicts and developments that occur develop naturally as they get to know each other, but they keep focused on the main thing: they are absolutely 100% making anime. For real. And it’s that dedication to the joy of shared creation, the excitement of pursuing a dream sheerly because it makes you feel so damn alive, that elevates these three girls far above the grim archetypes that haunt most seasonal anime productions. They are all, in their own ways, fully alive.

Eizouken is a love story dedicated to animation as an expressive medium and as a source of emotional connection, drawn with such energy and blissful abandon that one only encounters work of this quality every few years at best. While an anime series that’s about making anime might not seem appealing to everyone, this show is really just about the thrill of new friends and the incomparable exhilaration of experiencing a new creation just as it takes flight. Shows like this remind me why I love anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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