Welcome all to another week of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Like the Runway de Waratte post, this one is going to be shorter, for very similar reasons. But where “more of the same” for Runway is a disappointment, for Eizouken its just a good time. So lets dive in!
As always, the animation and production of Eizouken is good, but this week I want to focus on something else. I want to focus on the meta aspect of it all, and how Eizouken cleverly uses its premise here. This latest episode actually gives me a perfect example of what I am talking about, ala how it visualize things. We see it when Doukemi, the sound club girl, is modifying the sound waves in time with the actual bell. Or when she is moving the sound waves around, layering and piecing them together. It’s a little choppy of course, it isn’t perfect. But I love the concept behind it and how Eizouken uses its premise and medium to depict it all. This isn’t the first time either, we have seen it throughout the series. This week just gave me a good chance to talk about it.
As far as the actual content of the episode go, it’s not the strongest Eizouken has given us. This week felt primarily like a progress/montage episode which, to be fair, is exactly what it gave us. Walking us through some of the sound gather process, showing us more of Asakusa’s wild idea’s, etc. Slowly but surely marching us towards what will be our season finale in 2 weeks time. Now as I said, none of this was bad. In fact it was quite nice to get some of these character on character moments of them just interacting as a group. Hanging out “outside” of the club and having some fun together. Even managing to bring in a member of the student council for some of the shenanigans. Its only when compared to Eizouken’s previous fantastic episodes that you realize how high the bar has been set.
As far as what did stick out to me this week, there were a few. For instance I enjoyed seeing Mizusaki film herself dancing as preparation for her animation. Once again showing us her focus on more realistic and human movement rather than big setpieces. We also got to see more of Asakusa’s overactive imagination, coming up with new stories and projects on the fly. All based on their current location, showing how you can find inspiration anywhere if you look hard enough. Meanwhile Kanamori is doing her best to rein Asakusa in and get her focused on finishing the project they have on hand right now. It’s a more lighthearted look at the importance of storyboards and how they can affect a production as a whole. Shirobako did something similar, though with a more serious bent towards how it affected their production.
So yeah, all in all, this week was more of the same for Eizouken. But “more of the same” is already a pretty high bar. The fact that I am disappointed that every week isn’t an emotional blowout just goes to show how much Eizouken has accomplished. As I said last week, my only concern at this point is how the series is going to finish. With 2 episodes left and a currently ongoing manga, one has to wonder where it will go. But this episode served to basically setup and lay all the weight down onto this final project for the shopping center. There was a slight focus on money and student troubles of course, maybe imitating issues studios can have with things like the IRS. But for the most part it just made me look forward to the finale to come. I hope you are to.
