Hello all, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Today we’re returning to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, after an episode that essentially served as Mizusaki’s dedicated statement of purpose. That episode opened on one of Eizouken’s most poignant sequences yet, as we learned that Mizusaki’s fascination with the human body was in large part inspired by her love of her grandmother, with her studies of human movement eventually helping to restore her grandmother’s own mobility. The roots of artistic inspiration are varied and personal, and for Mizusaki, conveying the fluid beauty of bodies in motion likely brings her back to those days with her grandmother.

At the same time, Mizusaki is clearly passionate about animation as a tool for self-expression, and eager to announce her existence through cuts intended to dazzle even fellow animators. Anime is one of those rare mediums where an individual artist can sear a blazing signature into the work – like a dazzling guitar solo, an inspired cut of animation reaches up out of a work and grabs you by the throat, demanding you acknowledge the passion and talent of its creator.

This, unfortunately, is all just bad news to Kanamori. She just wants to ensure the project actually gets finished – and with her lead animator rambling about animation for animation’s sake while her director dithers and refuses to delegate, that’s currently not looking too likely. With the fate of their giant robot anime hanging in the balance, let’s return to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Episode 8

Oh damn, looks like we’re jumping straight to the festival. We open on a lovely establishing shot of their club building from the riverside, with their “greatest windmill” this time given a sense of presence through its rippling reflection on the water

Because Mizusaki was late on the animation, they’re going to have to do the voiceovers live at the festival screening. An excellent dramatic compromise there, one that will hopefully promote the most possible chaos when the giant robot club president starts feeling it

All of this show’s backgrounds are so brimming with details. This mid-distance shot sees the team of four pressed into the middle of the frame by all of the recording equipment and shelves around them, which when combined with the single light of the computer screen, strongly conveys that unique sense of quiet intimacy you feel when working on a project late into the night

Asakusa is actually developing into a real director! Wonderful to see her giving such precise critiques of the sound design, after she was so intimidated during the background art meeting last episode

“If we use the music from Cut 24, we can create a motif linking the different scenes.” Holy shit, she’s leveled up so much. This single thought implies Asakusa has shifted from imagining their production as a collection of discreet scenes to imagining it as one collective organism, where balance and symmetry across the whole results in a satisfying, cohesive experience on a level most audiences won’t even consciously recognize

Another key insight shared by her and Mizusaki: if you cut the music in a key moment, you’ll force the audience to pay that much more attention to everything else that is happening. Cutting the music from an important moment results in something like a dramatic “gasp,” where the sound holds its breath while the animation takes center stage

Well shit. A project fell through for Mizusaki’s parents, so it turns out they’ll be visiting the cultural festival. Hopefully they see all the work she’s put in, and finally choose to respect her passions?

Her parents’ acknowledgment that they haven’t been present in her life is punctuated by her mother’s trip to her room, where she sees Mizusaki has left a dummy in her bed

The team share predawn instant ramen outside the club house. Eizouken very effortlessly pulls off some of the most convincing, tangibly felt slice of life sequences in the genre. You never get the sense their stories are taking place on a soundstage or sitcom set, like many slice of lifes can often feel – instead, like most of the best shows in the genre, their adventures take place in a specific, lived-in world, and their stories are grounded in the context of whatever else is going on in their lives

Granted, some shows aren’t actually trying to create a sense of “lived reality,” even as slice of lifes – they might intentionally be presenting a very sanitized, enclosed fantasy, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Kanamori’s description of Mizusaki’s importance is amazing: “we’re using you, along with air conditioning, to make people pay attention to the anime.” At least she gives her top billing over Air Conditioning

“We’re going to win over the people who came for Mizusaki with the anime’s quality. Which we can’t do if they won’t show up.” One of the weird truths of commercial artistry is that you often have to “trick” audiences into watching things they’ll like, but don’t know they’ll like. The average person is pretty happy to mostly consume art that is largely equivalent to art they’ve enjoyed in the past; to expand their palette, and reveal they have interests beyond even the ones they know about, you must often lure them with promises of the familiar

It’s a truth people are more often willing to admit when it comes to food. Most people would agree that McDonald’s is not the height of culinary achievement, but rather the lowest common denominator – but when it comes to something like film, lots of people assume the lowest common denominator is also the greatest art available, because it’s what they already like

Gorgeous shot of the sunrise, as Mizusaki decides the time for hiding has passed

That almost surf-rock song lead that opens Eizouken’s Greatest World sequences is now being applied to the opening of the festival. As Asakusa said, musical motifs are key!

“My family situation can suck it!” describes a whole lot of stories

Why is Mizusaki dressed as a manta ray. How does that relate to their production in any way

The robot club actually come through at last, as their rockets finally grab the crowd’s attention. This is one of the harshest realities of art: no matter how great your work is, your audience will likely be dictated more by your promotional efforts than anything else

Wonderful scene of the goddamn air conditioning club getting hustled by Kanamori. The sequence is framed like a dramatic showdown from Giant Robo or something, complete with a club president bearing a retro hairstyle and those classic full-black shades

The leadup to the screening is in fact full of classic giant robot beats, like the robot club here concealing Mizusaki with their own costumes, and saying they’ll gladly lay down their lives for the sake of the screening. Everyone loves a good “you go on ahead, I’ll hold them off here”

I love how in this sequence of Mizusaki running, her windmilling arms keep poking out of and then retreating inside the silly robot costume. Nice design touch

What a wonderful story this is. Anime focus aside, conceits like the team handing out robot costumes in order to improve Mizusaki’s disguise are just terrific ideas

The two- or three-frame cycles they’re using for the characters’ silly runs are adorable

This is something Yuasa regularly celebrates – the overwhelming reckless abandon of youth, and living your truth no matter what comes after. This shot of Ono with sweat and snot all over his face, breaking into a massive grin, encapsulates a great portion of Yuasa’s work. Both The Tatami Galaxy and The Night is Short, Walk On Girl regularly built up into climaxes precisely like this

It’s lovely to see their early storyboards turned into full, colored animation, but perhaps even more satisfying to hear the yells of the crowd, as they comment on all they’re seeing. When you hear an audience offering comments like “why so much crab” at a dinner scene, you know you’ve got them – laughing at the characters and exploring your worldbuilding choices means they’re already engaged

Mizusaki’s mother notices that the characters in the film hold chopsticks in the same unusual way Mizusaki does. Her daughter’s distinct personality, captured in a film enjoyed by all these people. How can she say no?

Hah, Mizusaki actually includes a tea-tossing cut as well

Mizusaki claimed she wasn’t good at smoke or explosions before, but she’s clearly mastered it now. Terrific effects animation throughout the crab’s rise, along with some excellent layout choices

“That running…” “It’s Tsubame.”

The shot of the foot crashing down is directly followed by a slow, swinging walk cut of the robot straight on. This two-shot sequence actually feels ripped from the very first Unit 01 Eva fight, which also strongly emphasized the weight and flowing motion of the robot through a couple cuts like this

Of course, as her parents acknowledge, a sequence like this is also directly reflective of her own dance experience – she knows precisely how the human body moves, how “walking” is actually a coordinated effort of the whole human form. And in animation, she can celebrate the miracle of that movement – through animation, the beauty of human movement that we so often take for granted can be made novel and thrilling again

“Tsubame is already a fine performer.” Aww, this is killing me. Wonderful to see her parents articulating what so many young artists long to hear

“I realized something, working on it. That to me, life is about working on stuff like this. And there’s nothing I can do about that, now.” This is likely a sentiment shared by virtually all professional artists. There’s very little money in art, at least relative to the work you put in, and your professional position is perpetually unstable, and often guided by market forces more than your own passion. And yet, for all that, you simply could not live any other way – you were born to make art, and if making art means accepting these sacrifices, so be it

Last episode, Mizusaki said she created animation the way she does because even if most people won’t appreciate it, the right people will notice. And here, they have

And Done

Aw jeez, what a wonderful conclusion to Mizusaki’s arc! If the pre-production episodes were essentially “Asakusa’s story” and the first production was “Kanamori’s story,” then this was undoubtedly Mizusaki’s time to shine. Her story actually ended up feeling even more personal than the other two, diving deep into her relationship with her parents and grandmother in order to explore the roots of her motivation, and the ways her methods of self-expression have shifted throughout her life. Seeing her parents directly calling out all the quirks of her animation method served as a perfect validation of her “acting” method – and even if the rest of the crowd weren’t trained to appreciate Mizusaki’s work, they still felt the effect of her grounded, incredibly human choreography. A triumph for Mizusaki specifically, and a rousing ode to the power of animation for animation’s sake.

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