Hello everyone, and welcome back once more to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll at last be continuing our journey through Masaaki Yuasa’s joyous and beautiful Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, as our crew struggle to complete an alien invasion anime celebrating their unique hometown. Though they’ve endured persistent interference courtesy of their school administration and meddling parents, Kanamori has held this team together, the siren allure of capitalizing on her friends’ talents keeping her dedicated even as the whole world conspires against them.

Meanwhile, her friends aren’t really making things easier for her. Last episode saw them joining Doumeki on a sound-gathering expedition largely because it sounded fun, and Asakusa still doesn’t have a clear overall storyboard, and still hasn’t clarified the designs of the townsfolk’s defenses relative to the alien attackers. I don’t expect this episode to be twenty straight minutes of Kanamori shaking her by the shoulders until a plan falls out, but we’re getting pretty close to that point. With panicked brainstorming and major crunch time on the horizon, let’s get back to Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Episode 11

We open on Mizusaki doing some animation tests for the dance segment. Note the fluid lines of the lightly sketched characters – not only are curved designs like this simply more amenable to movement, but the way the curves flow with their dancing creates a sense of symmetrical motion, as if their limbs are rising and falling like waves

We also get a brief pan of their current production situation. While the opening and ending are looking relatively good, the middle act is still in its early storyboarding stages

In light of that, the background artists are also getting worried, since they can’t start on backgrounds until all the cuts are at least established

“Why are they fighting in the first place?” Oh my god Asakusa. I love you, but I could never work on a project with you – your approach to brainstorming and design is just infuriating

God this show’s palettes are good. Even though it’s all shades of yellow, this shot of the club building is just beautiful

Nice aside of Kanamori realizing their building probably needs some internal dividers, as her arguments with various collaborating clubs start distracting the artists. Having Kanamori’s thought bubble show up directly on the screen is an imperfect solution, but it’s better than the common adaptation solution of “add the character’s aside as a full cut of screen-filling animation and dialogue.” Many shows translate little corner-of-panel gags that way, and it’s almost always a bad idea – gags like that are specifically designed to be perceived as happening concurrently with the active drama, or at least minimally distracting, and so dedicating full seconds of screen time to them tends to undercut their intent

The security club is a goddamn SWAT team

“What even is an enemy?” Goddamnit Asakusa. I know Kanamori rags on her plenty, but I get the feeling she’s still going too easy on her – having your director work only when they’re inspired is a completely untenable professional situation

Hah! And just after I say that, Kanamori catches her in a big yellow net, and starts yelling at her for going on walks when the storyboard isn’t completed. I’m sorry I doubted you, Kanamori

“Don’t work more than you have to, and when you find the time to, you play around.” Their club advisor is actually correct in this – having time to play is crucial for maintaining productivity in your actual work time, and for people in creative fields, it’s often play that offers the inspiration for your next project. Though in this case, Asakusa could probably use a bit more discipline

Asakusa and Mizusaki’s goofy running animation is so good. They don’t have “walk cycles” (and walk cycles don’t work for running towards the camera, anyway), they just wildly slam one foot after the other, with no real rhythm to their movement beyond the energy of youth

“The best work comes from a sense of play.” I don’t think this is a universal truth, but it certainly applies to most creative work, and to Yuasa’s stories in particular. You can always sense the joy of discovery in his works – they are overflowing with visual ideas, each one likely the result of a momentary passion and “play”

Frankly, if I lived in this town, I couldn’t resist the urge to play around and explore it, either. Every visit to these backstreets feels like a gift, as they navigate strange alleys and improbably connected buildings and canals

Very natural banter from the girls, as they riff on the nature of this river, comparing it to both Rome’s system of roads and the river Styx. Allusions like this need not be thematically purposeful; having them bounce ideas and references like this naturally enriches our perception of them as fully realized people, with interests outside of their narrative goals

Oh my god, Asakusa built a security harness for her security bunny. Incredible

The canals eventually lead them to a strange half-submerged car park. Asakusa’s journeys around the town act as a pretty clean metaphor for the initial creative brainstorming process. You follow an idea where it leads, even if it initially doesn’t seem all that promising – because it’s by iterating, and extrapolating on our initial ideas, that we often find something genuinely interesting. You should never be discouraged by the fact that the first ideas that come to you don’t seem like particularly interesting ones; that’s true of all creators, and ultimately, it’s only a small portion of a creator’s ideas that they’ll consider good enough to actually pursue, and turn into a finished project. Before that, you have to be unafraid to follow strange ideas wherever they go, and embrace the spirit of play that their teacher was talking about

Kanamori’s idle mention of an “underwater city” at last helps Asakusa strike gold. Beautiful visions of a city built largely underwater, leading into more inventive uses of Flash animation, as her ideas form a spinning wheel of inspiration

Kanamori immediately dives into the river to save Asakusa when she falls. She may grumble a lot, but she’s a loyal friend, and Asakusa would be kinda useless without her

Aw shit, the Vice Principal’s applying more pressure

“Being alone is scary, but so are other people.” At last, the fated first meeting of Asakusa and Kanamori. And of course, they didn’t find each other organically – as a pair of loners, they were paired together during gym class

Asakusa is a lonely middle schooler, unsurprisingly. She’s a strange kid with profound social anxiety, always off in her own world, and often acting in ways that other people could easily pick on her for

And of course, Kanamori realizes this, but doesn’t really care – she just sees Asakusa as a useful financial partner

“The idea that all children can be friends is magical thinking on the part of educators.” Excellent line by Kanamori. It’s true – lots of people are just not going to get along, but we’re still asked to perform a fantasy of total communal friendship for our teachers. It’s likely that Kanamori started distrusting the views of adults after her family store closed down, and has since then only found ample additional reasons to distrust the conventional wisdom of those in positions of power. No wonder she’s so confident in her arguments with the school administration

Kanamori’s expression at last shifts from some mixture of fatigue and disgust to genuine surprise and curiosity, when Asakusa reveals her notebook of blueprints

Of course, her only actual smile is reserved for the moment she gets paid

Even as she lies sick in bed, Kanamori moves their production forward. She circumvented the school entirely, and made sure their production was making waves in the local media, as a forward-thinking collaboration between the school and town. An excellent plan – it’s clear the school’s board was too fearful of parent complaints to actually negotiate with them fairly, so instead she goes entirely over their heads, and makes it so that it’d be even more embarrassing for the school to actually cancel their project. Kanamori understands that negotiating with people who have no power is useless

Asakusa’s eventual story plan actually incorporates all of the diverse ideas she was brainstorming, like the chiming bells used to communicate, and the underwater city separated from the mainland. Not only did her ideas actually enrich the overall narrative, but it now actually feels more tightly composed as well, with all of the ideas playing off each other naturally

Asakusa manages to add a new character point of view without adding new footage, simply by flipping the perspective and changing the coloration of the kappa perspective. Fantastic

Every element of her ultimate narrative is built out of the fragments of ideas she gained while playing around, from “what is an enemy, really” to the kappas and wind chimes. For aspiring creatives, there’s a clear lesson in this – write down all of your ideas. Authors don’t come up with entire narratives in one wild fit of creative expression – they gather ideas all the time, some big, some small, and eventually start to fit some of those ideas together into what will eventually become fully realized stories. Not every idea will be useful, but every idea is worth writing down!

I appreciate how as we get further into the material that hasn’t been fully developed, the visual design becomes looser, shifting from finished cuts to rough storyboarding doodles

“The theme of this work is coexistence.” It was her strange friendship with Kanamori that inspired her final concept

Aaand it turns out their one music track doesn’t really match anything. Wonderful

And Done

The production continues! We really dug into the roots of storytelling this time, as we shifted from exploring the mechanics of animation or production to instead consider the nature of inspiration, and illustrate how writers can bring seemingly unrelated micro-ideas together in order to create an inspiring, cohesive whole. Asakusa’s carefree methods are kind of agonizing to watch, but her fundamental process felt very familiar, as she took fragments of inspiration from the world around her, and ultimately settled on a concept that didn’t just celebrate her town, but also felt like a tribute to her friendship with Kanamori. And with just the sound design left to resolve, it’s looking like Eizouken will be coming in for a glorious landing in its final episode!

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