Keep your hands off Eizouken!
Genre: High School, Drama
Fanservice: Not-particularly-sexualized bathhouse episode with partial nudity
Premise: Three high school girls want to make anime, things don't always go as planned.
Tiny, awkward Asakusa is a bundle of insecurities and social inadequacy. She has trouble staying focused on tasks she's not passionate about, and gets lost in details to the detriment of the overall project. She is the "concept" girl of the group, always ingesting the world around her and reinventing it into fanciful stories, characters, and locations that all serve as inspiration for stories and art. She also serves as the project director, which is extremely difficult for her because her social insecurities make it difficult for her to talk to other people, much less give them direction - which really causes problems when they start to farm out background work to the art club. Without Kanamori to back her, she'd be a complete doormat. However, she IS able to connect with other people of inspired passion on a way that Kanamori can't (and even finds distasteful).
Mizusaki is a pampered rich girl who isn't used to not getting her way. When her parents forbid her from joining the anime club, she bands together with Asakusa and Kanamori to found the "film club" which is actually making anime on the sly. She is fixated on the craft of animation, and can be childish and unreasonable - for example, she wants to animate an entire project by hand on paper and celluloid for the artistic merit rather than use time-saving digital conveniences. Her insistence on artistry and technique for its own sake frequently puts the entire production behind schedule, causing compromises in other areas. However, as long as she's kept in check, she's an excellent artistic compliment to Asakusa, specializing in realistic humanoid and action sequence animation that Asakusa typically has trouble with.
Kanamori is a tall, lanky, toothy girl with an avaricious streak a mile wide, and serves as the group's "producer" role. She sees the passion of her two friends as a vehicle to financial gain, or rather a beast of burden that can be yoked. While she doesn't share the others' passion for anime, she does indulge and play along with their flights of fancy so that they don't become discouraged, and that shows she does really care about them - but she also is the firm voice of reality when she needs to be, and iron fist that focuses and keeps the film club's projects on track - without Kanamori, the two creative girls would go off on wild tangents and never complete anything at all, much less on time. She also has a ruthless streak, and isn't above using blackmail or other underhanded negotiating tactics to get what she wants (and the club needs). This leads to other students treating her as if she's a dangerous or intimidating yakuza member, but really she's the taskmaster and the sensible grounded one of the group.
There's no love interest story to distract from the meat of the plot, thankfully. There's lots of realistic portrayals of immature and awkward teenagers, but also smooth segues into Calvin-and-Hobbes-style flights of imaginative fancy. It also often reminds me of the earlier parts of "The Color of Money," being a story of balancing talent and enthusiasm with real-world demands, business, and street-smarts. Just like Tom Cruise, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Paul Newman were part of a symbiotic relationship that furthered their collective goal, so are these three girls - and without each doing their respective part, the flaws of each would cause the entire house of cards to collapse. That's how this story about three severely flawed and immature girls managed to keep me interested in the exploits of characters I actually found to be rather annoying. Asakusa's meandering aimlessness, Mizusaki's obsession with artistic technique, and Kanamori's complete lack of creative passion each would fatally sink the efforts of the club if not counterbalanced by Asakusa's astonishing creativity, Mizusaki's proficiency and drive, and Kanamori's sharp acumen. This is what makes for truly compelling characters, even if you find them annoying - and keeps you watching to see if they can achieve their dream of making anime... despite the production value looking like it actually WAS produced by high school students.
Also, I think the title is really a mistranslation done by someone who doesn't grasp idioms of both Japanese and English origins. "Keep your hands off" is generally meant to ward off unwanted attention or affection, whereas it's a reference here to a line in the show that actually goes "Keep your hands off the student council," which is meant as a way of communicating how bad an idea it is to interact with them and thus draw attention. So, really, I think a more faithful localization of the title of this series should have been "Don't mess with the film club" (I have no idea why they chose not to translate eizouken in the actual title).
Boy, I sure had a lot to say about an anime I'm about to give a middling rating to, huh.
Verdict: 3/5. An interesting character study that sometimes gets a little bit too in love with itself. Definitely thought provoking, sometimes entertaining. I don't regret having watched it, but I'm not exactly sure I'd tell anyone to go out of their way to watch it either. But it definitely gets bonus points for the funky opening song.
