I had to go through the panels several times to try and figure out the reading order, something that takes away from what is intended to be a really ambitious and interesting student work! It’s a shame since the visual language of manga and anime is really quite different when it comes to displaying action, timing, etc so there was certainly more sophisticated ways to show off the Eizouken’s student film, it wasn’t an impossible feat by any stretch. It’s unfortunate since the setting is a fascinating visual mixture reminiscent of retrofuturism the editor/translator notes at the end of volume 1 directly tie a lot of inspiration to Hayao Miyazaki’s earlier works and I could certainly see hints of Castle in the Sky and other films in the way both the manga in general and Asukasa specifically visually approach the world.Īnd of course, the animation! It’s hard to really appreciate what Asukasa and Mizusaki are creating without seeing it in motion or to appreciate a scene where Kanamori shows the other two how little they have animated so far when, well, all we the readers see is a few still images anyway! Animation is at the heart of this work and, perhaps ironically or perhaps intentionally, it’s the pages where the Eizouken’s first animation is displayed that the manga paneling becomes really hard to parse. When reading I was struck by the thought that I felt like panels were missing, not because the pages looked strange but because the story wasn’t giving itself enough time to breathe, or really any time! Having downtime in a story is important, and while it is true that this is a bit easier to achieve in an anime than a manga (where the audience has to watch a show at a certain speed, not reading through a book at their own, individual speed), Oowara doesn’t provide a lot of time to let the reader’s eye “rest” to give that much-needed pause. The biggest reason for my preference is the pacing: in the Eizouken manga events happen bang-bang-bang without pause. So that bias is certainly playing a part here, but I do think that the anime adaptation of Eizouken flows better than Sumito Oowara’s original story (Oowara’s recent entanglement with pixiv accounts displaying sexualized art of minors has also made me a bit more cautious in approaching his work and that was also on my mind going into reading this first volume). The anime is certainly a faithful adaptation - I didn’t notice any missed scenes here in the manga and the anime dove whole-heartedly into Asakusa’s crazy, design-inspired daydreams that she ropes Kanamori and Mizusaki into, which is easily the most charming part of the anime.īut one thing I’ve noticed about my own media consumption is that I tend to prefer the version of a story that I come across first, like in cases where I read a manga adaptation of a light novel I tend to be more interested in the manga than I would be if my reading order had been reversed. I, like many folks, first came across Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! from the Studio Science Saru anime adaption earlier this year and that adaptation, an anime about making anime, felt like such a perfect match for the material that I was curious how the original manga would come across in comparison. Her friend Kanamori, tall and unsmiling with a personality like a hardened salaryman manager in the body of a teenaged girl, keeps asking when Asakusa will make an actual anime of her designs but Asakusa says it’s not that easy.īut when the two of them meet a third weirdo to round out their trio, the teenaged model Mizusaki who has had a fascination with movement and animation since childhood, perhaps this club of “moving image studies” (“Eizouken”) can pull off making anime after all! Helen: Asakusa is a bit of a weird teen, easily falling into daydreams that are more vivid than reality, and she’s also a talented designer who draws inspiration from the kooky world around her at Shibahama High School.
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