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Hey! Look who's back! It’s Masaki Yuasa and I tell you what, I’ll shove a pointy stick up my ass and be spit roast by a wealthy cult of bored cannibals if that isn’t a wonderful thing. Whenever director Masaki Yuasa wakes up and decides to make a tv series, I tend to be reminded of why I watch anime which is occasionally necessary after a long chain of godawful isekai. However, Eizouken is a bit different. There are some notable absences from “Hands Of Eizouken” that I consider Yuasa staples. Absent is a truly bizarre art style, the high-concept philosophical and psychological theming and ... his trademark predilection for getting funky with the narrative. It seems to me that there was a deliberate attempt to make “Eizouken” more accessible, and this is the most subdued I think I have ever seen the guy. However, subdued Yuasa kicks ass. 2020 should probably be a little embarrassed to have blown it’s wad this early. I mean I am all for coming out with a bang but exploding your all white hot creativity on our eager faces in the winter season has got to a dysfunction. It is fairly clear to me that Yuasa has been both deeper and more creative in the past, but he has never been this accessible and arguably never this powerfully emotionally impactful. “Hands Of Eizouken'' had me in enthralled. It got me to care about its characters. It got me to rejoice in the magic of creation. It got me to delight at the idiosyncrasies of a fascinating concrete jungle. This anime makes me FEEL things. If you can manage to make a piece of art genuinly moving you've gifted the world with a high only otherwise achievable with good food, hard drugs, and an adventurous sex partner, and dammit, “Hands Off Eizouken” is genuinely moving.

The first thing you tend to notice about any Yuasa anime is the art direction. “Hands Off Eizouken” is no different. Eizouken looks immediately distinctive, and furthermore it looks absolutely gorgeous, which is actually kind of surprising. While Yuasa visuals are always impactful, they aren’t usually conventionally appealing. Every frame of “Ping Pong the Animation” looks like a sketch artist was paid 10 bucks to draw the world's ugliest teenager in under 10 seconds. This is not a criticism. I think Yuasa’s willingness to explore aesthetics outside of convention is a major strength, but I bring it up because Eizouken’s aesthetic feels comparatively timid when compared to Yuasa’s other works. However, this is where my criticism ends because this anime looks stunning. The backgrounds look great. In terms of line work, style and even color there is nothing all that shocking, but it stands out due to composition. The backgrounds have tons of depth and verticality, with building, ledges, and bridges criss crossing into a seemingly impenetrable maze but the bright colors and low contrasts makes this labyrinth far more inviting than imposing, supercharging your desire to see this world explored. Then there is the character art. I love the character art. One thing I have always respected about Yuasa is that Yuasa gives his characters visual flaws. Nobody else seems willing to do this. There is one character in this show who is generically visually appealing because she is a model, and everyone else looks deformed reminders of mankind’s tragic imperfection. In other words, they look like people. The character profiles and features are exaggerated and cartoonish, but the fact that everyone has obvious physical flaws gives them a sense of immediate personality completely lost in 90% of all other anime. It also means that everyone is immediately visually identifiable and I just love it all so much.

This all contributes to this anime’s great sense of atmosphere. That atmosphere is not laid on quite as thick as a lot of other “artsy” anime, but I’m not sure it’s any less compelling for it. As I mentioned, the art design molds the backgrounds into this strangely welcoming labyrinth, and the world design itself does much the same. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a show about making anime to be much about the joy of exploring the world around you, but, in Eizouken, that joy is fundamental to the experience. 50% of this anime is just the three leads bumming around in their weird ass city, concocting elaborate fantasies to explain it’s many idiosyncrasies, and the anime makes this process feel impossibly exciting. The general worldbuilding and background is an important part of this, but one cannot ignore the elephant in the room. There are these imagination sections. During moments of inspiration, the anime will descend into a landscape based on the creative process of one of the lead characters while nearby characters observe, edit, and exist within her fantasy. I love these bits. First of all, the music is absolutely fantastic. In fact, I love sound design in general during these bits. The way the anime layers real sound effects over the characters' vocal approximations is absolutely inspired. I also love the shift in artstyle to a more sketchy, unfinished style reminiscent of, appropriately enough, and animated storyboard. These sections feel great, uplifting, mesmerizing celebrations of the creativity inherent to children, directors, artists and perhaps unintentionally Yuasa himself all at once. One might assume the atmosphere created during these sections would contrast with the mundanities of the actual creation of an anime but I found they actually inform it. These mundanities come to represent the realization of the fantastic world you just witnessed and in doing so are granted a special magic of their own.

I also love the beautiful balancing act accomplished by the tone. For while the atmosphere of the world outside and the imagination sections definitely seeps into how the actual animating process is presented, the tone between the main characters animating and the main characters interacting with the broader setting is undeniably different. However, it’s not jarring and I am not sure how. Anime are often really bad at tone. Particularly when they try to juggle several different tones, it normally ends up with them dropping all balls, stepping on a landmine, and being blown backwards into a river full of starving alligators and malaria. Eizouken has no such issue. It juxtaposes the painstakingly authentic mundanity of actual anime production with an exaggerated setting populated by total weirdos and it does so with incredible fluidity. During certain moments you can almost forget that they live in a non-euclidean town whose school is filled with swat-equipped disciplinary committees and a dictatorial student council secretary but then it rockets you back to an absurd heightened reality and somehow that transition feels amazing. It’s like the payoff to a joke almost. Even though every moment of this show is riveting, there is this cycle of build up and exciting release that I suppose echoes the emotional buildup and release of real world anime production. Not that I would know I guess, but the point is, that there is a compelling cycle of tones that would have been very easy to mess up leaving the anime feeling sloppy and poorly planned. Eizouken pulls it off brilliantly.

Now we come to the characters. I love them all. Every single damn one of them is a treat. Just to start, they are universally incredibly likable. Side characters and main ones alike are incredibly easy to get attached to without relying on shallow aesthetics or generic cuteness. They all have flaws and idiosyncrasies, but that just makes them humans, and as humans they are impossibly endearing and, in the case of our three leads, incredibly aspirational. This anime is about highschoolers making anime in a club, but do not imagine it’s anything like K-On. These characters are talented, driven and all have this special spark of passion that makes it impossible not to root for them. In addition, they are very well written to be multidimensional and distinct. Broadly they are pretty clear idealized personifications of their role in the production. The writer/director is a nervous, flighty, auteur prone to sudden flashes of inspired productivity, the animator is a technical genius with a pure passion for movement and art for its own sake, and the producer is a somewhat grumpy yet lovable taskmaster who is always right, loves money, and is the only reason anything ever gets done. It would have been easy to stop there and I probably would have still praised the show for that creative descision but you really come to understand these characters' backstories and driving motivations and in a way that feels organic and contextualizes them and their motivation brilliantly. Mizusaki in particular had a fantastic backstory that I found incredibly personally affecting. These characters are all testaments to how to invest you in a character without making them generically cute or having life arbitrarily shit on them all the time. They are testaments to how to provide motivation for highly driven characters in a way that seems natural and doesn’t come across as needlessly melodramatic. I can’t think of anyone else whose lives I would much rather follow.

Annoying people tend to ask me why I watch anime if I hate everything so much. My typical response is to immediately punch them in the genitals, steal their credit cards, and sell their organs to heroin addicts, but if I were more willing to entertain annoying people asking stupid questions I would respond that I don’t, in fact, hate anime. I love anime. I have watched anime since I was six years old and it’s played a substantial role in my life to this very day. Shows like this are why. If the very best anime could do was decent but forgettable shows like “Kaguya Sama” I would have fled the medium for pastures new long ago. However, shows like “Hands Off Eizouken” remind me why I so stubbornly refuse to “grow out of it.” For better or for worse, It is also shows like “Hands Off Eizouken” that I will be remembering the next time I am watching some god forsaken video game anime about an ugly nerd acquiring a harem of thick witted, horny cat girls. I am hard on anime because I know anime can be great, and I know anime can be great precisely because of shows like “Hands Off Eizouken”. Eizouken is a magnificently powerful thing. Is it Yuasa’s best work? Probably not. In fact, my biggest worry about this show is that it’s accessibility will allow it to overshadow his past achievements. However, if my insignificant role in the anime community, and indeed the larger cosmos is just to offer some creative similes and a thumbs up or down, it’s hard to imagine that I could give a more emphatic thumbs up. I loved watching this. It made me feel powerfully good, and hopeful and awestruck by the wonder of anime and of creativity in general. Everyone needs to watch “Hands Off Eizouken”.

Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlDp06GXycc&t=35s


The “Crunchyroll Original” tag frightens me. I see what you have been advertising at me, Crunchyroll. I know what you think profitable anime looks like and I am deeply unimpressed. Still though, let's have an open mind. Maybe this anime is great. Stranger things have happened and the least I can do is read a plot synopsis before passing judgment. Lets see here, “tower”....“shinsui”....“irregular”....oh dear. This isn’t going well. “Tower of God” is what I tend to refer to as “tumblr bait”. There are many hallmarks of bait but I feel the fundamental core of the genre is a setting that sounds kinda ... neat right up until you actually think about it. If your setting seems quirky and interesting but in reality mostly lends itself to incredibly on the nose metaphors about non-specific prejudice then you are probably making tumblr bait. Still though, not all tumblr bait is bad. I happen to quite like certain parts of “Steven Universe” so “Tower of God” sucking salty horse cock was not necessarily a given. Being tumblr bait does not make “Tower of God” bad. All the terrible creative decisions do.

I am going to cut right to the chase here, and explain the fundamental reason why “Tower of God” fails. I could not possibly give less of a shit about it’s two central characters. This anime seems to assume that we should care very deeply about the two characters of Bam and Rachel, but nonetheless refuses to grant them more personality than a styrofoam packing peanut. You see, when crafting a character to be the emotional core of an anime, it makes sense to explore that character in a way that makes them likable and sympathetic, however “Tower of God” is pioneering a bold new storytelling philosophy of not giving half a deep fried fuck about characterizing your lead characters. I don’t know how the fuck it thinks I am going to care about Rachel. We start out knowing literally nothing beyond her hair color, and we end up knowing nothing about her other than she might be a bit of a prick. Wow, “Tower of God”, doth the muses themselves sing through thee? “But she’s important to Bam” you might point out. “We should care about her because HE cares about her.” That would be an excellent point indeed, if I could be convinced to give a shit about him either. Seriously, why on earth should I care about this limp dicked, worthless pile of dry white toast? “Well he’s super nice.” Yeah ok, but what the hell has he actually DONE? From where I am standing he has been rescued a lot, dropped a sword, made some puppy dog eyes, and abandoned his friends at a critical moment. What exactly am I intended to latch on to here?

But maybe the side characters can save this thing, right? There is more to this story than just the protagonist and the cardboard cutout he uses to practice kissing and perhaps the sheer charisma of its secondary cast can fill the void created by the lead character. Honestly, the side characters almost do so. A lot of them have compelling motivations and a ton of personality. They all fit very neatly into various tropes and archetypes but that’s ok because their motivations are well established and their characters make sense. Shame this anime felt the need to stomp the concept of simple, effective storytelling to death. This is one of those shows that feels the need to add 20,000 character twists to every climactic moment to create deeply unessesary drama and it makes every character fucking confusing. The characters in this show can shift between a villain, hero, victim, or three monkeys in a trenchcoat in the space of 5 minutes based solely on slightly cryptic dialog and it’s infuriating. These people are incomprehensible. This anime pulls about 500 character revelations per second from a place so far up its own ass it’s developed a severe swelling in the large intestine. It’s confusing. You can never get a beat on where their arks are supposed to be going, so when character development DOES happen it feels like it comes out of fucking nowhere. In the end I just gave up and completely emotionally checked out. I wanted to like these characters, but the ones I felt I understood didn’t seem to be developing at all, and the ones that do get development make zero goddamn sense.

The one thing I do really like about this show is the art and atmosphere. It’s why I ended up watching it all the way through, though I do not recommend you do the same. I keep seeing people get all huffy about the art and the production quality and I am deeply confused by this. Sure the production isn’t at MHA levels but it’s not noticeably bad. The fights felt cathartic to me and I never noticed any big ambient screwups. I think the aesthetic looks awesome. It goes for really hard, dark lines contrasting against very desaturated colors and it’s really distinctive and kind of beautiful. Some of the character designs aren’t great but some of them are really cool and I like how they give everyone really prominent, interesting looking eyes. It makes them seem more expressive. Besides, the non-character art is amazing. This anime is surprisingly good at creating atmosphere. This is partially due to the music which is excellent, but this anime makes great use of color and imagery to help set the mood. This anime does a great job convincing you that you are in a deeply strange other world where you do not belong. There is a pervading sense that something just isn’t quite right. It’s like you are slowly realizing you are in some kind of oddly beautiful dream that’s being puppeted by something sinister and immense. It’s a cool feeling and if the story were such shit, I would have been really into it.

To summarize, “Tower of God” has just enough cool moments to make it incredibly annoying that it sucks this much shit. It’s got some pretty cool moments but that means very little in context with the veritable sea of awful creative decisions leading to a broken mess of a story. I don’t know how to make sense of “Tower of God”. It’s characters confuse me and its intentions confound me. It’s possible that “Tower of God” is just too intelligent for my feeble reviewer brain, but...it’s not. After a certain point I just gave up trying to analyse it because there was no longer anything the story could have done to convince me to care. The two characters at the heart of this thing were just too underdeveloped and the side characters didn’t make any goddamn sense. I gave up. I checked out. Whatever happens, I am officially too bored to care. “Oh, so the climax has our main character just sitting in a bubble his favorite sex doll waiting to be eaten by a giant barnacle while the side cast does all the work? Cool, cool, if anyone needs me, I will be over at the snack bar aggressively not giving a shit.”

Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVZ-3BCvsUw

Me and studio Trigger have a complicated relationship. On one hand they have consistently released fun, well animated, high energy comedies that are difficult to fully hate. On the other hand, they have consistently released the same fun, well animated, high energy comedy that’s difficult to hate. For 10 fucking years. It’s why I find it hard to love Trigger. Yes, Trigger, “Kill La Kill” certainly made quite an impact. Really, you can stop making it now. However, with both “BNA” and Promare they appear to be on some kind of racism kick and I am almost prepared to view that as ... progress. BNA even crafted a world, narrative and core set of themes with something approaching a vague approximation of substance. However you might have noticed the words “something approaching a vague approximation” floating around and that certainly cuts to the heart of the problem. Step in the right direction or not, BNA is short, shallow and deeply pleased with itself, but this time Tigger isn’t doing it on purpose. Trigger anime have been relying on self awareness to avoid actually writing coherent stories for a long time, but BNA feels uniquely bored, tired, and half assed, and the more I watched it the more I began to realize that I kind of fucking hate it. In the past I have been frequently somewhat dismissive of their more recent efforts but this is the first time I have ever truly managed to hate a trigger anime. I have been saying that trigger needs to branch out and try something new but shitting on a plate and declaring it Foie Gras is not what I fucking meant.

What fundamentally makes BNA as infuriating as it is is the pacing. It’s paced a bit like a starved, crippled elephant seal with an inner ear infection that forces it to forever waddle slowly in small circles. “Slow Pacing in a trigger anime?” I hear you exclaim. “Impossible!” and frankly I am just as surprised as you are. It even took me a while to realize it, what with Trigger’s trademark “epileptic seizure” approach to animation, but upon reflection it became incredibly clear to me that despite only having 12 episodes to work with it manages to use most of that to waste my fucking time. This show has a consistent narrative throughline that is highly present throughout, but despite that most of the episodes just settle into some variety of obnoxious holding pattern as the story strides boldly toward but-fuck nowhere. My favorite trick they play is forgetting that certain characters have super powers because that would force the plot to progress and we are far too busy sticking microwaved pocky up our nose. It’s as if the Trigger saw a hamster wheel for the first time and immediately shouted “I JUST GOT THE GREATEST IDEA ABOUT NARRATIVE STRUCTURE”. Even more annoying is the character arks, which frequently take time out of their busy schedules of going fucking nowhere to activly regress. Pretty much all the meaningful story and character development take place over 3-4 episodes leaving the remaining 8 free to be completely fucking worthless.

However, Trigger anime have always been sorta plot anemic and have often focused on lively, appealing characters to capture the audience’ attention. Unfortunately the characters in BNA make me want to stove their head in with a lead pipe. The promotional art would have you believe that the two characters of Shirou and Michiru form some kind of duo but don’t be fooled by that dodgy lying bastard. In practice they spend most of their time nowhere near each other because Shirou is far too busy standing next to the mayor being incredibly boring and Michiru is far to busy being stupid. We actually spend most of our time with Michiru, a character who early on was effectively characterized as outwardly jaded but fundamentally good hearted so that the anime could later completely ignore all that in favor of her being naive to the point of willful stupidity and then frame it as good thing. See Astuko, Luluco or 90% of all Trigger protagonists for details. Michiru mostly stumbles around for a while doing pretty much fuck all before finally managing to find herself in a Naruto-Sasuke situation with her former childhood friend and oh boy does that not improve things. I’m not sure why this anime thought I would care about lil miss childhood friend. Her characterization was incredibly inconsistent, wobbling between unbelievably stupididity and detemined dickishness, but judging by the climax, BNA clearly thought they knocked it out of the fucking park. The Naruto-sasuke dynamic was annoying in Naruto and since then has only managed to become both annoying and done to death.

However, what really ended up surprising me is how generic the story ended up. Trigger traditionally has been nothing if not random and quirky. They have so much lol-random energy that new Cartoon Network shows arise fully formed from discarded hair and toenail clippings. However, BNA never once surprised me. It’s a procession of cliches and obvious story moments that would much rather beat you to death with determined blandness than dare take this story in an actually interesting direction. “Oh her baseball team is rigging a match for monetary gain? She better not make some kind of inspiring speech about-oh yup and there is.” There was an actually interesting discussion to be had here. Is it actually fair for her to follow her own code of ethics at no cost to herself even as she ruins her teammates' only chance to escape poverty? Could be interesting but “BNA” was too busy humping a taxidermied ferret to notice. This anime is like a clock. Incredibly predictable and soul crushingly boring to stare at for 5 hours.

In summary this anime’s plot makes it boring, it’s characters make it annoying and it’s pacing makes it downright loathsome. It seems that Trigger is trying something new but when the “new thing” your friends are trying turns out to be crystal meth, it’s not the time to be supportive. I wanted to like this but in the end the only thing BNA really succeeds at creating is the current title holder for “worlds hottest animated raccoon”. I’m sure all the furries will be quite grateful once they finish masturbating themselves to death.

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-2ntl73w5I&t=12s

The first season of “Kaguya-Sama: Love is war” will forever live on as “that show that certainly existed.” It occupies a happy little middle ground where it’s not quite bad enough to really hate yet not quite good enough to give a sustained shit about. Kaguya-Sama found a big pile of genre conventions lying around and used them to build a nice little comfort zone, in which it has now hunkered down and is refusing to leave on pain of death or torture. It’s still a decently funny romantic comedy but the most memorable thing about it is an ending just terrible enough ... to be worth briefly mentioning. It is kind of like an elementary school presentation where the first 3 group members manage to get through “my friend the beaver” without incident right up until the 4th group member nervously shits himself. However... it’s a brand new season and after a dull but competent introduction to attract the complacent morons who react to the idea of creative inspiration with fear and aggression, perhaps Season 2 is willing to take the risks necessary to elevate it to real greatness. I'm obviously joking, this series has the ambition of a grape. That said, Season 2 does make incremental improvements. Kaguya-sama 2 is still a safe, shallow piece of fiction, content to go down easy and leave very little signs of its passing but it does make some improvements. Season 2 is slightly funnier and one hell of a lot less annoying than season 1, and fuck it. Progress is progress.

Like every other comedic Slice of Life anime ever made, the comedy in Kaguya-Sama revolves around extreme reactions to very common events. This is the law of slice of life comedies. Sometimes they go big, sometimes they go small, sometimes they are Nichijou, but every single one of them revolves around extreme reactions to very common events. Within this space Kaguya-sama isn’t particularly high energy, but puts in more than enough oomph to get you paying attention. The big gimmick of the show are the hyper dramatized battles of wit between the two main characters as they attempt to manipulate each other into confessing their love. These were never that funny. They weren’t that funny in season 1 and they are arguably worse in season 2. Kaguya herself has been reduced a little bit and doesn’t really come off as an equal opponent. It feels like all the president has to do is look in her general direction for her to spontaneously orgasm and that’s simply not conducive to the whole “clash of the titans” vibe. However, the comedy outside of this gimmick is still quite strong. There is a lot of variety in this show. Every character seems to have an established dynamic with pretty much every other character, so the show can mix and match pretty much any combination of characters, and come out with something unique and compelling. It’s also nice that not all the relevant characters actually like each other that much, meaning the show can generate a sense of social tension that feels real. They try their best to ruin this at the end of each season, but if you rightfully consider these finals as pointless digressions, the comedy holds up extremely well.

It helps a lot that the characters are great. They are likable and energetic which is sort of the bare minimum for a show like this, but more impressive is how well they differentiate themselves from genre tropes. The exception here is Chaika. I understand that many people like Chaika but that doesn’t change the fact that those people can go fuck themseves. She is an utterly bog-standard ditsy airhead designed to be cute in the most formulaic way possible. Big eyes, Big head, small body, it’s the toddler’s guide to character design. Everyone else is a lot better though. Our two leads kinda have their basic personalities chosen for them by the premise, but they end up as pretty effective subversions of their tropes rather than strict examples of them. Kaguya is reduced a little bit, but I still love how insecure the two of them are. They come across like a pair of idiots trying desperately to act out a role they don’t realize they are criminally unfit for. It’s part of the reason why Kaguya is one of the cutest characters in all of fiction. I still love the NEET character. I am really fond of characters who are technically right but nonetheless are consistently unhelpful. There is also a brand new character who fits wonderfully into the cast, and has the single best ongoing gag in the show. They all interact and bump off each other wonderfully, and the chemistry between them and the tertiary cast is by far the greatest success of this show.

However, now we come to the problem. The plot sucks. This is normally where I would complain about romances that are stuck in a bullshit holding pattern while I crush the writers’ genitals under a hydraulic press for their crimes against god and man, but honestly here it’s a minor issue. Instead I am going to complain about forced melodramatic finales. I hate them. Anime always seems to forget that you can’t just close the lid on that box. If you write a very special episode about how social isolation has taken a terrible toll on a character's life and mental health, we all can’t just go back to laughing at the funny, friendless nerd. That joke is over. You added stakes to his vulnerability and now it’s not funny. Jarring tone shifts are always a problem, particularly in comedies, but the real dagger to the heart is that Kaguya-sama couldn’t write a decent dramatic moment without the benefit of divine intervention. The big, dramatic character arch we get is inauthentic, forced and cowardly. It presents us with a completely absurd scenario that requires one middle schooler to go Snidely Whiplash, and another to fucking matyr themselves. It also required me to care about middle school infidelity, something so utterly inconsequential that I would have to activley try to give less of a fuck. It feels a lot like a tortured attempt to explain why people don’t like one of the main characters without it having been his fault in any way. We, of course, already had plenty of perfectly good reasons for why he is unpopular, but whatever. Feel free to disembowel yourself on the alter of shitty climaxes for the glorious prize of absolutley fuck all.

So Kaguya-sama 2 isn’t perfect. It’s not even exceptionally good but in fairness, very little actually is. That’s what the word “exceptional” means and I enjoyed Kaguya-sama 2 a lot. In fact I am even prepared to call this a show worth watching. It’s not even close to becoming something great or long standing, but it’s a well above average comedy that does more credit to it’s genre than the genre frankly deserves. So there we go, Kaguya-sama 2: winner of the prestigious “definitely acceptable” award.