All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. You could just kind of tell from day one with Eizouken. It was the kind of thing that almost everyone seemed to agree was worth watching a rare moment of the popular zeitgeist lining up with a show thats expertlycrafted incredibly interesting and written straight from the heart. Its rare for this many people to agree on anything in an anime fan community that is increasingly fractious and divided. 880https://i.ur.com/6P7fbmq.png Popular rumor states director Masaaki Yuasa found the manga by having it brought to his attention on Twitter with fans saying he should adapt it. Those people if the story is true are heroes but the idea that there was an Eizouken before the anime adaptation can feel a little strange given its heavy emphasis on anime as an artform. Indeed it doesnt really feel like part of the general anime seasonal cycle at all though most of Yuasas work can be said to have that same quality. Being tasked with summing up Eizouken in an interesting and concise way feels like being told to write something new about those anime that have just kind of always been there. Your Ghibli movies and your Evangelions. 880https://i.ur.com/S5NmN3d.png Yet ultimately that feeling is something of an illusion. Eizouken is very much an anime of the new 20s and its consciousness of its own medium aside it is factually a product of the mangatoanime process that defines much of the industry and some of what makes it good has more to do with that than one might assume. As such here we are a few months later audience appraising the artist and their art same as always. But there is a little more to it than that. Criticism is piggyback expression. You are writing about someone elses art. If we take that to be true there must be some chain effect involved in reviewing an anime about making anime adapted from a manga about the sameeffectively one person appraising someone interpreting art about making art. If youre feeling slightly dizzy please know were only just getting started. Eizoukens core premise is so simple it needs no introduction. Three friends. High school. Anime club. Making not watching. Thats about the long and short of Eizoukens actual setup. Its easy to lose sight of this but for everything it does thats innovative or draws from well outside this plane Eizouken is at its heart a school life series. It takes that simple core premise and turns it into a dual thesis On one hand on what it feels like to express yourself creatively and to be inspired to make that leap to expression in the first place. On the other a look at the vast diversity of people and what motivates us to do what we do. Thats quite a lot for three high school girls to carry on their shoulders on its own. That it also gets into the nittygritty of how to make those dreams a reality is something else entirely. That it then also manages to be nuanced enough to not lose sight of the fact that there are a billion and one different approaches and reasons for making art and that all of them are valid in their own way is nothing short of astounding. Anime about anime arent actually a recent development but they can sometimes feel like one. Its a piece of subject matter thats seen something of an uptick in recent years. Both in series that actually tackle anime production this one Shirobako and shows where anime and the real world intersect somehow Re:Creators AnimeGataris. What Eizouken gets right from the jump is that wanting to make an anime is not exactly a rational thing. 880https://i.ur.com/JByB4u5.png Two of our leads the short kappaesque Midori Asakusa and the teenage model Tsubame Mizusaki are ultimately driven purely by passion. Midori is a talented background artist and director and Tsubame a prodigal character animator. What or rather who actually makes the two able to work together to productive ends is the shows third protagonist Sayaka Kanamori. Tall with tombstone teeth a generally intimidating demeanor and in sharp contrast to our other two leads a head passionately and almost exclusively for finance. Kanamori is both the groups glue and arguably the shows. Since shes so different from the other two characters its through her that the series can present very different ideas of what it means to make art and sell it. It wouldve been easy to paint her as an antagonist but Kanamori is never depicted as anything less than necessary for the continued function of the Eizouken itself. 880https://i.ur.com/u2shfb0.png Of course Asakusa and Mizusaki are pretty different from each other too. In the shows middle we explore Mizusakis passion not for anime specifically but for animation as a concept. Her background as a model and child actress leads to a lifelong obsession with motion. We see her as a child become fascinated with the way her grandmother tosses excess tea onto the grass outside and try to replicate it. Later the cut of her grandmother doing that is echoed in one of Mizusakis own cuts in one of the Eizoukens shorts. Saying that Eizouken has passion for its medium is not enough the series integrates its own characters passions into the narratives they make and its creators passions into Eizouken thereby layering itself. We see in this repetition the inherent artistry of Mizusakis grandmothers motion Mizusakis own fascination with that motion and crucially the skill and passion of the real world animatorShuuto Enomotohttps://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/112610as well. Weaving its characters and creators own passions into the visuals is one thing but Eizoukens strong character writing shouldnt be ignored either. Its cheap to say that none of the characters here feel like familiar archetypes but they genuinely dont. Kanamori for instance has what initially seems like a quirkher moneyfirst attitudeexplained pretty readily by her backstory. We learn about halfway through the series that her grandparents liquor store closed due to a lack of visibility when she was younger. Itd be easy for Eizouken to milk this for drama but Kanamoris experiences shaping her character is taken as a simple fact of life. We are indeed all shaped by our experiencesanother message the show pushes pretty hard. 880https://i.ur.com/MSceFvs.png The contrast between this approach and the one often used by bigticket manga adaptations is sharp but its easy to take for granted. This in fact is the part of the series that draws most heavily on Sumito Oowaras original manga. Good writing can transcend the constraints of its format and in keeping that element the anime retains a strong emotional core. In turn this is what makes the shows exploration of the creative impulse and celebration of diverse experiences feel resonant. Every part of the series is bursting with life in that same way. Theres nuance here too. Kanamoris conflicts with the student council and the school itself and a discussion in the final episode about how peoples sharp differences of opinion can cause conflict arent just window dressing or bethedging. The show does acknowledge that earnest expressionwhich is ultimately what unites both halves of its core pointcan be hard. 880https://i.ur.com/5duBOsJ.png The show has a lot of impressive visual tricks but this one with almost every controversial subject under the sun depicted as part of a literal torrential downpour might be the most purely clever. However the fruits of the Eizouken Clubs labor prove that it can also be worthwhile. And that right there is what ropes Eizouken back into the circle of broader anime discussions. The difficulty but necessity of communication is of course a popular theme for art in general but in a certain sort of anime it has found a particularly fertile place to bloom. You can draw broad thematic lines from here to things as otherwise wildly different from each other and Eizouken as Symphogear and A Place Further Than The Universe. The show ends with one of the Eizoukens own shorts playing in its entirety. An 11 minute student film about a war between landbound humanity and seadwelling kappas. A war that occurs infilm because of a lack of communication. Not exactly subtle is it? 880https://i.ur.com/hJyt3kN.png But subtlety is perhaps overrated. Eizouken is a lot more than just an anime about anime. Its a celebration of the vast diversity of the human experience arguably the thing that makes us human in the first place. If that message speaks to enough peopleand I believe it haswe can stop beating around the bush and just call Eizouken what it is the first truly great anime of the 2020s. Or more poetically the future. 880https://i.ur.com/ItUfwT7.png