The greatest technical and storyboarding triumphs of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken‘s first episode are not the flights of fancy that take Midori Asakusa, Tsubame Mizusaki, and Sayaka Kanamori into the world of their own animations but the framework of every day life that inspires them.
“You take something that’s totally implausible but pass it off like it is! You take reality and exaggerate it in a way that makes sense!”
-Midori Asakusa, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Episode 1
When Midori discovers “the greatest world” of anime, she’s sick and stuck at home. Watching Future Boy Conan causes a realization that people make the anime she watches and that it’s their efforts that she truly loves. This ties into her childhood dream of wanting to be an adventurer. Our initial introduction to Midori as viewers is through an imaginary world that she creates after moving into a new apartment complex.
It’s easy to see from where Midori draws her inspiration. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken shows us. Rather than having us listen to Midori talk about her adventures, it simply shows her running around and then transfers this to drawings in her adventure logs, all while keeping the kinetic energy and childlike wonder of her exploration. While her drawings reminded me of entire worlds I would create with my friends in my own childhood, it’s the framing and storyboarding of Midori’s new apartment complex that caught my attention first.
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken‘s premiere was Mari Motohashi’s debut as an episode director and animation director (she helped direct and storyboarded later episodes in the series as well). Her greatest achievement in introducing us to Midori and company’s every day life is how she manages to make everything simultaneously crowded and spacious. There are narrow alleys to explore and buildings constantly reaching into the sky, even when the skyline is relatively clear. She uses a variety of angles to make even the mundane seem large, fantastic, and worth exploring. In the words of Midori herself, Motohashi “takes reality and exaggerate it in a way that makes sense” in order to convey the inner workings of Midori’s creativity.
Somewhere between legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki’s curmudgeonly insistence that the best inspiration comes from experiencing life rather than anime itself, and the litany of insular otaku-references that fill many anime series which only look inwardly towards other anime for inspiration, there’s Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken. It finds a happy medium in a way that’s realistic and acknowledges both anime and life experience as equal partners in Midori’s imagination.
As a child, Midori is inspired by every day settings and Future Boy Conan (which Miyazaki directed) alike. As an adult, she keeps this love of anime while visibly drawing backgrounds inspired by her desire to continuously explore the real world around her, creating an entirely new world.
