

Midori makes a beautiful contrast by being small and circular, incredibly expressive, and radiating what many viewers have noted as “gremlin energy.” Tsubame is the prettiest and most “typical” looking of the three, but her vibrant, flighty personality still comes through in her design and the way she expresses and moves. Sayaka is tall and rectangular (an oddity in a medium where girls are often drawn as petite and rounded) and bares her teeth in a look of deadpan menace. The anime brings manga artist Owara Sumito’s character designs to life. The trio is glorious fun to watch in action, both in terms of their antics and their distinct aesthetics.

Through both the character design and characterization of its three protagonists, Eizouken challenges a lot of the tropes that often loom over portrayals of nerdy, passionate teenage girls… and, if we’re being honest, teenage girls in general.Įizouken is the story of three friends making anime: Asakusa Midori, a lifelong lover of concept art and design Mizusaki Tsubame, a fashion model and business heiress who would rather become an animator than a socialite and Kanamori Sayaka, who has the business sense of a con artist and thus assigns herself producer of the makeshift studio.

KANAMORI KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF EIZOUKEN CHARACTERS SERIES
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, a series about three high school girls using a school club to start their own animation studio, inspires exactly this feeling (as well as a general, inescapable sense of creative joy). In a media climate with a lot of restrictive expectations for the behavior and beauty standards of young cisgender women, there’s always something gratifying and delightful about fiction that lets female characters be goofy, expressive, and a little bit weird.
