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.