This is where the rubber meets the road for Eizouken ni wa Te o Dasu na!.  The premiere was spectacular, as anyone with any experience of Science SARU knew it would be.  These folks can’t fall out of bed without making anime that looks interesting.  The rub has always been what comes after – and there, the track record is mixed.  A complicating factor here is that Eizouken is an adaptation, which not all Yuasa projects are, though we’ve seen evidence that he’s taking some liberty with the source material.

As I noted last week the premiere was quite winning above and beyond the visuals – thanks largely to the anime-original prequel/flashback scenes.  Those were a major reason, I suspect, why the anime made a stronger initial impact on me than the manga did.  And that’s a good sign for what’s to come, no doubt.  While the second episode tracked along largely predictable lines with a good deal of “more of the same”, it continues to be a pretty entertaining experience.  There’s still work to be done to sustain this story for a full series, though.

Ultimately, Eizouken seems to come down to a couple of very elemental constructs.  We have the classic “Hey kids, let’s out on a show!” trope, which has been a staple of modern popular entertainment since before anime existed.  And we have the love letter to animation, which is where this clearly becomes a passion project for Yuasa and his team.  And around those pillars we have a lot of slapstick comedy falling along classic manzai lines, extended fantasy sequences powered by Midori’s imagination and – just maybe – the occasional commentary on the anime industry.

Given all that, the main trio seem to have a relatively low bar to clear as characters.  They have to be likeable and funny, and so far they are.  If Eizouken is going to be truly special at least one of them (Midori, most likely) will have to be more, but there’s no indication that the series is especially interested in exploring the girls as people beyond how their personalities impact the plot mechanics.  Midori is the big dreamer and general dojikko, Sayaka the streetwise enforcer and tsukkomi, and Tsubame the carefree naif with raw talent and theoretical knowledge but no grounding in the practical world.

What we got this week was mostly sight gags and plot advancement, plus a heaping helping of eye candy.  The background detail is already a little spotty in places but Ping Pong has already shown us what Yuasa will prioritize when he has a limited budget.  You don’t need much to come up with memorable visual hooks like Tsubame emerging from the sewers or the rusty old windmill sticking out underneath the Eizouken’s new “club room“.  That structure is itself a marvelous visual creation – more like a rusted-out airplane hanger than a school building (but then, this doesn’t look like any school that likely actually exists).

The club room and the old anime club studio space have more than a whiff of Ghibli to them.  And that’s fitting, as there’s a much stronger link between the SARU and Ghibli aesthetic than you might think at first flush.  One thing that’s very clear is that Midori and Tsubame are still entirely children (“adults” my ass – that’ll take more than a sofa), no matter how serious they are about animation, and this is all playtime to them right now.  Sayaka easily slips into the typical producer role, and she relishes the dirty work (like threatening teachers) so that’s not going to be a problem for her.

We’ll see if any other characters emerge to add some tonal diversity to the story.  One candidate is Fujimoto-sensei, the beardy who agrees to be the new “Motion Picture Club’s” advisor.  He’s played by Inoue Kazuhiko, and they haven’t made the anime yet that doesn’t improve by adding him to the cast.  My favorite moment this week was when the girls finished the old anime club’s animation sequence of the windmill, and Tsubame – realizing what a grind doing animation on actual paper was – tossed off a line about what animators get paid per drawing.  It’s all good fun so far – whether Eizouken ever becomes more than that we’ll see, but it probably doesn’t have to in order to succeed as a story.