The REAL Meaning of Eizouken

Passion is a bit of a funny term for me.

As someone who has been surrounded by the arts all my life, be it film, music or dance, you tend to hear this word a lot. “You look like you have so much passion for dance.” “You can hear the passion in their voice.” “There’s so much passion put into this film.” Over and over again, this word is coming out of the mouths of people in the arts…but I would be remiss to say that it’s something you hear coming out of the mouths of people who are successful within those fields. I tend to hear it more from people observing works from afar or who are within that field but at a very amateur level. And on YouTube, when you tend to see a lot of people analyzing media, you realize something very interesting.

People really tend to overvalue “passion.”

Before you assume that this is me saying that artists should approach things without passion and instead focus on making it a boring career, because unga bunga the RedLetterMedia meme that everyone misuses, I feel that that’s a gut reaction to anyone who really doesn’t understand what being in the world of the arts entails. Because you would think that someone who would make it their entire career to essentially make frivolities would inherently have to be passionate to go through such an industry, because make no mistake. Being an artist in the world of professionals is like entering a battlefield armed with a pen surrounded by armies and being attacked on all fronts every single second of every single day. It’s soul crushing, it’s difficult and only someone who has the passion for that art would survive. Passion is inherent.

What isn’t is what it takes to turn that passion into something real.

This is where a recent anime adaptation of the manga series by the same name “Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na!” or “Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!” comes into play, because surrounding the discourse of this anime is this term: “passion.” Every video covering this series mentions the term at least once, one video I’ve seen even questioning the passion of other creators in the world of anime or manga because they aren’t what they perceive to be on the level of Eizouken. And…not only is that sort of insulting to every creator that isn’t on the staff for Eizouken, but it also is fundamentally missing the point of what the show is trying to say, because Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is certainly the story of girls with passion, but to say that’s all the story is trying to say is telling of just how much that shiny term blinds people ignorant of what it takes to put that passion into motion.

And funnily enough, it establishes this very early on, from the words of the girl that everybody loves.

Eizouken establishes very early on that there is a difference between people like Asakusa and Mizusaki, who are the perfect representations of the artistic type, and people like Kanamori, who views the world through how it can be exploited, marketed, exchanged, and so on. Arguably, this could be seen as the difference between an idealistic mindset and a realistic one, yet the irony is that both Mizusaki and Asakusa are obsessed with realism in terms of animation and worldbuilding, to the point that they obsess over each movement almost needlessly, creating cuts that are more than twice the size of that of an average anime. Kanamori is the one who points out that there is no need for such realism and detail, so long as the average audience enjoys it and the product is complete. In fact, the show very much paints Kanamori in the right, because as Eizouken is an anime adapted from a manga about making anime, it stands to reason that this considers every aspect. Is this scene trying to say that you should give up your passion to make product? Is it saying that passion is all you need and you should keep working until the whole of your passion is realized? Or is the show trying to tell you that there needs to be compromise?

The irony as well, is that people always cite that this anime is a Masaaki Yuasa anime because of his influence and his widely-known style from such shows as Ping Pong, Devilman Crybaby and Tatami Galaxy, but what they fail to realize is that this is an adaptation of a manga. And, if you look at the character designs in comparison to the anime, there is very little difference if any at all. The look, the feel and how the story flows is pretty much 1:1, which is no coincidence. According to an article on Crunchyroll coming from a panel interview of Science Saru, the studio behind Eizouken, at Anime NYC, they revealed that:

“The panel host noted the positive reception to the announcement that Science Saru would be handling the Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! anime and asked if the director, Masaaki Yuasa, had any familiarity with it prior to the project’s inception. Choi revealed that when they brought it up in a project meeting he had already researched it. He’d been namesearching himself online one day and found a comment from someone saying they’d love to see him make an anime for it, which made him interested in learning about it. When they brought it before more of the staff, some were already fans of the manga.”

So Eizouken is an adaptation of a manga about making original anime, wherein, if you are familiar with Yuasa’s style, leans very little into said style that everyone praises the show for having. In fact, it’s pretty much just a faithful adaptation that benefits from having as little Yuasa as possible, because the style, the character designs and everything is in the manga. Compare this to Devilman Crybaby and Tatami Galaxy, which are all also adaptations. Devilman Crybaby’s character designs and overall look ended up fully being taken over by Yuasa’s style as well as being modernized and Tatami Galaxy is adapted from a novel with no visuals to compare. It could have gone full Yuasa with the super stylized sequences, look and animation, yet it instead chose to compromise, being a more faithful adaptation that does not rely on Yuasa’s signature look. It arguably sees more success as a series because it sticks to the look of the manga, keeping to a more traditional feel that allows more people to attach themselves to it because, make no mistake, Yuasa’s anime are nothing if not niche and off-putting to the average anime goer. On top of that, having the anime be over the top with his style inherently goes against the message of the series: which has its characters compromise on stylization in favor of making something everyone can appreciate. This anime cited for being full of passion, that some will even say is “different from every other anime within its own season or even the medium,” is in and of itself yet another product of the adaptation system that so many will cite as being “soulless” and “lacking in passion.”

The lesson is right there, both in the anime and in the production of said anime.

It is borderline insulting, ignorant and very much self-serving to say that Eizouken is different from other anime because “it has passion,” especially considering what we’ve just discussed. There is a video titled “Where is the Passion?” that basically says this outright, comparing the 13 episodes of Eizouken to 8 minutes of Kimetsu no Yaiba that he watched, citing Kimetsu as being the product of a corporate machine that is unable to show the “passion” that Eizouken had…based off of end cards of art and dialogue. Never mind that he also claims that there doesn’t need to be so many widely appealing anime with tropes and “bland characters” where there needs to be more shows like Eizouken that “have clear passion”, but considering what we’ve established, both Eizouken and Kimetsu are: pretty much 1:1 adaptations, have a look that very little deviates from the look of the source material, and were made so that the adaptation would have the best appeal possible: Eizouken using Yuasa’s name and Kimetsu using Ufotable’s. How presumptuous is it for a person to assume that an anime, because it is not niche or to one’s perceived standard of “passion” that there was none in there to begin with? Because if you are going to argue that marketability and reaching the widest audience is a bad thing:

Eizouken itself disagrees with you.

This idea that wide appeal and reaching the mainstream is inherently a compromise of artistic integrity is all the more telling of how little people understand about the arts industries. Popular singers must have no talent simply because they are popular, ignoring that singers such as Charlie Puth have the ability of perfect pitch, or even the talents of someone like Lady Gaga. They had talent to get to where they were, they were just able to market well in order to have their voices reach as far as they could. In terms of film, George Lucas was against the Hollywood system when he made Star Wars, but because of how it was marketed and how well the film was put together through his vision, Star Wars is as popular as it is today. Are films that are famous and successful automatically devoid of passion simply because they are popular? Are the Godfather, Titanic, Toy Story 3, The Dark Knight and the original Lion King now devoid of their passion behind it simply because of the marketing that went behind it? Are Neon Genesis Evangelion, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Cowboy Bebop now without their passion because of their wide appeal? If we’re talking about popularity to that extent, look no further than Boku no Hero Academia. It’s one of the most marketed and popular series of all time, yet no person who spouts the “passion” argument is willing to realize just how much of Horikoshi’s soul goes into making it. Boku no Hero is filled with compromise after compromise so the world could see Horikoshi’s passion poured out on a page. The man looked up to people like Oda, Kubo and Kishimoto and even talked to them to express just how much they inspired him. His passion is right there. Even Togashi, the mangaka behind Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter, is no stranger to compromise, as his health forced certain pages to not have as much detail or as “perfectly drawn” pages as he would like, yet he had to get his story out there. Both series are popular worldwide in an industry that crushes and uses them like they’re expendable because they are. Are you willing to say that they have no passion because they are marketable? Do you even have the right to say that? Marketability is for one thing and one thing only: so the world can witness the work that was poured in day and night into one product. Because at the end of the day, that’s what this is. It’s the reality of the industry. In order to be successful and for your art to reach as many people as possible and for the world to know that you are here, you need to get it to them in the most effective way possible.

Eizouken conveys this in its three arcs. In the first anime they produce, it’s their way of proving that they have worth as a club. They could have opted to, as the series showed, continue to make nothing but Sakuga and not compromise on Asakusa and Mizusaki’s visions, but that would have produced an incoherent mess of three pieces of animation. The only people who would understand the worth it had would be them. In their film for the mecha anime, it had so many moving parts to it yet it had to be experienced by as many people as it could to be a success, for Mizusaki to properly show her parents that she was doing the right thing. And as Kanamori points out, using her name as a famous model is the tool that they needed to accomplish that goal. Is the film any less good because they marketed it? It got her parents to see her passion, it got so many people in support of their goals and to say that the appeal to a wider demographic cheapens that is inherently missing the point. And in the final arc, the arc that uses the most marketing in the series, they inherently do things that allow them to put enough work in the animation while also building an audience that would experience and purchase the anime they were putting their hearts into. It’s right there in this series: their passion is what kept them going, but without these tools and compromises, they would have gotten nowhere. 

The balance between passion and compromise is everywhere in Eizouken. Asakusa loves worldbuilding, but her obsession sidetracks her and her bipolar motivation makes scheduling hell. Without someone to reign her in and support her, the story of the final arc’s anime would have gotten nowhere. Mizusaki loves movement and fell in love with it, but her obsession with making every movement as detailed as possible slowed down production to a screeching halt, so she needed to cut back and make compromises so that she could make it look as good as possible with as much efficiency as possible. And Kanamori, who views everything through efficiency and monetary value, realizes that, in order for this anime to be as well-made as possible, her animator and director needed as much motivation as possible so their passion could push them forward. Because that’s what art is: passion and compromise. If you only have passion and no one sees it except for you, then what was the point? Was it even there to begin with? Where’s the proof of your passion if no one was there to witness it? But if you do anything without passion, then why do it at all? Art is, after all, exposing your true self to the world: your heart on a silver platter. 

This message applies especially to my fellow content creators, because make no mistake. None of us do this for a job. You would have to be brain dead to choose to talk about Chinese cartoons on a platform that does not reward us for it. Two of the videos that I am proudest of: my video on my favorite protagonist in all of anime and my video on the group that started the events of my favorite anime are making no money. They’re both demonetized, yet I continue to make videos like it because I love doing it. I see too many smaller YouTubers go after the bigger boys saying that “they’re only in it for the money.” Gigguk came back to YouTube from a job in engineering. If you want to think of a stupider business decision, then I could think of less than going from a high demand, high paying job to basically being punished for doing your job on a daily basis. Sure, he gets paid more than me, but because he was smarter than me and marketed himself better than me, let alone his wider appeal and luck. If you have passion, there is a reason why people in the art industry have “passion projects,” because they know that no one in the wider audience will understand what they’re making. There are authors who create books that don’t even get wider appeal until years after their deaths. There are films made with passion like the Room that are clearly made to realize the director’s intent, but no one appreciated that intent for what it was meant to be because there was no compromise and the execution fell flat. There is a reason why “graphic design is my passion” is a meme. You are not special because of your passion and to proclaim yourself as such is self-important. You wanna know how I know that? Because I used to say those things when no one watched me, when I made garbage anime reviews that were paced and edited like shit, when I made an entire series of videos dunking on a creator bigger and more successful than me while also ironically not making anything myself. The growth to where I am now only came when I realized the truth that Eizouken is saying to all of us yet few choose to listen to:

Your passion means nothing if you don’t have the strength to compromise and make it as effective yet as powerful as you can.

And if it’s not as perfect as you want it and if it could stand to use some work, that’s fine. That’s the great thing about being an artist. There’s always things to improve on and one more step you can take into that world you imagine in your head.