Anime of the Year is a term that's thrown around pretty loosely, especially during an age where there's actual, streamed, anime awards. However, 2020 really did start off with a bang when it introduced a series that was highly stylized, highly meta, and somehow emotional for something that was oddly educational.

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That series would be Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, the latest anime from the eccentric animation juggernaut Studio SARU and the origin of the "Easy Breezy" meme. Beyond just having a really funky intro sequence, this anime brought fans into a close examination of the anime industry that the main characters interacted with at a technical and metaphorical level. This list will be pulling back the curtain a bit, as it goes over a few fun things that some fans may not have known.

10 Based Off The Manga By Sumito Owara

For those who didn't catch it during the intro sequence, this heavily self-referential anime is actually based on a manga by Sumito Owara. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! premiered on Monthly Big Comic Spirits on July 27, 2016 and is an ongoing series, having released its fifth manga volume back in January 2020.

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However, to some people's surprise, this informative and masterfully crafted series is actually Owara's debut. Not many mangaka ever really hit the ground running, yet Owara was able to skyrocket from having a cult hit manga to having an acclaimed anime. Pretty soon, those branching achievements will even include a mini-series and a live-action film.

9 Directed By Masaaki Yuasa

Having fun at the bar in The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl Movie

For those wondering if the odd movements and style of the Eizouken were a little familiar, that is because they were crafted by one of the anime industry's fastest rising directors, Masaaki Yuasa.

Studio SARU and Yuasa have become near synonymous within recent years, as SARU has helped the eclectic imagineer release four animated films in under three years and two of the most visually striking series' of the past decade, Ping Pong: The Animation and Devilman: Crybaby. For a duo set in its love of unique animation, it just makes sense that they'd inevitably produce a series about making them.

8 Its Character Designer Is Naoyuki Asano

Saint Young Men

Yuasa may be a rising name within the anime industry, but he is far from having been the only person to have worked on this show. While Yuasa was pivotal as a director, the person to thank for the actual character's distinct styles and imagery is none other than Naoyuki Asano.

Asano has developed plenty of attention within recent years for working on another stylized anime, the Mr. Osomatsu revival. However, Asano also bridges an interesting design connection between Eizouken's world of animators and Asano's other, underappreciated project on two prophets struggling to maintain an apartment, Saint Young Men.

7 Heavy Hiyao Miyazaki Reference In Episode 10

The anime industry already has a lot to be thankful for in terms of the contributions of Hayao Miyazaki. As a co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the director of several, magical classics like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki has been entertaining families and inspiring animators for generations.

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It just makes sense that Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! would also send its regards to one of the godfathers of modern animation. In Episode 10, Asakusa starts feeling a little proud to be directing her third production, and the series gives her a short Miyazaki-esque appearance for a couple seconds when she starts bragging about all of her experience.

6 Ono And Kobayashi

Josuke in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable.

It's oddly common that some original anime characters may be named after a key member of staff or even the voice actor playing them. This is no different in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, as it names a couple of its eccentric Robot Club members, Ono and Kobayashi, after Yuuki Ono and Yusuke Kobayashi respectively.

Yuuki Ono is a prominent voice actor who may be most notable for playing Josuke Higashikata from Jojo's Bizarre Adventures Part 4. Kobayashi, on the other hand, has also played plenty of roles but may be pretty recognizable within recent months for being the voice of Dr. Stone's Senku Ishigami. That means that this series has Jojo and Senku as two of its nerdy supporting characters.

5 References Future Boy Conan

Conan takes in his surroundings in Hayao Miyazaki's Future Boy Conan

While many may hold Hayao Miyazaki as a direct inspiration for a lot of anime creators, he isn't the industry's only muse. In addition to Miyazaki's imaginative worlds in the sky, forest, and a bathhouse, Future Boy Conan is another classic anime that is almost as responsible for inspiring a lot of the industry's elites.

This series about a young boy brought up and exploring a post-apocalyptic world is referenced in the first episode of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!. It's the very anime that Asakusa watches when her mother was away and inevitably inspires her entire passion. Funny enough, the creators couldn't actually get permission to use clips from Future Boy Conan, so they ended up just tracing and reanimating the clips that they used.

4 This Is Technically Not The Franchise's First Anime

While it's incredibly special to have a manga adapted into a full-fledged anime series, the Studio SARU that fans now know and love isn't technically the series' first adaptation.

In an effort to advertise Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and all of its underground animated glory, Monthly Big Comic Spirits hosted an animation contest that would utilize the characters from the manga. Eight winners were chosen and are now circulating the internet.

3 Gender Neutral Animation

While it may sound odd as a distinct animation choice, gender-neutral animation was at the heart of this anime's production process. Mari Motohashi was the director of Episode 1; and when interviewed by Gigazine, she revealed that she ensured that the character's movements felt "gender neutral."

After reading the manga, Motohashi believed that the main characters could have just as easily been boys and wanted to capture in equal measure the girlish flare and tomboyish-ness that made the Eizouken girls like no other within the industry. According to her, Asakusa was supposedly like a middle schooler, Mizusaki still had some girlish elements, and Kanamori was like an "intellectual yakuza."

2 The Diversity Is Inspired By Owara's Old Elementary School

One of the most striking and refreshing elements of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is the fact that its central school and depiction of the year 2051 is incredibly diverse.

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This is both Owara's forward-thinking view of how the gene pool may look in the future and draws direct inspiration from his own experiences during public elementary school. As it turns out, Owara has been raised since childhood around people of different backgrounds and wanted to recapture that diversity in his series.

1 Asakusa Is Based On Owara

While it's not uncommon for creators in any industry to base characters on themselves, Asakusa is personal to Owara in a surprising way. The anime as a whole is meant to reflect Owara's own experiences from his time in his school's Motion Picture Club and how he used animation as an escape from feeling alienated from other people when he struggled with his ADHD.

Even though the series never explicitly makes the connection, Asakusa was meant to portray some of his own challenges with the condition and the eccentricities that came along the way. The series as a whole is a bridge between those feelings of escapism and how anime can help bring them into reality.

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