With sketchbook always on hand, Midori Asakusa has a passion for drawing both the world around her and the world in her boundless imagination. In stark contrast, her best friend Sayaka Kanamori and her calculated approach to life keeps her grounded.
After a chance encounter with model Tsubame Misuzaki who has a passion for drawing fluid characters, Kanamori, sensing a money-making opportunity, suggests they start an animation club.
Take this anime series frame by frame and you will see that it is a love letter to animation and not at all as weird as you have come to expect from Masaaki Yuasa. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, head on down below.
Anime Like Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken
For Fans of Realistic Pursuing Dreams
Shirobako
The five members of the Kaminoyama High School animation club all make a pledge to make their project for the school cultural festival a huge success, then afterwards move to Tokyo and work in the industry.
Fast forward two years in the future and two members have made their dream a reality, but making anime is no easy task.
There isn’t, surprisingly, a lot of anime about actually making anime. What Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken does on a knowledgeable, but ultimately amateur, school club-level, Shirobako does on a professional level.
While both series highlight some struggles of being an animator, Shirobako often sort of glosses over it with that positive sense of pride that animators have in the process. Alternatively, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken often has them struggle due to a lack of funds, resources, and people to realize their complex dreams.
Regardless, both series fully focus on people who are very passionate about making anime.
Space Brothers
After spotting what they believe to be a UFO, two brothers Mutta and Hibito vow to become astronauts.
Fast forward to their adult years and Mutta’s life isn’t going as expected as he toils in an automotive company while the younger Hibito is well on his way to be the very first Japanese man on the moon.
When Mutta loses his job and is given a chance to catch up to his brother by joining the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, he jumps at the chance.
The journey of making anime in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is very different from the journey of becoming an astronaut in Space Brothers. However, what they have in common is that both series follow passionate characters who have a dream and are chasing it in a realistic way.
While about very different subjects, both series are mired in reality. They highlight the many struggles and small victories that come with chasing a dream you are passionate about. However, Space Brothers, because it is a very realistic story, doesn’t quite have the same high energy that the characters in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken have.
A Place Further Than The Universe
Upon discovering an old list she made in the last year of middle school, Mari Tamaki, who is now in her second year of high school, realizes she is not making the most of her youth. Whenever she tries to do something new, she is paralyzed with inaction.
Then one day she meets Shirase, a girl who’s mother went missing when she was in middle school on an expedition to Antarctica.
Knowing full well it is close to impossible, she works hard in order to go to search for her mother and invites Mari along for the ride.
Both Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and A Place Further Than The Universe focus on a group of passionate school girls with a pretty difficult goal. It is hard to make anime with just three people, and it is hard to get to Antarctica when you are a group of high school girls.
However, both series really focus on the realistic way that the characters reach those goals. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, since the characters often get lost in fantasy, is a bit more fantasy at times, but they are still showing you real animation processes. A Place Further Than The Universe is more adventurous, but still very grounded in reality.
A Place Further Than The Universe, as it does focus on some character stories, does feel a bit more dramatic with its coming-of-age moments, though.
Bakuman
As a child, Moritaka Mashiro wanted to be a manga artist like his uncle. However, after certain events transpired, he refocused his efforts towards studying in middle school.
One day, aspiring writer Akito Takagi notices some detailed drawings in Moritaka’s notebook and approaches him to propose they become a mangaka duo together.
Realizing that he might be able to get his crush to notice him if they make an anime adaption of it with her as the voice actor, Moritaka agrees, and thus, the mangaka Muto Ashirogi is born.
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Bakuman are similar in that they are about high schoolers making anime or manga, respectively, but they display that journey much differently.
Bakuman, in its storytelling, is almost like a shounen anime in its intensity and passion. Also, while the girls in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken often act like pretty normal nerdy teen girls, Bakuman has passionate and idealistic male main characters and female side characters written like the author had never met an actual female in real life before.
Both series document the creative journey and introduce realistic aspects when making anime or manga on an amateur level. It makes it educational, but also has a way of telling those stories that makes them fun.
Blue Period
In his second year of high school, Yatora Yaguchi goofs off with his friends and studies hard enough to make good grades. However, neither makes him happy. Bound by normal activities, he wonders if there is something more.
One day, he discovers the joy of drawing after becoming enchanted by a painting made by an art club member. Deciding he wants to do art as a living, Yatora faces a number challenges including his own hesitation on how far art can take him.
What Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is to anime, Blue Period is to more traditional art. Both series follow clubs dedicated to the art forms and the extremely passion-fueled members of those clubs.
However, while Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is high energy and wildly creative to the point where it is a very upbeat show, Blue Period is distinctly more of a drama. Even when artists are doing what they love, they are suffering in the creative process – Blue Period is about that suffering as well as featuring some more personal character drama.
Bocchi the Rock
Having social anxiety but still wishing to make friends, Hitori Gotou started learning the guitar to help lure people into talking to her. Years later, she has amassed great guitar skills, but is in high school with still no friends.
One day, she happens to meet an outgoing girl who just so happens to need a guitarist for her band. Gaining the nickname Bocchi, Hitori is recruited in and puts her heart into improving her stage skills to make the band a success.
While both Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Bocchi the Rock are similar in that they are about passionate, but socially flawed artists, they are about different arts. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is about making anime while Bocchi the Rock is about being a young rock musician.
Both series are about realistic struggles in the process with somewhat outcasted main characters making a friend who is just as passionate as they are. If you enjoyed how quirky Asakusa is, Bocchi has a similar energy, but with a bigger dose of social anxiety.
Both Bocchi the Rock and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken have serious moments, but are both more upbeat series that enjoy odd, but fun characters and unique visual styles that make them a treat to watch.
Girlish Number
Determined not to have a boring adult life, Chitose begins training as a voice actor so she can work at her brother’s voice acting agency.
However, when she only lands minor roles and starts clashing with other agency girls, Chitose learns that the industry is more competitive than she imagined and it will take a lot more effort to be successful.
Making anime and being a voice actor seem pretty easy, but the real truth is that it likely isn’t. Both series explore different aspects of the process, they both explore that realistically, but they make it still entertaining to watch.
However, Girlish Number showcases voice acting on a more professional level, akin to how Shirobako depicts making anime. It is not quite the frenetic school club experience of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken.
For Fans of Unique “Flat-and-Fluid” Art
Yurei Deco
The city of Tom Sawyer is an augmented reality society where citizens buy and sell services and appearance augmentations with Love, a currency akin to likes on social media. The Decos implemented in their eyes from early childhood allows them to enjoy augmented reality and also allow the government to control it.
One day, a girl named Berry with a malfunctioning Deco in one eye manages to see a boy invisible to everyone else. Following him, she ends up in a Love-draining event pulled off by the mysterious Phantom Zero.
After the government catches the boy believing him to be Phantom Zero and she helps his friends free him, Berry begins to unravel a never-ending spiral of society’s secrets as she is pulled into the fringes of society where people live without Decos and Love.
Both Yurei Deco and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken were made by Studio Saru that enjoys the same creative and unique art style in most of its works. However, art style aside, Yurei Deco feels like an anime that the Eizouken Club would make.
Throughout Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, you see Asakusa create these widely unique, somewhat sci-fi designs and you see Mizusaki really focus on fluid animation – Yurei Deco is both of that brought to life in actual anime.
If you like Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken for the energy and creativity rather than the plot about making anime, Yurei Deco brings that energy and creativity with in its own story.
Windy Tales
Nao is the president of her school’s digital photography club, which only has one other member. Instead of trying to grow the club, Nao spends he time taking pictures of clouds.
One day, when she goes to her usual shoot spot on the school roof, she sees a cat that can control the wind. Much to her surprise, when she tries to picture it, she falls off the roof and ends up being saved by her wind-controlling math teacher.
While both series share a very similar art style, Windy Tales is one of those simple, yet creative stories that feels it could be one of the animations that they’d make in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken.
That aside, both series follow a group of girls in an artistic club. However, while Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken focuses on the actual club purposes, Windy Tales gets lost in a unique, supernatural-laced tale.
The Tatami Galaxy
At a mysterious back alley ramen stand, a lonely college student in his final year accidentally bumps into a man that calls himself the God of Matrimony. There, he pours his soul out to the god about all the regrets he has about his college life, which he spent bitterly trying to break up couples.
However, soon he finds himself back at the very start of his college career. Can he change the past or will he just repeat past mistakes?
Both Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and The Tatami Galaxy come from Maasaki Yuasa, a director who has the more notable art style that these two series share. However, while Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken has high energy and some creative concepts, The Tatami Galaxy moves so quickly that it ends up more complex.
While Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is capturing the passion of the creative process with its energy, The Tatami Galaxy is using speed and complex dialogue to communicate its more high-minded concepts. The Tatami Galaxy is creative, but it is definitely telling a more complicated story that may put some off.
Ping Pong the Animation
Makoto and Yukata, nicknamed Smile and Peco, have grown up playing ping pong together.
While Yukata is bursting with confidence in his matches, Makoto is somewhat less ambitious about the sport. However, because they play their matches together, they have built a mutual love for the sport.
Ping Pong the Animation may be a sports anime, but it is a sports anime about ping pong. So, while it does get fairly detailed with the sport of table tennis, it is one of those sports anime series that is more about the characters than the sport.
Both Ping Pong and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken have a similar art style given that they are both directed by Maasaki Yuasa who cultivated that unique art style and founded Studio Saru. Expect that same unique and fluid art style, but Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is a bit more stylized while Ping Pong uses that sort of “realistic ugly” design of its characters that is also a trademark of Maasaki Yuasa’s art style in many series.
For Fans of Niche Hobby School Clubs
Do it Yourself
After the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cutting edge technologies have taken over and the old way of doing things is left in the dust. For childhood friends Serufu Yua and Miku Suride, they both applied to the elite Yuyu Girls’ Vocational High School that excels in teaching new technology.
However, due to her grades, care-free accident-magnet Yua could only get into the neighboring Gatagata Girls’ High School.
After getting into an bike accident, Yua has a run in with a passerby who fixes her bike effortlessly and later finds out that she is a member of the Do It Yourself Club. With the club in danger of shutting down due to a lack of members and becoming enchanted by the old way of fixing and building things, Yua hopes to gather new friendships and build new crafts by joining it.
Alongside both series having a similar unique art style, both Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Do It Yourself focus on school clubs that take place in a run-down old shack. They start from a rundown shack and work their way up through the projects in the show. However, while Do It Yourself gains members, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken only forges relationships with other clubs.
While Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is about making anime and Do It Yourself is about fixing and building things, both series make the topic interesting by following quirky characters that are reined in and complimented by more strict characters.
Diary Of Our Days At The Breakwater
Hina Tsurugi has just moved to a quiet seaside town with her family.
While visiting the ocean, she stumbles upon a girl named Yuuki who invites her to join her while fishing. Hina manages to land an octopus, but being afraid of bugs and big creatures, she begs Yuuki to remove it when it lands on her.
Yuuki uses this as an opportunity to try to get her to join the Breakwater Club, a club where members catch and eat fish.
Both Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Diary Of Our Days At The Breakwater are about school clubs that are focused on niche topics. Since they have such a niche focus, those clubs have problems getting members, but are managed by a clever taller girl that makes sure things get done and stay afloat.
Diary Of Our Days At The Breakwater may have a club focus, but it lacks the same frantic energy that Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken enjoys in its club activities. However, it despite lacking that, it still manages to keep its fishing topic interesting due to likable characters. Essentially, both series are educational club-based anime about a niche topic.
Laid-Back Camp
After moving, Nadeshiko decides to go see Mount Fuji. She manages to bike pretty far, but has to turn back because of the weather and ends up fainting.
When she wakes up, she finds herself somewhere she has never been and no way to find her way back. It is in this wilderness where she is saved by Rin, a girl who was out camping by herself.
While both series are about school girls in school clubs that have a very niche appeal, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and Laid-Back Camp differ in energy. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken enjoys being very frantic at times, while Laid-Back Camp is, well, more laid-back and relaxed
Both series follow characters that are very passionate about their interests and enjoy them in their club. Although they do it with different levels of energy, both series make ordinary niche topics interesting through their characters and also enjoy drawing attention to the small details of the activity. Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken wants you to see the little details in production that elevate anime from good to great while Laid-Back Camp reminds people to enjoy small moments in life.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken? Let fans know in the comments section below.
