Keep Your Hands Off Ezouken! was massively popular upon release, receiving praise from anime fans and critics alike. It became the first anime to make The New York Times' and The New Yorker's top shows of the year lists in 2020 and won one of four Galaxy Awards for the month of March that same year. In 2021, it was nominated for and won numerous awards including the Crunchyroll Anime Awards for Director of the Year and Best Animation, seven of the 10 awards it was nominated for at the 2021 Brazilian Anime Awards, and received the Grand Prize at the 2021 Tokyo Anime Awards Festival for Television Animation. The series also received a live-action adaptation and a live-action movie in 2020. With so much praise from numerous sources, why hasn't Season 2 been confirmed yet?
One of the major draws for the series was the story and characters. The first character introduced is Midori Asakusa, a shy, passionate freshman who loves anime and creates fantastical worlds based on what she observes in her everyday surroundings. It's through her sketches that the group imagines the scenarios for their projects and explores their hometown. The "producer" of the group is Sayaka Kanamori, a tall, money-driven young woman who knows the importance of negotiation and self-promoting via social media. She's the one who keeps the other two on task and acts as a buffer between them and the administration and other clubs. The final member is model Tsubame Mizusaki, who loves to observe and animate the way people move.
These three girls are the driving force behind the series, navigating the complicated world of establishing a club, attaining funding, and networking. While Midori and Tsubame want to have complete creative freedom, Sayaka understands that sometimes compromises must be made for the sake of finishing a project.
Tsubame wants to hand-animate everything, but doing so would cause the club to miss the deadline to present to the Student Council. As a compromise, she agrees to use a program that creates tweens -- the frames that go in between two keyframes that create movement -- while hand-animating the scenes that she wants. Stepping into the hand-drawn world of Midori's sketchbook, the girls explore what it means to be an animator and follow their dreams.
Despite how much praise the series has garnered, as of the time of writing, there has been no information on whether the series will receive a Season 2. It's not a matter of no source material, as the manga the anime is based on has been going since 2016. It appears to just be a matter of whether the network will approve a second season. With other series getting new adaptations several years after the conclusion of the previous ones, there's still hope for Eizouken! to join the list of upcoming releases. Whether the announcement comes in a few days or another year, fans will be eagerly waiting to see what new worlds they will be brought into thanks to the Animation Club.
