Matt Schley
December 1, 2020 
What do Better Call Saul, Pen15 and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! have in common? They’re all among the best TV shows of 2020, according to The New York Times.
The newspaper of record has just released a list of the best TV shows of 2020, on which Eizouken! landed twice: in both the Best Shows and Best International categories.
Writes the NYT: “Woven into the let’s-put-on-a-show story line is one of the best renderings of the creative process I’ve seen on TV (with special meta-attention to the exhausting labor of animation) and an affecting theme of discovering identity through art.”
High praise for the series, which was directed by Masaaki Yuasa and based on a manga by Sumito Owara. It aired from January to March of this year, and was described by Crunchyroll like this:
First year high schooler Midori Asakusa loves anime so much, she insists that “concept is everything” in animation. Though she draws a variety of ideas in her sketchbook, she hasn’t taken the first step to creating anime, insisting that she can’t do it alone. The producer-type Sayaka Kanamori is the first to notice Asakusa’s genius. Then, when it becomes clear that their classmate, charismatic fashion model Tsubame Mizusaki, really wants to be an animator, they create an animation club to realize the “ultimate world” that exists in their minds.
Source: NYT
