The Easy Breezy Weekly Fan Newsletter Issue #2

This post is written by committee for the Easy Breezy Fan Club. We hope you enjoy!

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Episode 2! Sorry we're later this week, the committee had external important business to attend to. This episode, despite only being the second one, saw a downturn in the production quality, with the character animations suffering most obviously. However, the ideas were still there and this episode has solidly set up the basis from which the rest of the story will play out: the girls have gotten their own club, their own building and even the equipment they need to start animating! What luck! The story is still firmly in the first act right now, but hopefully the cogs are just starting to turn, or should I say windmills?

The shaping and alignment of the boxes around each character reflect their way of thinking.

I feel like the story is still trying to build the sense of cohesion within the club. Last episode it brought them together as friends, but now it is trying to bring them together as a productive team. It especially seems keen to justify Kanamori-shi as an important member. This makes sense since the other two girls' roles are more obvious to anime, while the role of producer is more ambiguous but nevertheless incredibly important, as this episode shows. Without Kanamori-shi's charisma and social finesse the bargaining with the teacher would never have gone well. Midori-chan is too awkward and ungainly, as seen in her attempt to strong-arm her way through negotiations, and Tsubame-chan seems hesitant in her abilities. We did get a glimpse into the strengths that Midori has in animating though, but I'm sad to say the visual execution under-performed in this regard.

Here is a frame from the improved animation Midori drew, imagining how the windmill would turn if only the wind could blow hard enough. This was in turn foreshadowed earlier when the girls are reminded that a storm is coming in the previous scene. This sets up quite cleverly the final shot: of the windmill now truly turning in the storm's gale, nicely tying up that particular object's arc.

Brilliant work by the episode writer, but while we noticed this and were expecting this payoff to come in the form of Midori's own drawings being used to animate the real windmill, this didn't happen for some reason. Instead the payoff shot is from a different angle, and even falls foul of the problem that they discussed right there in the episode! Who ever animated that deserves to not get paid...

On closer inspection, the central axle is actually misaligned too, double oops!

One thing that was excellent this episode was the architectural design. It seems every location in this show has to be weird in some way. The teacher's office being locating inside an old swimming pool, the interesting elevated monorail station design or the part of the school built atop a river. The latter in particular being a reflection of Midori's house in the first episode, showing Tsubame's relative sheltered innocence as an ojou-sama compared to the other girls as she has never seen this before.

You can even see the old ladder used to get in and out of the pool.

So although this episode saw some wobbles in execution (I put it down to the new-to-TV-anime studio Saru), the execution is still there and you can tell there is someone holding onto the reins (it's Yuasa-san). Let's hope we keep on seeing the innovative story telling on display, and the Eizouken can take us somewhere we've never been before. See you next week!

PS: The end-illustration this week was from Eureka Seven character designer Kenichi Yoshida. Neat!