As someone who watches anime, I cannot help but love Shirobako. I love the fact that it exists, I love the fact that we as fans can finally see how anime is created through the medium of anime itself, and I love the fact that not a moment of it felt untruthful. One can only imagine the process of creating Shirobako, a work so clearly imbued with love for the anime industry, love enough to lay the process bare and without overdramatization, knowing that the process alone could keep us enraptured for week after week. Following the fictional studio Musashino Animation, with the fictional production assistant Miyamori Aoi and all her colleagues as they create the fictional animes Exodus! and later The Third Aerial Girls Squad, it feels more like we're following the real studio P.A.Works and real director Tsutomu Mizushima (who, no stranger to anime about anime, was involved with Genshiken Niidaime) and his colleages as they create the real anime Shirobako. They eat together, they miss deadlines together, and together they get through weeks and weeks of effort just to see their love of anime come alive in that little white box with the final print, the shirobako itself.
And like with any real profession, especially one as laborious and strenuous as anime production, those weeks and weeks of effort constitute the vast majority of the show, as Miyamori and the rest of Musashino Animation continually schedule and reschedule, miss deadline, rewrite whole episodes, cut corners, and jump through every hoop imaginable to get their episodes out. As a high school student she produced a short amateur episode with her five friends, but while those management skills carried over to her job well, nothing could prepare her for the constant stream of mishaps that fly her way, nor her responsibility to make calls, drive all over town, and bow her head in apology as much as it takes for the problem to go away. Shirobako plays this straight; her earnestness occasionally rewards her but never gives her any special status in the professional world.
They make real compromises and sacrifices to get their episodes out on time, and outsourcing happens constantly. Even more heartbreaking are the voice actresses; we see Miyamori’s friend Shizuka work as a waitress while struggling to find voice roles, and over and over again we see her rejected, even by Miyamori’s company itself. Their friend Misa works at a 3D modeling company and spends all her time animating wheels, because that’s what her company demands. Over and over again we see the anime industry in a completely disillusioned light—not to serve as a rejection of the industry, or as a criticism of the conditions these girls work in, but as a real challenge to their resolve as anime fans and professionals, as the process by which ideas become animation after months of changing hands. They are constantly at the mercy of the broadcast company and the author of the source material, who changes his whims at the drop of a hat and forces Musashino to dance to his tune. Shirobako sells to us the truth that few other shows have managed to sell: industry is hard.
Yet the show is still a comedy, because any show about a group of people spending all their effort doing what they love is bound to be a comedy. In a fantastic reinterpretation of the idea of “cute girls doing cute things”, Miyamori goes for drinks with her high school friends and coworkers after hours upon hours of work, and suddenly all the honorifics and formality comes off as everyone whines about their corporate lives. Another gag has the assistant director luring the director of Exodus! into a steel cage with pasteries in an attempt to force him to finish the storyboard for the final episode. The shows within the show themselves, Exodus! and The Third Aerial Girls Squad, are cartoonishly clichéd, and yet everyone gets so fired up thinking of new plot points and resolutions, changing the angle of a character’s face just a bit for a more dramatic effect, when in reality they are producing the kind of cheap magical girl show many of us intentionally avoid. Later they released the first episode of each, which played out exactly according to our expectations, something we can rarely accuse Shirobako itself of.
The head of Musashino appears only to give motivational speeches and home-cooked food to his hardworking employees. But as an industry veteran he also hears from Miyamori about her favorite anime Andes Chucky, a parody of the World Masterpiece Theater classic Rocky Chuck the Mountain Rat, and instantly he can tell her a story about how they miraculously pulled through a particularly tight schedule with animating a snowstorm episode of Andes Chucky in just three days. Miyamori’s eyes light up. Here is the magic of Shirobako: with a simple story of the past, we get the perfect taste of her passion for anime and her drive to succeed in the industry. It exposes the trick behind the magic of her childhood, but in doing so it becomes the magic of her adult career. And as anime fans ourselves, we are right up there on the screen, our eyes lighting up next to hers.
I learned so much from watching Shirobako. I learned that the only thing harder to draw than horses are horses in motion. I learned that the tension between the computer graphics animation camp and the traditional hand-drawn animation camp is quite pronounced, even in this day and age. I learned that a show can be behind schedule with four episodes completed months before the show even airs. I learned that the minute-and-a-half ending credits of an episode aren’t just for show; there is a convoluted network of people coming together, constantly shifting and adjusting, all to produce one twenty minute production every week. I learned that there is so much real effort put into producing an anime that even the most mundane generic show, the type I would rip to shreds in an instant given the opportunity, could never be finished without a little love behind it. By the end I learned to love anime a little more myself.