Reviews

anime about the making of anime, following in the occasional footsteps of other anime such as _Otaku no Video_ and _Animation Runner Kuromi_ and to a lesser extent shows about doujinshi like _Genshiken_ or _Comic Party_; a 2-cours anime, each cours focuses on, naturally enough, the making of a 1-cours show by the show's anime studio (mostly a stand-in for Studio Gainax, I thought, given how the in-show anime _Jiggly Heaven_ is said to have fallen to late storyboards by the director, like _Evangelion_, and the poor animation provoked a firestorm of Internet criticism, which happened with _Tengen Toppen Gurren Lagann_; but others argue it's more akin to the producing studio itself, P. A. Works, due to the problems with their previous anime, _Girls und Panzer_, which if true would make the second half much more trenchant and the whole anime that much more meta).

_Shirobako_ is not a documentary so much as a brightly-colored love-letter to an idealized image of the anime world, sanding off the rough edges like the starvation wages of animators or the outsourcing of much work to other countries (China and South Korea do not exist in the world of _Shirobako_), in which everyone is attractive & well-dressed, no one lives down to their stereotypes, plucky wannabes can succeed if they work hard, and the assholes work outside the studio or are just traumatized by past experiences, but still focusing on all the steps that go into producing a single anime episode and the large cast that tames the chaos. (Ironically, I say that it's an idealized image, but the anime industry still comes off as sometimes quite vicious nevertheless...) Shonen-style (or given that anime are made by teams, perhaps that should be sports-manga style?), our protagonists will follow their dreams and tackle the obstacles as they pop up. Like in _Animation Runner Kuromi_, the lead protagonist becomes the Production Desk, in charge of coordinating all the disparate stages and having their fingers in everyone's pies. The plot twists are a bit telegraphed (was anyone surprised when the author caused problems a second time?) or have occasional holes (how exactly was Hiraoka cured of being a embittered slacker, anyway? and I always assumed that the old guy Sugie *was* working on their current show, so that he was the solution to their animal-animation crisis came as a total surprise to me and not in a good way), and the anime references & allusions are surprisingly sparse - I particularly enjoyed the _Initial D_ homage in episode 1, the very appropriate use of the themes of _Space Runaway Ideon_ in episode 5 to reconcile two feuding studio members, and the homage to the final scene of _Cowboy Bebop_ in episode 23. Apparently every other character is a _roman a clef_, but I must admit I only caught Hideaki Anno's unusually serious appearance and Itano (of the Itano Circus), and certainly none of the voice actors or their agencies. (The parodies of light novel-based series are self-explanatory.) And naturally in an anime about producing anime, the backgrounding and design is excellently realistic ("In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe, the model is indeed near at hand.") Overall, a great watch for anyone interested in the making of anime.