Shirobako focuses on a group of five girls who were once members of an animation club getting together to produce an anime for their school festival. Soon after graduation, they dreamed that they would one day produce an anime together. And thus, the real plot begins. The story focuses the working environment of an anime company where the MC is working at.
The anime does a magnificent job in explaining the steps and procedures on how an anime is produced. Beginning from the process of writing a storyboard to the step whereby it is delivered to radio station, it might not be very detailed but it is very sufficient enough to give us viewer a general idea on what's going on behind the scenes of the anime we watched today.
Apart from it being educational, the gem of this anime lies behind the characters development. The number of characters in this anime is quite enormous and almost most of them had made an appearance in episode 1. Sure enough I did not remember all of them but a few episodes later, I can roughly know them better.
Onto the main point, the anime mentioned about the characters' pasts, fears, problems etc. Some with a depressing past, some facing with a bad situation in present, some with an aimless dream. Though the anime is fiction but all these are totally reflections of our reality. If I have to pick on a theme where the anime pay a lot of attention to, I would say "dream". From the anime you could see various characters (which sometimes reflects people around us) with different reasons of being in the anime industry, different objectives at the end of the road, different interests etc. And to add on, the anime also showed how did those characters work on achieving what they dream to be. Filling with element of surprise and emotions, the developments are very well delivered to the viewers.
Next, climax. You don't need to have an extraordinary action or a tear-jerking drama to have climax into an anime. Even an anime as simple as showing the working environment could also provide tensions to the viewers. I'm not gonna spoil but all I could say that even though there isn't much climax, its a key element worth mentioning as I find them quite exciting!
Alright, a short summary, Shirobako is a comedy, slice-of-life anime which centers around an anime industry with 5 friends dreaming to be together working on an anime. I apologized for not mentioning details like the art or sound as the other elements have brought my attention away.
TL;DR version: As a whole, I seriously enjoy this and if you are viewing this page wondering whether you should give it a try, then I will say to just go on ahead. Don't turn a blind eye on this or you'll miss a great series!
Thanks for reading!
SPOILER: I love donuts too. :D
