Shirobako is What I Wanted Comic Girls to Be

Two months ago, I talked at length about Comic Girls, and how it fell short of my expectations. Comic Girls was a step outside my comfort zone when it came to anime, as the main reason I chose to watch it was part of a larger effort to expand my horizons and better understand the slice of life genre. However, the reason I chose to watch Comic Girls specifically as opposed to other slice of life series was because of my interest in the subject matter. The idea of watching characters make art appealed to me then, and it still does today.

When I finished the final episode of Comic Girls, I started doing background research on the series to prepare for my blog post about it. As I did so, I happened across the existence of a show from 2014 about the trials and tribulations of a struggling anime studio as we followed them throughout the production of an in-universe anime. I was intrigued, but I felt a bit too burned by my disappointment with Comic Girls, so I resolved to just watch it later. Well, my friends, later came. And I loved it.

This promotional image was the first thing about Shirobako that I saw when I cued up the series on VRV. And I already felt better looking at this than I did when checking out Comic Girls. The characters of Comic Girls had soft, round features and a strange, pseudo-chibi quality to their proportions, infantilizing them to an absurd degree. For Comic Girls, the selling point was not that the characters were making comics, but that the characters were cute while they did so. The characters in Shirobako, meanwhile, have realistic proportions and slightly angular (but still soft) features. They might be easy on the eyes, but these are real people living in a real world. And you know what else I see on this image that is conspicuously absent from Comic Girls? Male characters. Hallelujah!

I'm not saying that I can't relate to a story about female characters because I am a man. That's ridiculous. But when Comic Girls only has four main characters and four recurring support characters, and all of them are female, the world feels artificial. Do I need realism in my anime all the time? Hell no. My favorite anime is One Piece, realism isn't a factor in my enjoyment of an anime. But in a slice of life anime that takes place in the real world, the story needs to be grounded in reality, otherwise it hurts my ability to get invested in the story. And you know what else in this image helps sell me on this show? Behind our five main girls being cute, there's an air of chaos. You got the goth girl scribbling madly with papers flying around her, the big guy talking on the phone and looking at his watch with a distressed expression, and the two in the back running like mad. This might be a nostalgic look at the world of anime production, but the chaos hiding on the promotional image here tells me that it's going to be an honest look at production. It's not going to be all romantic all the time; it's going to be messy and chaotic and ugly sometimes. And that will make the happy moments resonate all the more. Compared to that, there's no way that the overly sappy and sweet to the point of tooth decay Comic Girls can possibly compete.

But I'm not going to compare these two shows anymore. It's not really fair to Comic Girls. As much as I prefer Shirobako over Comic Girls, they're really not comparable outside of the similarities in their premises. Comic Girls is a 12 episode adaptation of a four panel gag manga. Shirobako is a 24 episode original series that focuses more on light drama than comedy (though there are still plenty of jokes). I just wanted to explain my thoughts when I started this up and lay my biases bare so I can just gush about Shirobako for the rest of this post while I talk about the show on its own merits.

The best "Go team!" moment I've seen in a while.

Shirobako is about a group of high school friends who made a short anime together for their school cultural festival. After vowing to make this project into a professional anime as adults, we cut to two years later and follow their efforts to break into the industry. Shizuka is a voice actor who is going from audition to audition just trying to find her big break. Midori is a college student studying writing and working to become a scriptwriter. Misa is a 3D modeler who gets a cushy job with a big name studio, but feels creatively burnt out as the studio only renders vehicles for video games and she doesn't get to work on any project with a story and leave her artistic stamp on her work. And Ema and Aoi, the two we see the most often, join a struggling anime studio called Musashino Animation (or Musani for short) as an animator and a production assistant, respectively. The story predominantly follows Aoi as our point of view character as we follow her from department to department as she tries to do her part to bring the studio together to produce a hit anime to save their studio.

While promotional materials paint these five girls as our main characters, it's actually not true. The story is about them, absolutely, but this is an ensemble piece. Several recurring characters at Musani get a great deal of attention and development, to the point where poor Misa feels left out a majority of the time. The production staff, the animators, and the director are just as much protagonists in their own right as the main five are. And this is a very well-balanced cast. As the story focuses on one character, we see the other characters progress their own arcs in the background, always choosing to show their stories whenever they could instead of keeping it out of sight until it's relevant. This makes plot turns still surprising but not out of nowhere if you're paying attention. The best example of this would be Sugie.

Warning: There will be spoilers ahead.

Sugie Shigeru is a key animator for Musani who had been shown since episode 1. However, he never took the spotlight and was only ever shown drawing in silence and occasionally saying good-bye to his coworkers when he went home for the night. A typical background character that would be easy to forget about if it weren't for the fact that other characters still occasionally mentioned him when it came time to assign key frames. Anytime his name came up, however, it would quickly be dismissed as he was supposedly not used to drawing the cute modern aesthetic that their current project demanded. His most prominent role up to this point is giving Ema some advice on animating a scene featuring a cat. Without spelling it out for the audience and presenting it entirely in in-character dialogue, the viewer is given enough information to infer that Sugie is a veteran animator (I mean, he's the only major character aside from the company president that is significantly older than the average age at this company) who isn't considered to be an asset to this project and is instead working on other projects to help other studios, something that the show has already shown us is commonplace in the industry with Aoi contacting other studios and freelance animators to help them with their current project Exodus. Still, Sugie is kept in view just often enough to keep him recognizable and in the back of the viewer's head. At the end of episode 9, the director of Exodus announces a grand finale that he has planned that involves a herd of stampeding horses, which is an incredibly difficult set piece to animate. So Aoi is left scrambling for two episodes trying to find a key animator who is up to the task, quickly concluding that nobody at her studio can take on any more work. Eventually, she ends up at the doorstep of Mitsuaki Kanno (a cute little nod to Hideaki Anno of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame) in episode 12, who does decline her offer but points out that there is an animator at Musani who is up to the task. It turns out that Sugie is indeed a 40 year veteran of the industry who has a particular talent for animating animals and even worked on Aoi's favorite anime back in the 70s. 

Everything about this reveal is well done and foreshadowed perfectly. Sugie's age foreshadows his status as a veteran animator and his scene giving advice about animation while Ema is working on animating a cat hints at his expertise in animating animal characters. And the way that he is repeatedly shown without giving an overly abundant amount of focus makes his relevance feel earned and believable without necessarily being too predictable for those fans who might not be focusing on background details.

Also, look at that picture. That's the anime that Sugie used to work on, as we see much later in the series. That is the same old-school cel animation that would have been used at the time this series would have been made. And it's clearly inspired by the World Masterpiece Theater classic Rocky Chuck the Mountain Rat, which was released in 1973 by Mushi Productions. 

Wait...Mushi Productions sounds suspiciously similar to Musashi Animation, doesn't it? Well, yes, and this is another part of how Shirobako appeals to me. The creators are clearly longtime members of the anime industry, and there are tons of references and in-jokes about real people and studios in anime history. In addition to the references I've mentioned above, there are references to studios like Kyoto Animation, Production IG (or maybe it's JC Staff), Sunrise, Studio Bones, and even Pixar and Ghibli! The director of Exodus, Seiichi Kinoshita, is visually based on Seiji Mizushima (of Gundam 00 and Fullmetal Alchemist fame) and his character arc of using Exodus to make up for his past failures on a series he really cared about is based on the actual series director Tsutomu Mizushima, who had a similar meltdown on the series Girls und Panzer (a show I have never watched and I only learned about the parallels in the research I have done after watching Shirobako). This is a story beat that is honest and true to the life of a creator, and it's not the only one.

Shirobako's greatest strength in its plot is how every conflict is unique to the struggles that creative professionals face. A traditional animator feels threatened by the ever-growing ubiquity of 3D animation. A huge anime fan turned professional quickly loses his enthusiasm for the work and becomes a jaded cynic. Misa is forced to choose between a safe and stable job or a chance to find a creatively fulfilling and stimulating career. Aoi is forced to struggle with high expectations as a great deal of responsibility is thrust upon her with little to no warning or guidance. The studio is forced to work with difficult publishers who obstruct their progress at every turn. Anime production is portrayed as messy, chaotic, and sometimes just plain disheartening.

And that makes it all the more wonderful when things come together and characters succeed. And that final shot of the series makes you realize just how much these characters have been through, and how happy you are that they finally pull it off.

Don't worry, not all of these characters are important. Just most of them.

Shirobako is a beautiful story of a group of well-written and well-realized characters that comes together to be something greater than the sum of its parts. But it isn't perfect. While I love the characters and their stories, there is one aspect of the show that I haven't touched on yet, because it is the one complaint I have in an otherwise excellent show.

These two dolls are Roro and Mimuji. They are Aoi's childhood toys and they act as a window into her thoughts. Their banter is used to explain Aoi's current situation and different aspects of the anime production process. And while they have pleasant designs and their antics can be amusing on occasion, I object to their very presence in this otherwise very grounded character piece. The fantastical nature of their existence is clearly shown to be entirely in Aoi's head, with her talking to herself without either of them in the shot whenever she is framed from another character's point of view, so they clearly aren't going to directly contradict the realism the show is trying to establish. But Aoi is very clearly not insane; in fact, she's frequently portrayed as a lone pillar of stability in the chaotic office. And the writing is too smart for that sort of thing. So, I can only conclude is that these characters exist to explain things to the audience. But if that's the case, why do they wait until episode 14 or so to start explaining things? The show was doing a great job of presenting the ins and outs of production in an organic way. It trusted the audience to figure things out just by presenting these characters naturally.  Why change it halfway through? The only reason I can come up with is that someone higher up the chain thought that the story was too complicated for the stupid viewers. And that's just insulting. 

But ultimately, while Roro and Mimuji are annoying to me, they don't take away from the many many ways Shirobako succeeds on a narrative and technical level. It is an excellent show and I highly recommend it to any anime fan.