{"id":85040,"date":"2024-02-01T02:00:34","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T02:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.alltheanime.com\/?p=30512"},"modified":"2024-02-01T02:00:34","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T02:00:34","slug":"shirobako","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/01\/shirobako\/","title":{"rendered":"Shirobako"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Andrew Osmond.<\/p>\n

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Shirobako <\/a><\/em>opens\u2026 misleadingly, actually. Its first minutes show an animation high-school club where five close-knit girls are making their own anime mini-epic. Once that\u2019s been done, they promise each other, they\u2019ll join up again to make something else. And then\u2026 the story skips forward two and a half years. Two of the friends, now young adults, are working at the same Tokyo studio, but their friendship isn\u2019t the focus. Instead, there are loads more<\/em> characters for us to meet. There are na\u00efve newbies, and veterans who can be genial or forbidding, and they all have their own issues and conflicts. This is the adult world of anime, way more complex than a high-school club.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Shirobako<\/em> is mostly set in an anime studio, Musashino Animation. The studio is fictional, but Musashino is a part of central Tokyo, and it\u2019s home to several real studios, including Production I.G and the studio it grew from, Tatsunoko. In Shirobako<\/em>, we see the staff struggle to make TV anime through the eyes of young Aoi Miyamori. Once she was the leader of the school club. Now she\u2019s just a production assistant, which means she\u2019s racing around the various departments, trying to liaise between people who can be very, very hard to deal with, while the clock\u2019s always ticking down to deadline.<\/p>\n

Aoi can occasionally grab a drink with Ema, her former clubmate who\u2019s also at Musashino as a rookie animator. They\u2019re joined by their other former clubmates, who offer glimpses into other sides of anime. There\u2019s Misa (\u201cMii\u201d) who works at a CG studio; Shizuka, a struggling voice actor; and Midori (\u201cRii\u201d) who\u2019s a university student and budding writer. But other characters are just as important, including the high-strung, childlike director Kinoshita, on whom so much depends, and his production manager Honda, who must physically force Kinoshita in the right direction. At first these men are visually linked by their tubbiness, though eventually that changes.<\/p>\n

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The 24-part series covers Musashino\u2019s production of two different anime \u2013 one an original show, and the other adapted from a popular manga. As you can guess, each kind of production throws up its own curveballs, although there are some similarities between them. For example, one of the worst tortures for everyone is getting the end <\/em>of the series right.<\/p>\n

Today, many Anglophone anime fans are savvy about the industry\u2019s production process. That\u2019s largely due to the rise of sakuga<\/em> fan commentary \u2013 fans who break down a piece of animation into the individual shots and movements, and celebrate the many artists behind them, often translating Japanese sources or interviewing creators themselves. As of writing, the prominent English-language sakuga sites include sakugabooru<\/em>, fullfrontal.moe<\/em> and Anim\u00e9tudes<\/em><\/a>, all well worth visiting.<\/p>\n

For readers less familiar with anime\u2019s production, some basic terminology is handy. For instance, a \u201ccours\u201d refers to a three-month TV season. As used in Japan, a \u201ccut\u201d is what we call a shot, rather than the end of a shot. Then there\u2019s a lot of talk of \u201ckey\u201d and \u201ckeyframe\u201d animation, alternatively written \u201ckey frame.\u201d These are the frames of animation that shape and define movements on screen, and passages of movement too. These bits of animation can be simple, or bogglingly complex. The frames of movement than connect key frames are called \u201cin-betweens\u201d (or tweens for short). The convention is that experienced animators will draw keyframes, while beginner animators supply in-betweens.<\/p>\n

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Anime doesn\u2019t start with the animation, though. Before that, it\u2019s drawn as a comic-strip style storyboard \u2013 this may be done by the anime\u2019s director, though that\u2019s not always the case. (Storyboards are sometimes made available as extras on anime home releases, or else they\u2019re published as thick books in Japan.) In Shirobako, <\/em>the director Kinoshita does indeed do the storyboards, and the agony of drawing them is a big part of the early episodes. After the storyboards, there\u2019s the layout stage. Layouts are visual guides to the animators and background artists, showing where characters will be placed in a scene, the details of camera movements, directions on action, and so on.<\/p>\n

It might all sound dry in the abstract. Shirobako<\/em>, though, dramatises the process by showing the artists struggling to get it right<\/em> \u2013 for instance, we see the devastating effect on the newbie animator Ema when her key animation is rejected. That judgment is made by an animation director (AD), a woman freelancer called Segawa who\u2019s quietly brilliant, though we\u2019ve already seen how thin she\u2019s spread. In part one, the Musashino staff beg her to draw a heap of keyframes at the last minute after a botch-up. Rough keyframes will do, they say, but Segawa\u2019s not having that. She\u2019ll do them right, or not at all.<\/p>\n

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Is that about having professional integrity? Or is Segawa being childishly precious about \u201cher\u201d bit of a group enterprise? That question will mushroom later, when one of the studio\u2019s production team openly scorns artists who won\u2019t wave through work fast and want it done better. Shirobako<\/em> is built on such conflicts. For instance, there\u2019s a male animator called Ryosuke who walks out of the studio in high dudgeon when he hears that a cut (or shot) that he was preparing, involving lovely, lovely explosions, will be made in CG instead.<\/p>\n

Anime is about more than just the visuals. We get look-ins at the colouring department, and at the people who tirelessly provide all those footsteps and door-slams that you don\u2019t register consciously, but would miss instantly if they were gone. As for voice-acting, that gets its own running strand as we follow the struggles of Aoi\u2019s friend Shizuka to get a voice part, her confidence shaken by every stumble. There\u2019s a scene where she\u2019s with a bunch of other actors to provide voices for a background crowd (what\u2019s called a \u201cwalla group\u201d in America). But Shizuka tries too hard, shouts too loud and humiliates herself. If she can\u2019t be a decent voice in a crowd, what hope is there for her as a voice actor?<\/p>\n

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Later on (part 14), the voice-actor strand brings in a bitingly sardonic portrait of a production committee. Those are the company sponsors who\u2019ve invested in an anime series and expect their due returns. One sponsor rep insists the lead must be voiced by a singer who can pump out tie-in songs. Another wants the heroine to be voiced by a sexy model who can do live events and bikini shoots, and so on. In the second half of the series, Musashino Animation adapts a popular manga, which is hugely prestigious. But it leaves the studio at the mercy of the manga\u2019s powerful and inaccessible creator, who can capriciously veto what the studio\u2019s done and throw everyone into chaos.<\/p>\n

While names are fictionalised to protect the innocent (and guilty), some of the anime\u2019s references are obvious. For example, in part 6 two rival animators bond over their common love of a classic robot anime called Idepon<\/em>. That\u2019s modelled on Space Runaway Ideon<\/em>, an epic 1982 anime space opera that was apocalyptic even by anime standards. It was created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, the father of Gundam<\/em>. Shiraboko<\/em> episode 12 sees the appearance of an industry legend whose identity will be instantly obvious to many readers \u2013 even his name is only a letter away from the real one. The only pity is he\u2019s not voiced by the real person, who\u2019s done anime voice-acting elsewhere. No, it\u2019s not Miyazaki, though there\u2019s a hilarious Miyazaki gag worked in too.<\/p>\n

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One of the most important episodes, though, is part 19. Aoi is taken by her genial studio president, Marukawa, to a shuttered old studio where he worked decades ago. It\u2019s a tribute to a bygone age when CG was just sci-fi and everyone worked with physical paints and plastic cels, making masterworks to inspire future generation. Judging by the \u201cvintage\u201d animation that we see, the old studio was operating in the 1970s, maybe even the 1960s, when it made a wonderful cartoon about a brave Alpine hedgehog, smacking of Heidi<\/em> and The Moomins<\/em>. If only it had been real! As for Marukawa, his name\u2019s a giveaway. He\u2019s surely based on Masao Maruyama, who\u2019s been in anime since in the 1960s, co-founding Madhouse in 1972 and founding MAPPA in 2011.<\/p>\n

These references are just the start. For a far deeper dive, there\u2019s an article by Kevin Cirugeda on the sakugabooru<\/em> site, called \u201cShirobako\u2019s Secrets<\/a>.\u201d Among other things, Cirugeda reports how the childlike director Kinoshita was cheekily modelled on Seiji Mizushima, who directed such 2000s shows as the first Fullmetal Alchemist<\/em> and Gundam 00<\/em>. As for a crazy piece of animation in Shirobako<\/em> part 12 \u2013 it involves police cars, flying, and lots and lots of horses \u2013 that was actually guest-drawn by Toshiyuki Inoue, who\u2019s animated everything in his time from Kusangi diving down a building (Ghost in the Shell<\/em>) to a little witch in flight (Kiki\u2019s Delivery Service<\/em>).<\/p>\n

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Shirobako<\/em> is an upbeat series, showing Musashino Studio rising in the industry. That\u2019s surely a little self-promotion on the part of Shirobako<\/em>\u2019s real studio P.A. Works (which is not<\/em> based in Musahino but outside Tokyo, in the mountainous Toyama prefecture). Founded in 2000, P.A. Works spent its early years doing below-the-line support work, before breaking out with shows like the exuberantly tragic Angel Beats!<\/em> (2010).<\/p>\n

Since then, P.A. Works has had made a wide range of work, from the heartrending fantasy film Maquia<\/em> to the delightful 2023 school show Skip and Loafer<\/em>. But one strong running strand for the studio has been its \u201cworkplace\u201d anime, about people in grounded jobs. P.A.Works has made the series Hanasaku Iroha<\/em>, set in an onsen inn; Sakura Quest<\/em>, about a tourist board striving to promote a remote village; The Aquatope on White Sand<\/em>, about an seaside aquarium in Okinawa; and the 2023 film Komada: A Whiskey Family<\/em>, about a distillery. Sliding in among them, Shirobako<\/em> isn\u2019t just about the rise of an anime studio, but the rise of the studio which made Shirobako<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One last issue is raised by the show\u2019s title. \u201cShirobako\u201d means \u201cwhite box\u201d; in the industry, it refers to the box that carries the physical copy of a completed animation, usually a TV episode. Once these would have been videotapes, though when a \u201cshirobako\u201d box is glimpsed in part 3 of the series, it\u2019s plainly for a disc. A digital file is one thing, but a tape or a disc is concrete<\/em> proof of a studio\u2019s efforts.<\/p>\n

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Indeed, Shirobako<\/em> shows the perils of assuming that everything is digital now. In an early episode, a server goes down at a crucial moment, meaning vital data can\u2019t be sent and a hard drive must be couriered to Tokyo from an outsourced studio in the sticks. The series goes further, though. At the climax, there\u2019s a madcap scene where characters are taking tapes (not discs) of a finished episode and rushing them to broadcast studios around Japan, by plane, train and automobile. This isn\u2019t<\/em> because of a network meltdown. Rather, the script indicates, the broadcasters need the episode in a physical format. (There was a similar situation in the \u201cMellow Maromi\u201d episode of Satoshi Kon\u2019s Paranoia Agent<\/em>, though that was ten years before Shirobako<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Viewers may be befuddled. Even when Shirobako<\/em> was shown in 2014, wouldn\u2019t an anime studio just send episodes to broadcasters\u2019 hard drives? Actually, Japanese TV stations were using betacam tapes (with material in digibeta form) as a standard format until at least 2011, when the facility making those tapes in the city of Sendai was damaged in the catastrophic Tohoku earthquake.Granted, Shirobako<\/em> may have been using a little dramatic licence, and shifting the clock back a few years.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s last episodes also include hilarious excursions into \u201canime\u201d reality, such as a crucial creative meeting in a high-rise building that plays like Sergio Leone meets Shonen Jump<\/em>. As for the mad rush to get the tapes to the TV stations, it enters Charlie Kaufman territory. Even while you enjoy the climax, you\u2019ll be clocking the huge number of shots and backgrounds and characters and thinking how exhausting it all must have been to make. Behind any artistic licence, perhaps this is the reality of the anime industry that P.A. Works wanted to show, as frenzied as any car chase.<\/p>\n

Andrew Osmond is the author of <\/strong>100 Animated Feature Films<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Shirobako<\/em> <\/a>is released in the UK by Anime Limited. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

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By Andrew Osmond. Shirobako opens\u2026 misleadingly, actually. Its first minutes show an animation high-school club where five close-knit girls are making their own anime mini-epic. Once that\u2019s been done, they promise each other, they\u2019ll join up again to make something else. And then\u2026 the story skips forward two and a half years. Two of the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[61,122,127,129,124,128,125,132,131,133,126,130,123,66,94,88,97,56,64,65,60,112,40,75,95,104,33,120,105,101,98,115,30,29,41,86,70,69,68,72,71,26,118,108,87,46,55,48,52,54,51,50,83,62,58,57,109,35,59,63,85,79,82,96,80,27,81,114,44,42,43,45,38,39,110,117,100,111,116,73,89,90,92,91,93,84,78,37,102,34,36,77,67,74,99,113,119,28,121,32,47,49,53,103,31,76],"class_list":["post-85040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","tag-airpods","tag-anime","tag-anime-characters","tag-anime-cosplay","tag-anime-edits","tag-anime-merchandise","tag-anime-movies","tag-anime-news","tag-anime-recommendations","tag-anime-reviews","tag-anime-series","tag-anime-streaming","tag-animes","tag-app-store","tag-app-store-samsung","tag-appgallery","tag-appgallery-oneplus","tag-apple","tag-apple-music","tag-apple-tv","tag-apple-watch","tag-bbc-sport","tag-best-mobile-games","tag-bixby","tag-bixby-xiaomi","tag-champions-league","tag-cyberpunk","tag-cyberpunk-2077","tag-fantasy-football","tag-fifa","tag-football","tag-formula-1","tag-fortnite","tag-free-fire","tag-free-mobile-games","tag-freebuds-pro","tag-galaxy-a52","tag-galaxy-note-20","tag-galaxy-s21","tag-galaxy-watch-4","tag-galaxy-z-fold-3","tag-game","tag-games","tag-golf","tag-harmonyos","tag-how-to-backup-iphone","tag-how-to-factory-reset-iphone","tag-how-to-reset-iphone","tag-how-to-restore-iphone","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone-5","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone-6","tag-huawei","tag-ios","tag-ipad","tag-iphone","tag-live-soccer","tag-lol","tag-macbook","tag-macos","tag-mate-40-pro","tag-mi-11-lite","tag-mi-home-security-camera-basic-1080p","tag-mi-home-security-camera-basic-1080p-huawei","tag-mi-smart-band-6","tag-minecraft","tag-miui","tag-mlb-scores","tag-mobile-game-design","tag-mobile-game-development","tag-mobile-game-marketing","tag-mobile-game-monetization","tag-mobile-games","tag-mobile-gaming","tag-nba-scores","tag-nba-standings","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-scores","tag-nhl-scores","tag-one-ui","tag-oneplus","tag-oneplus-9-pro","tag-oneplus-buds-pro","tag-oneplus-nord-ce-5g","tag-oxygenos","tag-p40-pro-plus","tag-poco-x3-pro","tag-pokemon","tag-premier-league","tag-pubg","tag-pubg-mobile","tag-redmi-note-10-pro","tag-samsung","tag-samsung-pay","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-steam","tag-steeam","tag-top-10-anime","tag-valorant","tag-when-do-the-iphone-7-come-out","tag-when-does-the-iphone-7-come-out","tag-when-is-the-iphone-7-coming-out","tag-world-cup","tag-xbox-series-x","tag-xiaomi"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85274,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85040\/revisions\/85274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}