This essay contains spoilers for the Shirobako film.
As crazy as things have been over the past several months, my husband and I are finally at the point where we’re willing to go out and see the occasional movie again. As it was prior to the original lockdown, the majority of our moviegoing energy has been spent seeing limited-run anime showings on odd nights of the week. This pretty much guarantees both a small crowd (which has been helpful to settle my fears of being out in public again) and that we’ll enjoy what we’re there to see. Recently we ventured out to see a film we’ve been waiting to arrive stateside for a long time, the Shirobako movie. We both loved the anime series and really wanted to the witness the continuing adventures of the characters that we’d grown to love. That said, to expect the same of a beloved franchise (and in some sense, to receive it), can lead to some issues.
As someone slowly learning to acknowledge my neurodivergence, one of the amusing things I’ve been learning is that weird traits of mine I’ve thought were just quirks (or on bad days, complete failures) are often somewhat common among folks who share my “issues.” One fascinating aspect of ADHD that I seem to share with some of my peers is a very strange sense of “object permanence” as it applies to relationships. On the positive side, I can pick up again with someone who I haven’t seen in a while as if we’ve never been apart. I have a small group of friends I’ve known since I was in high school (and some of them I’ve known quite a bit longer) who I only see face-to-face around the Christmas holidays when they’re back in Minnesota. Yet, to me, I have no problem behaving as if I’ve just seen them days before. That comes with it a downside, however; in the meantime, these folks have been living their lives, growing their families, and changing themselves to fit their chosen lives. They’re definitely not unchanged and my perceptions of their static natures are easily proven to be misinformed.
I’ve gotten extremely self-conscious over the years about this. I often think about initiating contact with my friends throughout the year rather than just at the end of it, and yet I talk myself out of it. “It’s been too long already,” or “I don’t really know what I’d say to them and it feels random.” This has gotten worse since they all have families now and my own infertility has left me feeling like I’m on the outside looking in in the worst possible manner. Perhaps the most succinct way that I can describe this is that I simply feel out-of-sync with them. The image of them I have in my head, paused indefinitely until I see them again, is most certainly mismatched with their reality. And I feel like I should know better by now.
The Shirobako movie picks up a few years after the TV anime left the Musashino Animation crew. The film leads off with an amusing summary of the TV series’ plot, before revealing that in the years since both the studio and the anime industry have seen some hard times. Musani’s latest TV series has been cancelled part way through production, and a film they’ve been working on as an animation contractor has gone completely off the rails due to the storyboards from their client being basically nonexistent at the contractually-defined day of delivery. So, with a shell of a company, Aoi Miyamori is left to decide whether to give up entirely or find some creative way to make lemonade from lemons already months past their expiration dates.
The answer here is obvious; Miyamori, having learned much about the peculiarities of the anime production process during her employment at Musani, manages to call in favors, approaches former colleagues who have since moved on to other jobs, and even helps “convince” Musani’s problematic former client to drop threats of a potential lawsuit so that the company can move forward with creating “SIVA” on their own terms. Once again, the true grit of the Japanese anime industry is reflected in the absolute madcap last minute work of the animators, animation directors, and many other staff members.
Before I say anything else, I want to note that I really enjoyed this movie. It was wonderful to be able to meet with these friends again and to experience a story that takes a joyous look at the creative process, specifically one that’s made such a huge impact on my own life. But I think my experience with Shirobako represents a dissonance between storytelling that’s willing to provide more of something comfortable and familiar, and the realities of a changed world and an audience that’s been living their lives in the meantime.
Much of the movie’s run time is spent “getting the gang back together” in one way or another. The Shirobako TV series begins with a scene around a boardroom table where several characters are named in quick succession on screen, and then we spend the remainder of the series (2-cours, a real luxury nowadays, it seems) learning more about them and their personal stake in the production process. The film wants to involve each of these characters in some way, which is understandable – we all have our favorites. But with only 2 hours to work with, a couple of additional characters to introduce, and 4 years to try to account for, creating a satisfying narrative for all of these folks is a literal impossibility. We’re left to reconcile our static imagery – our memories – of the characters we love with the gasps and glimpses we receive as they rush by on the way to the movie’s finish line, and it’s an unsettling, discordant feeling.
The real world has also changed in the 6 years since the series ended. Rather than a down turn, the anime industry has entered a nigh-unsustainable fever pitch, where desire for new and more anime coupled with a general unwillingness to pay and develop up-and-coming domestic talent (as well as the extra hardships put in place by the Covid-19 pandemic) has left the entire anime creative complex stretched paper thin. If I had to give one major criticism of the Shirobako TV series, it might be that it introduced into its narrative some of the issues with overwork that had become endemic to the anime industry while sunnily glossing over the severity of their impact. The Shirobako movie goes further, introducing a last-minute and very major animation and narrative change a very short time before delivery of Musani’s film project, yet doing so without showing the consequences to the production staff – the people who’ve been so carefully gathered over the course of the rest of the film. The re-done scene is beautiful and epic – in spite of it being a completely made-up story-within-a-story, I admittedly had tears in my eyes watching it. I love the results of people pushing themselves to the limit to animate something amazing, but more and more my heart becomes weighed down with the amount of work it takes to separate that desire for aesthetic beauty from the ugliness it often takes to create it.
And that may explain the reticence I had to connect with this film, even though I’d been anticipating it from the moment it was announced. The past few years have marked a loss of innocence, a chipping away at my ability to remain blissfully ignorant of the injustices doled out against the creative folks who work so hard to tell stories using the anime medium. Even though I love anime the most among all my other hobbies, I’m constantly reminded of how troubled the industry is that produces the slate of new series that appear every season. And so, when a beloved franchise reappears with a fist bump and a smile as if unaffected by the tumult in the meantime, it starts to feel as though it doesn’t really know me as the person that I’ve become. It doesn’t mean that there’s no longer any love between us, but our relationship is fundamentally out-of-sync. To be reminded of that is uncomfortable, despite how much I care about these characters.
Ultimately, this is a good movie. It’s fun and there are several great moments (Miyamori’s fantasies being definite high points). I just think such a potentially dense narrative would have been better served by a more generous, TV-sized run time (please, can we get a second season?) and a slightly more realistic stance on how anime production has struggled in recent years. It’s a fact of the medium that’s impossible to ignore once you’re aware of how absolutely disastrous it’s become, and an anime-focused film that almost completely obscures and glosses-over that just feels out-of-touch. I guess the saying is true – you really can’t go home again.
Shirobako: The Movie is currently available for pre-order on Blu-ray in the U.S., with an upcoming release on October 26th, 2021.