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Shirobako Movie: Unbox anime's nitty-gritty

From "8½" to "Day for Night" to "Dolemite Is My Signature," movie history is full of filmmaking. The latest addition to this self-referential genre is Tsutomu Mizushima's "Shirobako the Film," an anime about the blood, sweat and beers that brought an animated film on screen.

Shirobako the Movie

It is the sequel to the television series "Shirobako," which aired from 2014 to 2015 and focused around Aoi Miyamori (voiced by Juri Kimura), a newly minted production assistant at the fictional Musashino Animation who, along with the viewer, discovers the ins and outs of how anime is produced from scratch to screen — and all the speed bumps that pop up along the way.

Since canceling an in-progress sequence, the film opens four years later, with the great Musashino Animation a shadow of its former self. With the studio floundering, one of its executives comes to Miyamori with a bold plan: make an original theatrical film to be completed in less than a year. With a skeleton crew working studio, it's up to Miyamori to get the band back together and pull off an animated miracle.

Like the show that preceded it, "Shirobako the Film" provides a satirical but down-to - the-details realistic anime industry depiction. This involves the various creative decisions that go into an anime production, including which pieces to animate by hand and which to create machines, who to cast in which parts, etc.

But where "Shirobako" is particularly strong is its portrayal of all the more ordinary elements that go into bringing anime on screen— from production assistants driving through west Tokyo to picking up completed drawings from freelance animators to handshake deals that take place over late-night, beer-fuelled meetings in cheap Tokyo pubs.

One pivotal scene in the film involves Miyamori storming a rival company and handing her rivals a crushing blow by — waiting for it — pointing out how the small print in a contract benefits her studio. For those unfamiliar with anime production's sometimes chaotic setting, there's probably no better introduction to how the sausage gets (and sometimes doesn't get) made — and for diehards, there's plenty of clinks to real-life places and people to enjoy.

The above is for both the series and this new film, but that's where the latter lost me a bit: "Shirobako the Film" doesn't bring much to the table that the series didn't do five years ago. Like many films about bringing the band back together, it essentially acts as some form of biggest hits for the original, with many situations and jokes repeated almost line-for-line. The new characters created for the film don't add much to the dynamic, and while Miyamori and her friends are four years older, they face the same existential questions as they did in the show, including exactly why they choose to work first in the low-paid, work-life-balancing anime industry.

Nonetheless, though "Shirobako the Film" doesn't feel necessary, it's a lot of fun seeing these characters again, struggling against scheming rights holders, seemingly impossible deadlines and imaginative doubts to dream up anything worth their viewers ' time. Certainly "Shirobako"'s real-life creators.

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