Moments of 2015: One Step Closer to Our Dream
January 1, 2016 2 Comments
If there’s any show that finished this past year way ahead of expectations, it would have to be SHIROBAKO. As an original without any of the big names that Western viewers usually pay attention to, perhaps it was not surprising that few paid it much notice at the beginning of its run, especially since the character design gave off vibes of the “moe” aesthetic that many have began to tire off.
 |
The show’s momentum, however, began to build towards the end of the first cour, as viewers really started getting invested in seeing Musani and its (mostly) earnest staff and contractors bring their hard work to fruition. And it culminated in the wonderful realisation of a goal that the five girls shared, one that brought Aoi to tears.
 |
 |
Much as I suspect that the “Seven Lucky Battle Gods” might not be the kind of show I like to watch, I sincerely hope that we’ll get to see Aoi, Ema, Zuka, Mi-chan and Ri-chan take further steps towards their ultimate dream! Come on, producers, you know you want to see it too!!
 |
|
| All together now: DON DON DONUTS!! | |
About karice
HOT CHOCOLATE IN A BOWL 
I’m OK with people liking (or even loving) Shirobako if they recognize it as “career porn” fantasy. The thing that bothers me is that most of its admirers seem to believe it represents some kind of watershed moment in anime addressing what a “real” workplace is like. Maybe I’m just a sourpuss, but to me, that’s utterly ridiculous. Real life work (and other) struggles have failures. In Shirobako, any and all setbacks were fleeting, at best.
Personally, I prefer my fairytales to be much more fantastical than this!
LikeLike
I must admit that I haven’t seen very many comments/blog posts that look at SHIROBAKO in that way. Though part of it would be that it’s not a series I followed as closely as many of the others on this list–I do seem to recall one blogger somewhere focusing on how it reflects some of the real places he’s worked at, but it didn’t resonate with me at all, so I don’t even remember who that blogger was.
That said, I wouldn’t say that all the struggles we saw in SHIROBAKO ended well. The ones that Musani and the five girls went through did, obviously–and I can understand why the creators might do that. No one wants to watch a show where the protagonist they barrack for fails, after all. But at the same time, there was an undercurrent of some of the negative things that go on in the industry in the background, such as the issue with which seiyuu would be used, or the reason behind Hiraoka’s disillusionment with the industry. Even the fact that an idiot like Tarou manages to be retained says something about the sad state of the industry–showing another consequence of how producers simply don’t put in enough funding into these projects to pay lower level staff a living wage. Furthermore, I expect Zuka in particular to continue to struggle to find work.
Maybe they could have had Musani fail to deliver something, as had happened with director Kinoshita’s previous work. But seriously, if you think about most anime series, whatever the problems they have, the vast majority of them do make the absolute deadlines, if only because the original production schedule gave them a week or two leeway in the first place.
That said, if English-speaking viewers in particular have been only focusing on the positive sides (the little I’ve seen of the Japanese fan reactions suggests that they haven’t), then I’d agree with you that their reaction could use a reality-check.
LikeLike