Shirobako episode 3

RUN! It's the walking dead! Behold I am Zombie Tenchi rising from the grave to bring you a heap of new posts. Because that is what zombies do. They watch 8 anime episodes at once and start blogging and watch more shows and never finish anything for almost an entire month. X___X Like the last post was on Halloween and now it is almost Thanksgiving. I have been a bad little zombie blogger. Please don't give up on me and all my lateness.

Anime=Where dreams come true!

I have finally sat down and finished MOST of the anime posts I stared. I have 1.5 episodes to go...on things I started. Yeah a bit behind on everything. But I am assuming that the new Pokemon game is going to enter my life soon so if I want a chance at catching up before Christmas I figured I better do it now. So let's get started with Shirobako episode 3. Spoilers for.....one facial expression adding a week's worth of work.

Clearly this scene needs to be changed. Adding 17 hours of extra work for one face.

Episode Summary: Seiichi and Aoi show the in house animators the new scene of Arupin yelling that she knew the betrayer was…betraying them. The new scene meaning the voice acting has changed but not the drawings yet. The animators see right away the acting is better than the drawing and Seiichi explains how he wants the scene to go now. Yuka (general animation supervisor assistant….) quickly sketches something to see if she understands everything correctly. Yuka seems to think that they can have this new scene done by tomorrow morning which impresses newbie Ema. Yuka and Ema get right to work but Ema stops to take a little break to spy on Yuka whom she really idolizes. Seiichi ends up spending the night at work and can be heard mumbling about recap episodes. Aoi is either at work bright and early or also worked through the night. I am going to assume it was bright and early. Or I could rewatch the episode and it’s nighttime……She goes through everything that she needs to get done today. I am going to also assume I finally know what it is Aoi does. Each assistant is assigned to a different episode and is in charge of making sure each component is done on time so the next one can take place. While episode 4 is being worked on Aoi needs to start working on episode 9. It seems like a lot of running around work and Aoi starts to get a little stressed about 4 key frames for episode 9 that aren’t being done in house. But she is mostly stressed about the retakes for episode 4 and how to coordinate all the people for that mess. Erika comes by and tells Aoi to not to get sidetracked with admiring the art and to stay on task. Erika also gives Aoi some advice on how one of her key animators like to…say things are okay when really they aren’t. Aoi calls the man in a panic and he doesn’t answer the phone. This causes Aoi to assume the worst. Erika is like meh it will be okay so thanks for worrying her for nothing. Honda comes by and Aoi watches as Erika perfectly talks about her episode 7 and the status of everyone and everything involved. Honda then turns to Aoi and starts firing away questions about…well everything. At first Aoi has all the answers but then she gets super frazzled. Erika hits the man for going too hard on Aoi and Honda apologizes for worrying. Aoi is able to answer the questions anyway about…well all those things that were fired off way too fast for me. Erika gives Aoi a few pointers on what to focus on first and who to give the extra work too. There is a brief scene with Yamada and another artists working on clips when Aoi comes by with some review work. Yamada asks her to calculate times in her head and gives her strict orders to wake him up at 6:30 am the next morning. Well really today as it were.

Everyone is cracking under pressure.

Aoi goes back to her desk to fret about what else needs to be done. She passes out briefly and has a dream that her dolls are arguing about her job. Soon the morning rolls around and Aoi is off waking people up, making sure sketches get done, and running them to every single person in this series at a breakneck speed making her look super busy. While handing the frames over to Rinko Ema gets called out on spying as she wants to learn this looking over process. Apparently looking things over is a skill that you can get super fast at over time. Aoi keeps on running around and accidentally makes a mistake due to her lack of thinking or sleep. Aoi checks the mail and finds out one of her people haven’t sent over the frames. Well it turns out he just woke up and assures her all will be well. Later he calls back and thinks he can’t do it at all and Aoi starts to lose her mind. Eventually she is able to pick everything up and runs to the colorer who assures her things like this happen all the time and not to worry. The work they have out sourced is finished but….the server is down and they are unable to send it via the computer. Aoi then has a break from reality and does the dishes instead. Erika sees Aoi and takes the girl up to the roof for a snack break. She tries to get Aoi to talk about what is wrong and to focus. Downstairs everyone starts to realize the internet or the server is messed up. Several people get involved but I am not a computer expert by any means so I really can’t tell you all that happened. Just that the files from the out sourced company could not be sent. The head office lady Yuka calls this company while everyone panics and has them drive the data over here even though it will take 2 hours. Aoi tries to then go finish episode 9 work and Erika is like hello anime is team work and other crap. She then offers to do some of the assistant jobs or…something despite that not being her duty. Because she believes in team work too. So off she and everyone goes working. Eventually the out sourced work arrives and the President of that company talks the ear off the President of this company. Seiichi views the new work and the tiny changes and it is a tear jerker. Aoi is told all the work is done and to send her people home. She then thanks Honda for all his hard work….He says mistakes happen and she will grow as a person. She tells her team that all the work for episode 4 is done woohoo! She then calls Shizuka to confirm plans for Sunday with all the girls. She then sits down with Ema to watch the complete version of episode 4 complete with Arupin ugly face. THE END!

I am sure the President has a name. But really he is named Dude Who Makes Food.

Okay wow folks. I was thinking that this episode was going to be so easy to blog. That I was going to simply say for the summary Aoi worked on episode 4 and a million things went wrong but in the end Arupin got her ugly cry while Aoi ran around appearing to look busy the entire time. Yes a run on sentence for the summary indeed. Instead I typed….a million words. How did that happened?! Clearly I have the crazies….

SO MANY NAMES!

But yes folks. I might have used up all the words in the universe for the summary but in reality…this episode was all over the place and half the time I had no idea what was going on. X___X Like how to blog this when I am not super sure what Aoi does for a living and when there are a million characters featured in this episode for a slightly brief amount of time. SO MANY CHARACTERS! It is like they want my brain to explode or something. Perhaps this show was created to show everyone what was on the line. If you don’t buy DVDs and BLUrays….none of these people will get paid. And there are a lot of mouths to feed apparently. So folks…downloading anime is bad. Very bad.

I see everything!

As I continue on with my downloaded anime….I am going to sit down and try to explain to myself what it is Aoi actually does. I am convinced she doesn’t do any drawing or coloring. We know she doesn’t do any voice acting. She MIGHT scan the prints to the computer and upload them final copies. You know, after she is doing running around with a million cells and folders all the time. But I believe Aoi’s main job is to oversee every single aspect of certain episodes. Mainly 4 and 9. Maybe another one but that hasn’t been mentioned yet. That means she is required to know who is working on what rough cuts, final drafts, coloring, ect. She needs to know when these things will be done and has to schedule when the next part can be done without asking anyone’s time so timing is important. So basically Aoi is supposed to keep track of everyone and everything as her only work while not having a hand at the actual anime episode herself.

Aoi's job is to apologize and be responsible for other people's actions.

Is that rude to say? Because I do like how Japan tries to find a job for everyone to keep unemployment low. People seem to accept higher prices on things because that will keep taxes low. Like you would have been spending that money anyway. So sometimes that means there is a lot of stupid red tape and people to go through because…well everyone needs a job. And sometimes that is how I felt Aoi was being. Not that I don’t like the girl. A job is a job after all. It just seems she was running herself stressful and crazy when in reality couldn’t this be done without Aoi? Just do things in order and the person who has the copies last gives it to the next person. No middle man involved, just everyone following a linear line of an episode and the last person who has the product will look it over and give it to the general manager who will give the A OKAY.

Honda is in charge of the episodes and then appoints minions like Aoi to be in charge of specific episodes?

But that is apparently not how anime works. And maybe if it did go this way things would end badly. No one person would know every little bit of an anime episode and things could fall through the crack and some finger pointing could occur. No one would be held to a time frame and since animes are made….three minutes before they actually air it is impossible for the boss to know each episode well. So this is where the assistants come into play. They aren’t drawing or coloring or voice acting things. Instead they are assigned a view episodes and keep everyone on track. Unless their name is Tarou they are supposed to be up people’s butts and never take no for an answer. So while Aoi is not doing any of the work herself she gets super stressed out over what she knows needs to be done. It is all in her head, bouncing around her brain and keeping her awake at night. Little lists of what needs to be finished and who has what scenes. Or she did until Honda came over and asked too many questions and turned her brain into mush. So Aoi has a reason to work.

Ema is like we can?!

All of this insanity in this episode happened over one little scene changes. Seiichi turned over the new voice acting part of his Arupin having lots of feelings moment and the artists all agreed that the voice acting was much better than the art and that Seiichi’s changes were sound. This TINY moment of animation meant tons of reworking. The voice acting was already complete but these tiny moments in anime add up into tons of work. Work that was being done in house and sent to other animation studios. I still find it odd that more things aren’t done in a studio. Like I knew manga artists work mostly at home but I thought all animes were done by people who worked at the same office so things would look similar all the time. Guess not. So that means Aoi has to lose her mind more over keeping track of slackers at home who are sleeping and not working. So many pieces of the puzzle spread out all over the place. I can see how that can get confusing, keeping track of all that. But I can also see how that could lead to some downtime. If everyone is working on what they need to do and Aoi is up to date on the situations what else can she do you know?

It's Aoi's job to wake people up and keep them on task?

That was most of the episode. Aoi and her lack of sleep trying to get episode 4 done while not neglecting her other episodes. Aoi freaking out and thinking she is letting her boss down. Dude these people work late. I almost feel bad complaining about my latest job as I never had to work past midnight and be up by 6:30. X___X Insanity. Yet Aoi was expected to do it all. Like um when can this girl get some sleep? She was constantly apologizing and being lectured to despite the fact she was doing her best and it was other people slacking or Seiichi’s idea to change one ugly face. And then the computer software crashed and the one file she needed was not going to be sent in time. I sorta liked that she lost her mind so much that she was doing dishes. I didn’t like that she blamed herself for this issue though. Not knowing much about computers how can she be the one to blame when she wasn’t the one who asked for the change? All dazed and confused…poor thing. Everything did work out in the end but I think Aoi aged 5 years in the meantime.

Ema spying on someone she feels is awesome.

In between Aoi freaking out and everyone in the world having a tiny part of this episode there were some other moments worth mentioning. Ema was adorable all over the place. She and Aoi are new to the business and as such are in awe of others that are in the same position but have been there longer. Ema watches Rinko and Yuka like they are the most amazing people on the face of the planet. Perhaps Misato is a bit higher rank wise but since Ema never leaves the office (because she needs supervision) she might not know to super look up to that woman yet. For now it is all about Yuka and Rinko who seem to get things done within a blink of an eye.

Eff you computers. All day long.

Aoi has her own moment of you are so awesome too. Well it wasn’t so much hero worship as it was Erika was rescuing Aoi from a stressful situation. All day long. Erika knows how animes work and things aren’t perfect. I think Aoi was assuming things were going to be her fault if they went wrong. Maybe it would have been blamed on her but I thought the artist were more at fault. In any event Erika was calm down Honda, have some chocolate Aoi, and we will all figure this out together. Maybe. Even if it wasn’t going to be alright I am glad that Erika was there to keep Aoi from washing all the dishes ever and quitting her job. Is this Aoi’s first job at all at the studio or just the first time she has been in charge of episodes alone? I hope it is the second option because the first one would be….a bit much for a newbie. Erika probably knows the new to the team feeling and made sure that Aoi didn’t fly away to crazy land while knowing what was expected of her. Yay for being friends.

Such....such a difference.....

So as episode 4 is finally finished Ema and Aoi can breathe a sigh of relief. All that rush and running around like chickens with no heads is done…well until episode 9 comes around of course. This finally means there can be time for friends. Because there were 5 girls in the animation club and we have only really focused on Aoi with a side of Ema and splash of lonely Shizuka. What about the two younger girls? Are they having a tough time as well because they are younger and would be fresh to this crazy city of Tokyo? Shizuka still hasn’t caught her break and she has been there probably as long as Ema and Aoi so….are the other two girls just as busy working other jobs while waiting for their dream job? Everyone must be busy as they barely have time to spend together. Almost makes me sad but I guess that is the reality of adulthood. Still once a month….at least Aoi and Ema got to take a moment to watch this new ugly Arupin moment of animation. Like take a breath and watch our work at…well work. You guys did it. Smiles and doughnuts for all. Then we will wake up the next day and do it all over again WOOHOO!