Shirobako is a show that exudes love for the anime industry and the process to go from concept to aired episodes that so many people go through year after year. It's a love letter to the medium, and it offers recognition to those who make it happen, even if their role doesn't get that much acknowledgement in the public conscience. I loved every episode, and I wanted to keep watching the growth of the main cast in the anime industry.

The main friend group of Aoi, Ema, Shizuka, Midori, and Misa are all trying to either find a job or grow into their roles at work, all of which are related to the anime production process. In the first episode, we see their passion as high school students working on their own anime for a school festival, making us understand their desire to work in the industry; a time skip happens, and years have passed. The focus on an adult cast was only natural for a series with a workplace setting, but those first few minutes did set the tone for the rest of the show. These are passionate and creative people, and they're trying their best to make a living doing what they love the most.

This anime has a romantic view of the industry, but it doesn't refuse to see the hardships of making it as a newcomer, or even as an established veteran, in such a ruthless field. During the 24 episodes of the one and only season (not counting the movie released 4 years after the series aired), we get to see the struggles of everyone in the cast: animators must work long hours to meet deadlines; the director may have a hard time coming up with a storyboard; outsourced work may not meet quality standards; artists may get stuck in a specialized field that doesn't satisfy their creative ambitions; requests for changes in an episode may come with little time to pivot; and production staff must juggle all sorts of requests, come up with contingency plans when something inevitably goes wrong, and efficiently handle communication across departments. Despite all of these hardships, or perhaps because of them, we see the immense joy and satisfaction of the team whenever a project is finished.

Shirobako is a series set in a very specific point in time, which matches the year it started airing on TV: 2014. A callback to the older techniques used in the creation of anime decades ago — like the usage of cels — is made in the second cour, in which Musani's president takes Aoi to an old office belonging to the studio and shows her around. I imagine that in the decade that has passed since the show first aired, a drastic shift must have also taken place, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic forced many to adopt a remote work arrangement. The series reflects on this passage of time, not only looking backwards, but also pondering on what the future may hold. For example, the eternal debate of 3D animation vs. fully 2D is the source of drama early in the first cour.

Contained in Shirobako is a heartfelt message about multiple generations working together, transferring knowledge, and learning from each other in order to make a piece of art much bigger than the sum of its parts. Each person in the staff had their own unique skills to contribute to the projects they worked on, and some even learned new ones from working with their peers. I particularly liked Shigeru's character, the oldest animator on staff at Musashino Animation. Seeing him get the opportunity to shine with his specialty of animating animal characters made me happy, especially when he later becomes a teacher for others in the animation department. There are also plenty of moments of fans getting to work with and learn from their favorite artists in the same project.

Aoi's closing speech at the end of the season was a perfect encapsulation of how art is made: it's only through the collective effort and passion of many that we get to see stories like this one, which so heavily move us and inspire us to also go out there and create. No artist is uninfluenced by their peers, and no medium is carried forward by the efforts of a single person. Truly, no man is an island; and no piece of art is made in a vacuum.