an outsider’s view of shirobako

MAL score progression for Shirobako (now it’s 8.46) [1]

Recently I’ve gotten an excuse to do nothing but watch anime every day for hours on end (I got finger tendonitis), so I’ve been going through my anime backlog. I’ve been out of the scene for basically five years now, so I haven’t watched or even heard about all but the most popular shows since 2012.

I think it’s worthwhile to give my unbiased view on Shirobako. Judging from the progression of the score on MyAnimeList (top image), people came to like it more and more as the show went on, going from a trash-tier 7.18/10 to a top-100 anime score. And from the few blog posts I read [2,3], the cultured individuals of the blogging community have held it in high regard.

So this is where I come in, I guess. In my aimless browsing of memes on reddit, I ended up watching one of ProZD’s videos [4] where he mentions Shirobako as a top-10 anime. Although my taste in anime is completely different from ProZD’s (i.e. I wouldn’t put any of the other anime he mentions into my top 20), I started watching Shirobako almost immediately after, ran through it in four days, and slapped on a 10/10 score.

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