From "8½" to "Day for Night" to "Dolemite Is My Name," the history of cinema is replete with movies about making movies. The latest addition to that self-referential genre is Tsutomu Mizushima's "Shirobako the Movie," an anime about the blood, sweat and beers that go into putting an animated movie on screen.
It's the sequel to the television series "Shirobako," which aired from 2014 to 2015 and centered around Aoi Miyamori (voiced by Juri Kimura), a newly minted production assistant at the fictional Musashino Animation who, along with the audience, learns the ins and outs of how anime is made from scratch to screen — and all the speed bumps that pop up along the way.
The film opens four years later, with the great Musashino Animation a shell of its former self after the cancellation of an in-progress series. With the studio floundering, one of its producers comes to Miyamori with a daring plan: Make an original theatrical film that must be completed in under a year. With the studio staffed by a skeleton crew, it's up to Miyamori to get the band back together and pull off an animated miracle.