Shirobako Movie:

Thanks to [Mushin] Shirobako's movie finally has a subtitled release.  It wasn't what I expected.  Due to unexplained disaster after disaster, the Musani at the beginning of the movie, suddenly four years after we saw it last, is basically bankrupt and shut down.  Only vague explanations are given as to what happened and why, but it doesn't seem realistic that such a capable company full of all-stars in their respective fields could end up where they did, even taking into account bad luck.

It's clear that the plot simply wanted the company to be struggling from the bottom up for the sake of added drama, and not because it made any sense in the preestablished timeline.

For some unexplained reason, they're given the rights to produce a movie despite only having five or so permanent employees.  This too makes no sense, nor does it make any sense where the budget is coming from to fund this movie.  But whatever.  They're given the rights, and so they rehire everyone who had left the company and get to work.  But then they're sued because they never really had the rights, so first they have to win a battle with ninjas and samurais and then there's a dance with kids and a Russian dance with stuffed animals and. . .

But at the very end they do release the movie, producing it in only ten months, and it seems to be decent enough to have pleased the fans.  But it wasn't the Seven Lucky Gods movie that Aoi and friends wanted to make in high school.  So what even was the point?  Maybe the company will make some money and improve its reputation so that it can start working on more sane projects from here on, but animation studios usually don't even get a share of a movie's revenue, they're paid a contracted flat fee for the work at the beginning. . .who even paid them?  I don't know!  What were they paid?  I don't know!

This movie had plenty of time to do surreal song and dance sequences but apparently no time to explain what the hell was going on at any given moment.  To me it's a huge letdown, compared to the beautifully explained and perfectly believable challenges of making Exodus and Third Aerial Girls' Squadron.  This felt like jumping from plot hole to plot hole, instead of iceberg to iceberg, to get to the endroll.

The only praise I can give the movie is the visual quality of the animation and the likability of the characters who are easy to empathize with.  It's cool that they struggled with all sorts of awful circumstances and prevailed, as unrealistic as it is that they did prevail with only ten months, five workers and no money.  Everyone likes an underdog comeback victory.  But perhaps Shirobako wasn't the proper venue for a story like that, considering it makes no sense how they even became underdogs or had to comeback in the first place.  Everyone liked Shirobako so they decided to use its name to tell a completely different story and get people interested -- as far as I can tell.  Brand laundering.

Oh well, it's not like the Evangelion movies were any good either.  Generally speaking adding movies to completed series never works out.  The Code Geass movie was a bad idea too.