About

Shirobako (MyAnimeList, AniList) is a 24-episode original TV anime series by studio P.A. Works that aired over the Fall 2014 and Winter 2015 anime seasons. Simply put, it is an anime about the production of anime and seems to be the producers' love letter to the industry. It is a very well written workplace dramedy that I would recommend to every anime fan. Just in general, but also everyone that is interested in how anime is actually made, while keeping in mind that the show does romanticize the industry.

It is also the source of this one screencap that seems to get used in every article about animators in the industry being underpaid.

Ema Yasuhara: apparently the poster girl for underpaid anime key animators.

In most industries, especially creative industries like anime, there is something most people loathe: deadlines. The race against deadlines is a very recurring theme in the anime, to the point that there is some discussion about limited time and schedules in most episodes of Shirobako.

It is these discussions in combination with visual clues scattered throughout the background that inspired this project: tracking the chronology of Shirobako to have an overview of the timeline of events and better understand just how close (or not) this fictional anime studio is cutting their deadlines.

The first version of this was created during the Reddit Shirobako rewatch in 2016. Screencaps and clips collected there have since been partly lost, so the idea behind this website was to archive the project from back then and visualize the chronology in a more appealing way, as well as fix some of the errors made back then, the most noteable being the airing schedule of the in-universe-anime produced in the second cour.

What ended up making this project fun was that, for almost all of the first cour at least, it is actually possible to assign a date to every on-screen day and resonably say "this date is correct". This unfortunately did not work out of the second cour as much, mostly because it takes place over an about four times longer timespan in the same number of episodes.

But how does one even assign the dates? As mentioned, character dialogue and visual hints, sometimes very obvious ones, sometimes less so. To give a few examples, starting with episode 1: a desk phone outright displays Wednesday, October 8 as the current date. This is an example for visual hints.

[Episode 1] Aoi's desk phone displaying Wednesday, October 8, 01:01 (likely PM).

An example for character dialogue is from earlier in the episode: here Marukawa, the president of Musashino Animation, states that the episode as aired "last night". The airdate of the episode is known, so from there it can be derived that this is the next day, in this case October 3.

Marukawa: "Exodus's episode 1 [...] aired last night."

And this technically falls under the category of visual hints, but a key kind of hint is the characters' outfits. Shirobako's cast wears a wide variety of outfits throughout the series, and at least one character changing their outfit indicates that a new day has started. Another example: between November 21 and November 22, the only indicator that a day has passed is several characters changing their outfits.

There are cases where characters pull all-nighters. For example, in episode 23, November 30 to December 1, two characters - Aoi and Midori - do not change outfits, whereas another one - Watanabe - does. In this case, the two former have pulled an all-nighter.

Repeat looking at these kinds of hints this for all 24 episodes and you get a fairly complete overview of Shirobako's chronology. If that sounds tedious: it honestly was. But looking at these hints and having the pieces of information fall into place has been a very satisfying experience. I hope this website can give you a new look at what is my personal favorite anime and enjoy it in yet another way.

About the author

Hi, I go by Mistaarr on Reddit and Syhans on Github. I have a background in web development and really like Shirobako, so I've wanted to something like this website for a while.

If you have any questions or ideas, or see anything that needs fixing, please message me on Reddit or create an issue on Github.