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Posted by Tom:
Animation Runner Kuromi #1

   Kuromi is a 40-minute OVA about a girl, Mikiko "Kuromi" Oguro, who is
   thrown quite abruptly into managing the production of an episode of an
   anime series. She's right out of college and expecting to work under
   the old production manager, but he has a bleeding ulcer and leaves
   immediately after showing her around the office.

   She has one week left to complete the episode, out of the five weeks
   originally alotted to that task. It's made complicated by a crew of
   key animators that wants to do anything but draw. Kuromi's job is to
   do whatever she can to ensure that that all the drawings come in on
   time.

   The show that this is closest to is probably Comic Party. Not so much
   in tone, or animation style, or anything like that, but because the
   characters are united in an artistic endeavour, rather than something
   like saving the world or falling in love. Still, there are many
   differences. Kuromi is animated in a very cartoony, somewhat slapstick
   style, in which it's okay to be off-model for a laugh. (The style
   looks alot like Jubei-Chan, which isn't suprising as the series share
   a director.)

   The show is about two things... Kuromi learning how to manage creative
   type people, and the larger question of why people subject themselves
   to life in the low-paid and hard japanese animation industry. And the
   OVA managed to draw me into these two things, as well as the story, to
   the point where I was interested in what would happen to these
   characters, and what their answers to those things would be.

   Kuromi manages, in a single 40 minute OVA, to achieve a degree of
   audience tie-in that's missing in some series. I like that. It's a
   good OVA, and interesting if you want to know how the anime sausage is
   made.