TAB: Tom's Anime Blog

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.