Animation Runner Kuromi is a simple and light-hearted story about the trouble of making an anime show come in on time. This stuff doesn’t happen by magic you know, lots of people work hard to make deadlines and great-looking anime. Or do they?
What They Say:
From the director of Fruits Basket, Now and Then, Here and There, and Jubei-chan the Ninja Girl!
Ever wonder what it would be like to work for an animation studio? Kuromi just landed her dream job at the famous Studio Petit, and boy is she in for a rude awakening! The new head of the ultimate team of slackers, it’s up to her to finish “Time Journeys Episode 2,” or fans everywhere will be let down. Will Kuromi’s love of cartoons clean up this horrible mess… or make an even bigger one?
Audio:
The audio presentation for this show certainly shows its age but also its intent as a straightforward comedic piece. The release includes the original Japanese language with English subtitles along with the English dub where it’s encoded at 224kbps. This is a pretty straightforward stereo mix with music and ambient effects in the left/right speakers and the majority of dialogue coming through the center channel. It’s pretty solid overall with no noticeable problems.
Video:
Originally released to video back in 2001, his is a very shiny-looking release. The colors are stunningly bright, the backgrounds are wonderfully solid and the animation simply looks great here. The only problematic area is with the cross coloration on some of the tighter-drawn sections that had a lot of lines. This was also strongly evident on the Japanese release so it’s definitely a source issue as opposed to the authoring here. This was something more noticeable back in the day when it came out but various ways both players and TVs process shows can introduce a lot of variance in how strong it is, if it’s visible at all to some.
Packaging:
With this release we get a good bright cover with a great sky backdrop set against the “ganbatte!” look ofKuromi and the smaller cast images around her. It’s an eye-catching cover with that kind of backdrop as well as the logo coloring. The back cover provides a nice shot of her holding the surfboard which is where they also placed the technical details. A nice summary of the shows’ premise fills out most of the rest of the cover as well as the disc features and other basic technical bits. The reverse side of the cover in this clear keepcase uses similar artwork from the back cover with the chapter stops while the other panel provides a list of credits for both productions and the bilingual cast list.
Menu:
The main menu utilizes the cluttered animators house nicely with all kinds of little bits of imagery scattered about under the selections. The main theme plays along adding a nice little bit of bouncy energy. Submenus load nice and fast and access times are quick.
Extras:
For those like myself who bought the Japanese release, it’s the extras here that are the most appealing, especially if you really enjoyed this show. The art gallery provides stills from the show and runs just under two minutes in length. The sketch gallery has just under three minutes worth of production sketches to show off. For dub fans, there’s a four-minute interview with Lisa Ortiz who plays the lead character. A really great feature that’s included, particularly for people who want to get into animation, is that the entire episode is also done to storyboards on an alternate angle. The director’s diary piece is a two-minute piece that was on the Japanese release and lets us follow Daichi around a bit in regards to the creation of the show, usually quite comical. There’s a brand new interview with Daichi that was done at the Big Apple Anime Festival back in 2002 that runs about five minutes (and you gotta love the promotion of BAAF, since its logo is “bugged” into the upper right corner for the duration of the piece). The really big extra that got me really excited is a commentary audio track from Daichi where he goes into all sorts of errata about the show, hints at who is based on who, and plenty more.
My first impression of this show, with its basis around an animation studio and the production managers who run it, was Otaku no Video Lite. Of course, the show lacks the hard edge of that Gainax classic, but it wasn’t setting out for something satirical and insightful about the anime industry in Japan. Its goal is to simply have some fun.
The show was done by current fan favorite director Akitaroh Daichi, whose been responsible for Kodomo no Omacha (Child’s Toy) and the US release Jubei-Chan. His trademark style is obvious right from the start, when we open with a blue sky and the main character, Mikkiko Oguro is bicycling her way to her new dream job at Studio Petit. It’s highly reminiscent of the Jubei-Chan openings.
Mikkiko is introduced to the current production manager who shows her around the small but fun-looking studio and he explains the way everything works. But it doesn’t take long until his mysterious illness kicks in and he books it out of there, leaving Mikkiko (who is referred to as Kuromi by everyone else) in charge of the production schedule for Time Journeys episode two. Time Journeys provides the segueway between sections with parts of the eye-catch and openings used with the “Time Journey’s!” title being called out during it.
With noon time creeping up and Mikkiko now in charge of the schedule, the rest of the staff slowly but surely shows up. Well, those who actually come to the office as most tend to do their key animation at home and away from prying eyes. Mikkiko tries to learn what to do from Hamako, the director for the imperiled episode two of Time Journey’s. There’s normally five weeks or so of time for each episode, but things have been so slack that there’s less than a week before the 312 total cuts that are due to be sent off to the in-betweeners for completion so they can make their airdate and not miss their slot.
Missing the slot would be disastrous.
Mikkiko ends up racing all over town and meeting with everyone trying to get them to work harder and faster all while learning her job and dealing with the myriad number of personalities that make up an anime studio.
Animation Runner Kuromi is a fun little episode that generated a good number of laughs from me. There are plenty of things to watch for if you’re an observant fan with toys snuck into he background as well as Mikkiko’s fascination with a Lupin-esque character that helps her keep her spirits up when things only look close to disaster.
CPM’s work here has come across as great overall. For someone who already had it, the amount of extras really made a difference. In addition, the fuller translation in the subtitles and the onscreen text made a significant difference at times, particularly since signs and such were not subtitled on the Japanese release. Having this and other areas such as the credits fully translated at last is nice.
In Summary:
We’ve had a lot of shows focusing on the behind-the-scenes elements of making anime and they’ll always be of interesting to me. It’s a great little comedy that has fun with the medium and plays things just like Daichi likes to do. Fans of his work will likely get a real kick out of this. With the short running time, CPM has balanced it nicely with copious extras. This is definitely worth checking out.
Content Grade: B+
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B
Released By: Central Park Media
Release Date: September 9th, 20023
MSRP: $29.99
Running Time: 40 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
