First celebrity death of 2017 , Leah Remini <| sep |> Rii is now helping with editing VA scripts based on the storyboards ! D Ema is offered work as assistant animation director for the first time ! D Mii gets to animate characters ! D And they get to work with each other , just like old times ! DAnd Zuka . well . um . gets drunk alone , in the dark . D The writers are pretty sadistic in how they set up the plotlines for the Donut Quintet , aren ' t they . Why , indeed . No doubt other rewatchers will point this out as well the girl that Zuka is watching on TV went to the same audition as her . Reposting this comparison pic I found . Lot of drunk people in this ep . All 3 of the groups shown drinking have their scenes interspersed together . Drunk Hiraoka reveals his broken dreams from the past . Drunk Zuka drowns her sorrows over her dreams getting broken in the present , basically right in front of her eyes . Drunk inbetween checker mentions her worries over her son ' s dreams for the future . Ema talks about the timing of frames . In animation for games , what she shows here is known as animationeasingtbmisch . Easing is pretty fundamental stuff for digital animators , which makes this scene a little hard to believe . But , I suppose Mii has been working exclusively as a modeler and hasn ' t been assigned motion work . Nice to see how Ema overcoming her own selfdoubt inspires Ai girl who never finishes setences to face her own problem headon . We know from ep 1 that Ema ' s parents were against her becoming an animator , due to the financial hardship of that path . And we actually see hints of that hardship in Ema ' s storyline in the first half of Shirobako . That context makes her gift and phone call to her mom more heartwarming . Ema has made it . ' Another smash cut from a feelgood scene with background music to a bad end cliffhanger . Very similar to episode 15 . Hiraoka . can you understand or even forgive him ? Or do you still believe he is a prick ? Still a prick . On rewatch , what bothers me most about him is his short fuse . It was painful to watch his scenes in the last few episodes due to this . The dude instantly resorts to shouting whenever someone rightfully gives him criticism . That ' s a flaw that ' s independent of his feelings towards the anime industry . He also incited a physical fight , even with knocking things over and throwing things , which should be a huge deal but somehow wasn ' t . Notice how , right after that incident , everyon gets uneasy and tense when he was around . The company president and I ' m assuming Japanese work culture too waswere too lenient . The ' redemption ' in this ep addresses his apathy , but I don ' t think it does much to address his anger problem . Also , Hiraoka ' s storyline would benefit if they showed more proof of him changing his behavior . As it is right now , the other characters only have Hiraoka ' s word that he ' ll stop being so awful , rather than his deeds . Actions would actually be worthy of forgiveness . It feels like the plot suddenly drops from doing this form of resolution because the show is running out of time and there are more important things to focus on .