Kuromi walks into Studio Petit expecting to manage artists and leaves wondering if she's actually managing a collective hallucination. The real comedy isn't the chaos of a deadline crunch, it's watching someone who loves animation more than sleep try to wrangle people who treat their jobs like performance art. By the end of one episode, you understand why animation studios run on caffeine, spite, and the kind of camaraderie that only forms when everyone agrees they're already doomed.

Fresh out of animation school, Mikiko Oguro, known as Kuromi, arrives at the famous Studio Petit for her dream job. An unexpected turn of events soon makes the newcomer production manager of Time Journeys, an upcoming TV anime on a tight schedule, and she must finish its second episode or let fans down. Reality hits hard. Her team is a crew of slackers, and pulling its creative staff together to keep the show on track for broadcast proves far more stressful than she imagined. Part workplace comedy and part drama, the story shows how much effort it takes to make an anime that can move its audience, and asks whether Kuromi's love of cartoons will fix the mess or make it worse.