Musashino Animation doesn't just make a show within the show, it makes you sit through the actual first episodes of two completely different anime, shot and paced exactly like real productions, which means you're watching what Aoi and the team actually built. The first one lands; the second one is rough enough that even hardcore fans debate whether it works. That's the joke and the gamble at once, the specials prove the series' central thesis by forcing you to experience exactly what it feels like when an animation studio's output is wildly uneven.
Two specials bundled with the third and seventh home video volumes of SHIROBAKO present the opening episodes of the fictional anime Musashino Animation makes within that series. In the first, Akane, Aya and Alpine form Tracy, an idol trio that has yet to break through. After a supermarket gig draws almost no one, Akane resolves to confront their indifferent manager Taguchi, but the girls instead find his body in a storeroom and fall under suspicion of murder just as the fame they wanted finally arrives. In the second, the 307 Aerial Squad, nicknamed Hell Alice, fights the mysterious Builders, whose Pillars now cover a third of the planet and disable every aircraft built after the 1970s, leaving the squad to fly aging machines against stolen advanced technology. Among its pilots is Aria Hitotose, a skilled Japanese schoolgirl known as the Ice Doll for her calm under pressure. When a mission to pull survivors from a wrecked base goes wrong, it falls to Aria and her comrades to set things right.
