This one plays like a production-office sitcom that keeps tripping over its own camera angle. Mitsuki Ikuta is the Houchiku Corporation lifer everyone writes off as a grown woman still dressed like a kid, and the joke curdles into something almost sincere when they hand her a hero movie, the exact genre the industry sneers at as childish. The pleasure isn't the plot, it's the backstage grind: meetings, sign-offs, the small indignities of getting a film made, a scrappy little SHIROBAKO decades before anyone had the budget to do it properly. Eight shorts, no stakes, no heavy weather, the kind of thing you leave running while you do something else and still catch yourself grinning at how obviously the staff enjoyed themselves. Be warned, though: the panty shots arrive with the frequency of a tic, and 2004 has not aged into an excuse. Watch it for the detective-movie nerd who takes the dumb assignment seriously anyway.

Mitsuki Ikuta makes movies for the Houchiku Corporation. Everyone who knows her sees her as childish, a view her youthful clothes do little to change. She loves detective and crime dramas, so it comes as a surprise when she is suddenly picked to be the lead producer on a new project that turns out to be a hero movie, a genre most people regard as kids' fare. Determined to make it work anyway, she accepts the job and begins her long struggle in the industry. The short-form series mixes comedy with ecchi content.