Miyamori Aoi and her high school animation club friends share a dream they all pledge to turn into reality: getting jobs in the anime industry and eventually coming together once more to create a professional anime they can be proud of. To that end, their first step is the production of their club's very own amateur anime, which gets screened during the school's cultural festival.

Two and a half years later, Aoi has a production assistant job at Musashino Animation, or Musani for short, a once relevant animation company that fell from grace and is now making its first anime in many years. Animator Yasuhara Ema, one of Aoi's clubmates, has also landed a job at Musani, where she is a keyframer. They find, however, that creating anime professionally is far more demanding than they had thought when they were still high schoolers, and Exodus!, the anime they're working on, shoulders a responsibility that leaves no room for issues.

Meanwhile, their friends from the club days also struggle in their own ways: Toudou Misa is a CG artist with a job that consists of drawing car parts only, Sakaki Shizuka has studied to be a seiyuu but is still only trying hard to land anything better than walk-on parts while juggling a waitress part-time job, and Imai Midori, who wishes to be a scriptwriter, is still a student and hasn't even begun to walk the path towards an industry job yet.

In an industry where the budget is small, the schedule is constrained, people overwork themselves to meet absurd deadlines, and something is always ready to come out of left field and wreak havoc on what little order there was, those five friends fight on towards their dream. Whether this dream was just a fleeting teenage passion that will get hammered by reality or whether they will be able to pursue it while adapting to the difficulties remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Exodus! has many issues that seem impossible to solve, but Aoi still needs to solve a number of them, and soon, because the airing of the anime she's working on depends on it!

— written by Hinoe

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Sequel: Gekijouban Shirobako