Ashita no Arika

Do not be fooled by its appearance, this Original Net Animation is not a work of art that carries any sort of intrinsic value or conveys a sincere human message in a tasteful way; it is in fact corporate propaganda co-opting a popular aesthetic to deliver a carefully crafted insidious PR statement with a particular Japanese twist, which is done in a blatantly obvious way that may or may not induce nausea with how shameless it is, depending on your sensibilities. The entire point of this ONA's script seems to be to run damage control for the corporate public image after the 2017 scandal involving falsifiedquality specifications, which brought attention to over five decades of compliance failures, data fraud, bid-rigging for large infrastructure projects, falsified emission data, failures to report tax income on multiple occasions and illegal political funding in local elections. That is done by portraying the struggles and tribulations of people in sales, PR and middle management who are, as is always the case, forced to deal with the fallout, as well as peddling the thesis that in its 120 years of existence the biggest steel manufacturer in Japan has only ever cared about improving well-being of the people and creating a brighter future for the nation all the while being a large, loving and devoted family who will go out of its way to take care of its own. Coincidentally, there's not a single meaningful attempt to recognize responsibility for decades of gross misconduct or issue an apology in the script itself, just like it is always the case with corporate PR statements. It is genuinely sickening. On a side note, I find it irresistibly hilarious that the studio which made this is literally called "Trash".