Renowned director Goro Taniguchi has been self-critical about his anime production skills – despite being behind some major successes like “Code Geass” and “One Piece Film: Red.” We summarize.
Not a specialist in any field
At the Aichi-Nagoya International Anime Film Festival, Taniguchi openly stated that he considers himself “the most incompetent person in the anime industry.”
The main reason given by the director was that he lacked special skills such as drawing, screenwriting or acting. In contrast to many other creative people, he sees himself as more of a generalist who understands many areas, but is not an exceptional specialist in a specific area.
That’s precisely why, over the course of his 35-year career, he has tried to understand as many different areas of anime production as possible – including animation, sound, editing, marketing, production and even business management.
Success through overall understanding
According to Taniguchi, it was precisely this broad understanding that ultimately helped him to connect the various departments of a production and thus successfully implement larger projects.
This became particularly clear with “One Piece Film: Red”, the production of which he actively helped shape – including marketing decisions and the casting of singer Ado as Uta.
But despite the film’s enormous success, with revenues of over 20 billion yen (around 108 million euros) in Japan, Taniguchi remained modest and explained that the success was ultimately largely thanks to the viewers.
The director most recently worked on the new original anime film “L’étoile de Paris en fleur”, which premiered in Japan on March 13, 2026.
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Via Oricon
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