According to director Goro Taniguchi, today’s anime industry is struggling with several fundamental challenges that, in his opinion, negatively impact the quality of many productions. We summarize.
Directors lose control
During a lecture at Keio University, Taniguchi, who directed the film “One Piece: Red,” among other things, criticized the fact that in many productions the individual departments were increasingly working independently of one another.
As an example, he cited footage of scenes before and after post-production that camera directors occasionally post on social networks. These corrections are often necessary because the source material already has defects.
However, in the director’s opinion, the overall creative vision should be set by the director from the start. If each department makes its own decisions without these being sufficiently coordinated, the result will be technically appealing, but not a coherent whole.
Taniguchi used the term “junk food anime” for such productions because various elements would work on their own, but in the end the creative unity was missing.
Shorter squadrons make training more difficult
The director also spoke about the consequences of the trend towards shorter anime seasons with just one episode, the number of which has increased significantly since the mid-2000s.
As a result of this development, young talent would usually only work on a few episodes and would therefore gain significantly less practical experience than before. Taniguchi sees this as one of the reasons for the gradual collapse of the traditional training system within the industry.
For this reason, according to him, only studios with long-standing series productions for children are still in a position to systematically train young talent. They include Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment and Shin-Ei Animation.
Especially at a time when more and more anime is being produced, the developments mentioned by Taniguchi could be crucial to whether the industry can maintain its creative quality in the long term.
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Via Asahi Shimbun
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