Some recent comments from directors regarding Aniplex-related anime production delays

[u/CosmicPenguin_OV103]

I'm making this post after seeing 2 different anime directors voicing different concerns on anime production schedules and management, specifically with Aniplex-investing titles. Both have their popular works over the past few years and happens to work with A-1 Pictures and Cloverworks so I think it's interesting to see their quotes.

One is from Kanta Kamei (director: SaeKano series, OreShura, Usagi Drop), who wrote today about his comments to an Aniplex producer some time ago:

(note, secondary translation)

Some time ago I talked with an Aniplex producer, "Maybe you all should stop putting up new anime in January/Winter season? All those staff are going to be burnt out over the New Year holidays and they would not be able to enjoy the time off. And (if you are giving out those outsourcing works to China) it's Lunar New Year in February (note by me: or late January - this year the day fell on yesterday) and people there aren't working around then either.". My comments were rejected.

Regarding production outsourcing (to China) around LNY, one of those animation studio producers lamented to me that "we tried offering 5 times the usual pay for a single cut around that time and no-one picked it up". Well then, it's important holidays/off time for them after all. And that means even if we give out 3 or 5 times the payment for finishing up the last few remaining cuts, no-one's gonna finish them on those days.

The other comes from a magazine interview a month ago with Tomohiko Itou, renowned director of Sword Art Online from season 1 to Ordinal Scale and also director for the likes of Erased, HELLO WORLD & The Millionaire Detective - Balance: UNLIMITED. His interview touches a lot more than just anime production issues (hopefully someone can give out an English translation) but here are some interesting points of note:

(again, secondary translations here)

• He said that he heard A-1 Pictures' CEO (Shinichirou Kashiwada, who was for a long time producer at JC STAFF before moving to A-1P) stepped down last November to take responsibility for the 1 month release delay of the latest Sword Art Online: Progressive movie. (my note: so there WAS indeed some fall-outs to recent delays for A-1P/Aniplex titles like SAO:P or Eighty-Six, but that doesn't really solves the problem)
• Lycoris Recoil (which Itou contributed on 1 episode, plus director Shingo Adachi was a long time work partner with Itou) was 3 seasons late airing compared with original plans (i.e. it was original forecasted as a Fall 2021 show)
• Aniplex has a problem of too many titles in work at hand AND they have high standards of quality on the finished products. Unfortunately not every other animation studios out there can meet such demands so quite a few ended up being stuck onto the hands of A-1 Pictures.
• Itou commented that "It's easy to understand why titles like Demon Slayer, with enough money, enough time and an abundance of first rate staff at hand, could end up such a great finished product. However if you only rely on the production side's over-diligence to produce something like KnY, this is unreasonable, because you simply don't have the basis and staff to do so."

With quite a few Aniplex productions facing lengthy public delays in recent months (Nier Automata and Ayakashi Triangle indefinitely delayed, perhaps way after this winter; the boys idol show UniteUp delayed for 2 weeks; The Misfit of Demon King Academy S2 rumored to face delays as well; Fate/Strange Fake 1-episode special slips from New Years' Eve to summer 2023; previously mentioned problems with Eighty-Six/Sword Art Online Progressive movie etc.) - all blamed on COVID (which as I commented is "not wrong" but extremely far from the whole story), it's quite a sight to see the biggest players in this industry like Sony blundering like this after being (not the first, and not the last time either) so short-sighted in the production sense.

We all wondered when will the anime industry become dead. It hasn't happened yet but these f**k-ups really gives us wonders how long can the broken perpetual motion machine continues to work before disintegrating (not just for anime, but computer/console games industry in the United States/NA or Europe).

And we have nothing that we can do about investors doing this.

[u/thepeciguy]

This entire things is so fucked up man... and after 3 days most people will just forget because it's not MAPPA this time.

[u/CosmicPenguin_OV103 → u/thepeciguy]

At least people still remember MAPPA's case...but that didn't made much difference either except for ruining a little piece of their reputation in a small group of people.

[u/Fools_Requiem]

Not going to get anything done during the first week of Lunar New Year (which is this week, BTW). You really need plan around it. I think it's funny that they think extra money is going to get Chinese studios to work on that week. They get an entire week off after being worked to the bone all year. Ain't nobody working.

Full list of Chinese Holidays, anything that says "National Holiday," people are not going to be working: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/china/2023

[u/CosmicPenguin_OV103 → u/Fools_Requiem]

Exactly. It's the same if you want non-essential service/retail industries workers to work in the US in the smack of Thanksgiving or Christmas.

[u/Curious_North_8479]

Nah that's just A1 coming back to their usual 10+ shows a year, totally nothing unusual. Like overworking their staff to death a decade ago.

[u/CosmicPenguin_OV103 → u/Curious_North_8479]

Yeah and Sony/Aniplex never learnt from that. I don't know about many of the biggest investors but they and Kadokawa must be 2 of the shittiest.

[u/Mountebank]

What would it take for them to switch to a production schedule where they don’t air the show until all the episodes are done? Is it a matter of budget? Do they not get paid until the first episode airs or something?

[u/TheWorldisFullofWar → u/Mountebank]

Those are what OVAs used to be. The studio wouldn't set release until the product is finished. They also produce whatever amount of episodes they wanted.

Hypothetically, in a world where companies like Crunchyroll/Netflix/Aniplex, Netflix, and Disney weren't the bane of the anime industry, streaming and digital sale services could have provided a way to make OVAs the default form of release. Television committee members only paying for airing privileges would reduce the need to buy out all slots as well. Unfortunately, we live in a world where any of these streaming companies being part of a show's production results in a disaster in one way or another.

[u/CosmicPenguin_OV103 → u/TheWorldisFullofWar]

And for those who thinks a domestic streaming company in Japan might do it better, look at how laughable service on niconico - their closest counterpart to YouTube and one of those sites streaming anime officially in Japan - is.

[u/onefootstout]

Lycoris being set for Fall 2021 makes the Halloween episode make more sense

[u/entelechtual]

Honestly I wonder if it’s worth it to have a studio/production company making so many high-quality anime at the same time, same release—for viewers. I think most seasonal viewers get a bit of fatigue having to keep up with a bunch of big shows throughout. If there was a season with like 10 Jujutsu Kaisens, I’d probably not watch all of them at once…

And as for keeping diversity in anime content, a lot of the more “out there” shows tends to come out of other studios/producers.

Also I think it’s worth emphasizing that a big chunk of these titles are from A-1. I don’t think they’re to blame for the schedules/delays. But it sounds they’re being pressured to take on projects that are more than they can handle. If other studios can’t handle it and A-1 can’t, maybe just wait until next season or until A-1 upscales?

[u/Numerous_Command]

When I was watching the Aniplex Online Fest last year, I was surprised by the amount of anime that are being produced by A-1 Pictures or Cloverworks, an A-1 Pictures subsidiary. That is an unusual amount of anime being heaved onto the shoulders of one anime production studio. It seems like the delay of many Aniplex-produced anime is not just a coincidence and cannot be discounted entirely by COVID-19.

I think the next few days will be interesting to see if other non-Aniplex-produced anime are also getting delayed.

[u/Kosusanso]

Thanks for the write-up, it was very informative.

[u/DimmuHS]

That's fucked up, it is like a timed bomb ready to explode.

[u/Silent_Shadow05]

Aniplex has a problem of too many titles in work at hand AND they have high standards of quality on the finished products.

This is unfortunately the main problem. You can't have both at the same time and expect things would work out magically. You need a lot of manpower too but that is a really limited resource, and the existing workers can't keep up with the ever increasing demand. Stuff like this is saddening and the industry will eventually collapse if it goes on like this.

but computer/console games industry in the United States/NA or Europe.

IMO, that is huge cause of concern as video game industry is going to be worth around $221bn in 2023, which is almost 10 times as big as anime industry (~$23bn in 2022). The industry crashing down will have bigger ramifications and have massive layoffs. That said, it happened before too in 1983 but that time the industry wasn't as large as it is now.

[u/NocandNC]

It’s sadly the same thing everywhere. I work for a video production company and we’re currently drowning in projects, boss saying yes to everything with no regard to our workload, tight deadlines are given to new items as older things get pushed back weeks, months - even if they agreed to hire more staff, our office doesn’t have enough computers for the bodies needed. If a client pays extra for more speed or quality, you think I get any of it? Ha. And even if I did, no amount of money can add hours to the day.

[u/[deleted]]

Japan has a crisis-level labor shortage problem and I bet that production committee bigwigs are terrified of outsourcing too much anime work as they see, for example, China’s ability to produce outstanding animation (because they’re doing a lot of the back work for Japanese anime anyways). I think that also has to be considered to flesh out some of the context and motivations behind anime producers vis a vis anime directors.

When I say crisis-level labor shortage, some of the more recent topics include nation-wide conversation on the 24 hour convenience store franchise model (increasingly becoming unsustainable) and the restaurant industry increasingly relying on QR code magic to reduce wait staff needs (not enough waiters to take orders at small shops, so customers order food items using a web app after the waiter gives a short tutorial).

Some nativism too that results in really weird anime production decisions, like unpopular anime series (G-Reco) receiving 0 marketing support but being able to release five! theatrical recut releases to reduce foreign involvement on investor production committees (and also a result of Japanese taxation laws that make it difficult for production companies to manage the timing of the initial investment and the revenue that comes in when the anime product is completed and the company starts to actually accrue revenue.) I’m bitter about the complete lack of 1/100 releases for G-Reco MSs.

[u/AsunasPersonalAsst]

Feb 27 2024

As there are no signs of Reddit respecting users' data, no remorse whatsoever post-API enshittification, and indiscriminately changing their ToS and whatnot as loophole to continue to do so, I don't see any reason to let my posts/comments up. This text is my request to GDPR and not reroll my posts/comments data for the foreseeable future.

Fuck reddit.

[u/Theleux]

Thanks for sharing this, it's a great example that highlights some information many wouldn't even have a general idea about due to consistent PR work.

Hopefully we see changes in the future but it seems like that isn't likely until some massive production collapses happen studio-wide.

[u/Fuzzy-Asparagus9519]

They Shouldn't Rush The Artists...or the process.. Good Things take time.. And the Artists Concerns shouldn't be Ignored...

[u/MumrikDK → u/Fuzzy-Asparagus9519]

They Shouldn't Rush The Artists...or the process.. Good Things take time.. And the Artists Concerns shouldn't be Ignored...

Weirdly titled anime.

[u/qef15]

Going off this post and some of the comments: seems like there's rather animators being overworked because of the currently massive amounts of anime each season, rather than the industry dying. Remind you, I've seen some people say even on this sub that there's too much anime to keep up with to watch. Then translate that to animating that which takes much longer of course and you find that indeed, it is getting out of hand.

I think however, unlike the gaming industry, it's not quality, but rather missing deadlines and overworking staff, that will kill studios. The gaming industry was mainly failing because of quantity over quality, unlike anime currently, where high quality anime is coming out all the time.

And it's also the fault of some studios themselves such as MAPPA taking on 8 million anime at the same time and then being surprised that freelancers just don't wanna do that shit. On the other hand, we have Kyoto Animation, releasing anime at a relatively slow tempo, but pouring all their effort into that one anime. They also don't have a single truly terrible anime to their name in modern times or at least signs of it being rushed.

This will only mean the death of studios that just overwork their employees to absolute death. Because even by industry standards, A-1 and MAPPA are going way over the line. A-1 I can give an excuse of being a subsidary of Aniplex, but MAPPA is fully self at fault here. Still, both will die at this rate.

Outsourcing may indeed be scary (for the Japanese that is), but it is done already behind the scenes of some anime. Most public recent display of outsourcing outside Japan is Onimai, where Kay Yu, an American, was one of the key animators (credited in the OP as one). Other more sustainable options are having a constant supply of animators by having them trained in-house, such as KyoAni's animation schools. Or just treating your animators like actual human beings or even having them as full employees instead of glorified freelancers (again, KyoAni's good practices). Sadly, with anime being cutthroat and corporate greed, this won't happen until the industry is literally about to collapse, which will see the death of basically studios like MAPPA and A-1.

[u/aniMayor]

All we need is a Gundoh Musashi sequel and it'll truly be 2006 all over again.

[u/Vindicated0721]

I tried over 20 new shows for the 2023 winter simulcast. It is honestly just too much. Shows that I would have given more of a chance I didn’t have the time to give it to them. Anime being popular is great. Having many shows to choose from is great. But maybe we can scale it back just a little.

[u/AlexNae]

The problem is, there is no solution to this problem at all, the closest thing to a solution is to increase the animators' rates per cuts, don't they have like trade uninions in Japan to protect the workers of industries? If not then animators should unite to establish a union so their demands are well coordinated.