The only real solution is to start holding directors and production committees accountable, with no one above them, Animators are always the first to take the blame, streaming networks and investors need to pay closer attention and be more involved instead of judging the work from a distance.

In many cases, it would have been far more efficient to just retake the entire cut from scratch.

This shifting of responsibility and workload is extremely common in today’s industry. People constantly pick up slack for others, and the structure has become top heavy.

I’ve seen this firsthand, directors constantly retaking cuts and adding new things last minute
Because of time pressure, the cut gets forced through douga (in-betweening) with all these micro-adjustments tacked on, pushing key animator level work onto the animation director.

But if the director can’t manage a large team, doesn’t know when to compromise or when to take control, the entire production suffers. That’s how you end up with slideshow level animation, regardless of which studio is producing it.

It’s not that modern anime lack talented staff, there are always skilled animators on board. (Eg: Chainsawman replaced many fully key animated action cuts with CGI because of time constraints, not staff skill.)

The first season of One Punch Man worked so well because it had a strong director who knew how to handle high frame counts, something extremely difficult in TV anime. They avoided production hell, endless retakes, scenes being scrapped, and the usual chaos most anime fall into today.

Making anime isn’t easy. You have to pick which cuts get polish & which get simplified to meet deadlines. A strong director can make or break a show, much more than the studio itself.

Why doesn’t One Punch Man S3 look as good as S1? Let me give an inside look at anime production politics as someone who works in the industry ↓

Thanks for asking, yes i've got some contracts with a few studios that helps keep me afloat

Correct!

Also, while unions are great, i believe they are part of the reason why 2D western animation is mostly outsourced to south korea, and asia, as evil as that sounds, media companies operate this way due to the "expenses" of hiring swaths of local animators, which include dealing with unions

it's not good, everyone is constantly grinding and being overworked, but they want to do it or else someone else will take their cuts, it's the same thing with people working in the game dev industry, they trade in good working conditions for the chance to work at their dream job

Ip that they buy, trade, and consolidate like NFTs. ROI, customer acquisition costs, and production efficiency are not the name of the game in this kind of business, which is a kind of dangerous business to run in the first place, moving pictures themselves aren’t that profitable. (3/4)

Big media mergers, like Skydance, CN(AT&T), Discovery, are less about creativity and more about rich Hollywood executives consolidating IP. These companies aren’t “media companies”; they’re glorified IP and copyright holders. The creative staff on their projects barely matter to them (2/4)

I worked on Witch watch EP#18 as a key animator

Thank you for watching!

I participated as animation director (Sakkan) for the anime April Showers bring May flowers EP#3, Thank you for watching!

(Sadly went uncredited this time)

And although this company is just 1, this represents a greater shift in the industry, where more AI companies are starting to pop into the anime industry to try and make a profit, optimizing the production pipeline for companies and ultimately stealing jobs from Inbetweeners (Dougaman)

I was actually invited for one of the investor pitch meetings for this company when they were looking for funding, approximately 60k, they ended up getting funded from Japan i believe.

Ultimately i believe this technology will displace jobs and slowly destroy the livelihoods of animators in Asia

Pretty much, the success of Disney is what hurt diversity in animation so much during those decades, and created that perception amongst audiences that cartoons are just for kids, anime helped show audiences more diversity and now, alot of western animation has some inspiration from anime somewhere

From a Personal Project

LOTR-War Of Rohirrim (It was codenamed as "DAYTON" for us)

Some of my Sakkan from Kanteshi that never ended up getting used, probably due to time constraints

rkgk

Thank you for your comment! i agree, artists will be the most affected, with commissions, character designs, BGs, etc

Companies that try to do this may feel like they're saving money in the short term, but eventually they'll realize people will lose trust in them as soon as they suspect ai usage