There are
criticisms that remain on the surface and there are criticisms that go to the
bone. Goro Taniguchi's at Keio University on May 26 clearly
belongs to the second category. The director of One Piece Film: Red used
a 90-minute conference organized by the production company ARCH to
say, bluntly, that much of the anime produced today is junk food: stimulating
on the surface, empty inside and without a vision to sustain it.
Taniguchi's
central argument is not that the current anime is bad because of a lack of
talent, but because of a lack of directorial leadership. When the
manager doesn't make clear decisions early in the process, each department ends
up operating independently without unified guidance. The result is a product
where the parties do not talk to each other.
To
illustrate the point, Taniguchi mentioned a practice he finds troubling:
cinematographers posting "before and after" images of their work on
social media, showing the adjustments they made. The problem, he says, is that
many of those adjustments aren't their own creative decisions but corrections
of defects in the material they received from other parts of the process. And
the lead director, who should have planned all that from the beginning and
instructed the photography team on the desired outcome, simply didn't. What is
presented as an achievement is, in reality, evidence of a broken chain of work.
The second
part of his critique points to the format. Taniguchi noted that the
proliferation of single-coured seasons (between 11 and 13 episodes) since about
2005 largely destroyed the anime's traditional learning system. In the long
seasons of the past, team members worked side-by-side with experienced
directors on many episodes and gained real skills through that exposure. With
shorter seasons, the same team member can participate in a maximum of three
episodes, which according to Taniguchi is insufficient to develop anything
meaningful.
The
exception, he said, are certain studios that continue to produce long series
for children, where the learning model has been better preserved. He
specifically named Toei Animation, TMS Entertainment,
and Shin-Ei Animation as examples where that tradition still
holds. The rest of the industry, in his view, still does not solve the training
gap that this generates.
Goro Taniguchi is one of the most renowned directors in the Japanese anime industry, with a career spanning decades and titles that marked generations. He is responsible for series such as Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion and s-CRY-ed, and most recently directed One Piece Film: Red, the highest-grossing film in the franchise up to that point. His most recent work is L'étoile de Paris en fleur, an original film released in Japan on March 13, 2026 that follows two young people, a painter and a ballet dancer, as they meet again in Paris pursuing their dreams. That someone with that history talks about a crisis in the industry is not a passing comment: it is a sign that the problem is real and they feel it from within.
