Goro Taniguchi’s Quiet Indictment of Modern Anime
There are criticisms that remain on the surface and there are criticisms that go straight to the core. The one Goro Taniguchi delivered at Keio University last month clearly belongs to the second category. The director behind Code Geass and One Piece Film: Red used a 90-minute conference organized by 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.
The Real Problem Is Not Talent
Taniguchi’s central argument is not that current anime is bad because of a lack of talent—a familiar lament—but because of a deeper, more systemic failure: the erosion of directorial vision. What he described is less a creative drought than a breakdown in orchestration. When a director does not make clear, definitive decisions from the very beginning of the process, each department ends up operating independently, without a unified guide. The result is work that is technically competent but spiritually disjointed—a collection of parts that simply do not talk to each other.
The “Before and After” Illusion
To illustrate this, Taniguchi mentioned a practice he finds deeply troubling: cinematographers posting “before and after” images of their work on social media, showing the adjustments they made. On the surface, it looks like a showcase of skill. But the problem, according to him, is that many of these corrections are not their own creative decisions—they are fixes for fundamental issues baked into the initial material. Issues a proactive director should have resolved in pre-production. The lead director, who should have planned all of that from the beginning and instructed the photography team on the desired outcome, simply did not do it.
What is presented as an achievement is, in reality, evidence of a fractured workflow.
The Single-Cour Problem and the Talent Drain
The second part of his criticism points to something structural. Taniguchi tied a real talent drain to a specific historical shift. The proliferation of single-cour seasons—typically 11 to 13 episodes—since roughly largely dismantled the traditional anime apprenticeship model that once defined the industry.
In the era of longer runs, young staff could hone their craft across dozens of episodes alongside veterans. Today, a new artist might contribute to only three episodes before moving on—which Taniguchi says is insufficient to develop anything meaningful.
Studios That Still Preserve the Old Way
He highlighted a handful of holdouts that continue to produce long series, particularly for children, where the learning model has been better preserved:
- Toei Animation
- TMS Entertainment
- Shin-Ei Animation
The rest of the industry, in his view, continues to not resolve the training gap that this structural shift has generated.
Why His Words Carry Weight
This is not a broadside from a disgruntled outsider. Goro Taniguchi is one of the most recognized directors in the Japanese anime industry, with a career that spans decades and titles that marked generations. His track record speaks for itself:
- Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion — a foundational mecha series
- s-CRY-ed
- 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 , following two young women—a painter and a ballet dancer—as they reunite in Paris pursuing their dreams. His concerns are not theoretical. They are born of continued, firsthand practice.
The Question That Remains
So we are left with a classic industry tension. Is the core issue a deficit of strong directorial voices bold enough to command a project’s totality? Or have the economic realities and accelerated production cycles of contemporary anime made that level of unified control a practical impossibility, regardless of a director’s intent?
Perhaps the most productive question is not choosing between the two, but asking a third: if vision is the casualty of the current model, what would a realistic, mid-tier production structure need to protect it?
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