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.