The harsh reality behind creating our favorite series has come to light again, this time from a highly respected voice. Toshie Kawamura, veteran of the anime industry known for her brilliant work as character designer and animation director in franchises like Yes! Pretty Cure 5, Smile Pretty Cure!, and Carnival, published a heartbreaking message confessing she no longer wishes to hold the position of animation director.

The “endless hell” of cleaning up others’ mistakes

Through social media posts, Kawamura explained her frustration has nothing to do with ego, as she considers all roles in production equally important. The real problem lies in how her work has been distorted over the last decade. Instead of supervising and adding final touches, animation directors are now forced to fix disasters created in earlier stages: cleaning up rushed sketches, correcting the work of secondary key animators, and redoing poorly finished in-between frames.

This extreme workload has pushed her to her physical and mental limits. “When I was young I could still endure it, but thinking this will continue forever feels like an endless hell. It’s no wonder the amount of medication I need has increased”, confessed the artist. In a desperate plea to studios, Kawamura asked they only hire people who have learned the basic fundamentals of animation, adding a phrase that broke her followers’ hearts: “I have a short life ahead, so I don’t want to waste more time on unnecessary things”.

A crisis threatening the future of anime

Kawamura’s statements immediately resonated with other industry professionals. An animator with 27 years of experience responded confirming almost all animation directors feel exactly the same way today. Other colleagues pointed out that the brutal overproduction of anime has caused many new artists to deliver poor work, without interest and treating the process as a simple assembly line rather than an artistic craft.

Fans, who often praise episodes supervised by Kawamura for their beauty and attention to detail, now understand the high human cost behind that quality: she herself redraws much of the material to save the final product. This veteran’s message serves as a severe warning to a saturated industry. If studios don’t improve conditions, training standards, and fair distribution of work, the great talents that sustain anime quality will eventually abandon it forever.