One Piece Boss Reveals the Real Reason Foreign Animators Struggled in the Wano Arc

Here is a fascinating little peek behind the curtain of how a mega-anime like One Piece actually gets made, and why the next decade might be bumpy if the industry does not fix some nuts-and-bolts problems first.

One Piece's top animation boss says the global hiring boom is a mixed bag

Keiichi Ichikawa, the current chief animation director on One Piece, joined during Whole Cake Island and made his biggest mark in Wano. At Japan Expo 2023, in an interview posted by Fullfrontal, he talked about the wave of talent the series pulled in from all over the world — and the headaches that came with it.

"It's not all bad, but each country has its own culture, and foreign animators don't always know how to match the Japanese style, so compensating for that is also causing some problems."

He said the team often lets new recruits run with their instincts. Sometimes that works great. Sometimes it does not. A big recurring issue: many foreign animators are not familiar with second key animation — a very specific step in the Japanese pipeline that tightens and standardizes the drawings after key animation and corrections so the episode actually looks like the show you expect. It is a shop-floor detail, but it absolutely affects what ends up on screen.

Why this matters right now: Toei is scaling up hard

Toei Animation just rolled out a ten-year plan, and it is ambitious. The studio wants to be a 500 billion yen (about $3.2 billion) global brand by 2033, which means more productions, more people, more everything. And that expansion leans heavily on international hiring to ease Japan's animator shortage.

• Target: 500 billion yen (approx. $3.2B) global brand by 2033
• At least three new studios across Asia within the next five years
• Hiring hundreds of new staff to support a growing slate

On paper, that is the fix: bring in talent from everywhere. In practice, it magnifies exactly what Ichikawa flagged. If new hires are not trained up on the Japanese workflow — especially second key animation — quality control gets harder, schedules get messier, and shows like One Piece feel the strain. The flip side is also true: the animator shortage is real, so doing nothing is not an option.

The bottleneck: no real system to teach the workflow

Ichikawa was pretty blunt about the industry not having a proper, resourced training setup for this. Time and budgets are tight, so there is no standardized pipeline to bring newcomers up to speed.

"We don't really have a system to do that. If we think someone is good, we entrust work to him. And if they do it, everybody will be grateful. It causes us trouble, but we can't really do anything about it."

That ad-hoc approach works until it does not. The fix is not mysterious: build a real system that onboards foreign key animators and teaches second key animation and the stylistic norms that make Japanese TV animation look like, well, Japanese TV animation. It takes money and time, but it pays off with smoother production, fewer firefights, and stronger episodes. If Toei is serious about its 10-year plan, this is where some of that investment has to go — or One Piece and everything else in the pipeline will feel the growing pains.

One Piece is streaming on Crunchyroll.