So, if Iwane finished #42 less than two weeks before it aired, that means...damn, the schedule really is bad now. I remember the days where he was working on episodes five months before they aired back in 2010. :(

JulieYBM said:
So, if Iwane finished #42 less than two weeks before it aired, that means...damn, the schedule really is bad now. I remember the days where he was working on episodes five months before they aired back in 2010. :(

I think you're missing the context of the individual animators like Iwane still not being able to openly talk about his work on the show right now on social medias after a certain incident in October 2022 just like every other anipoke animator who is deeply connected with the production of the show.

Because of that, Iwane's only been mentioning his work on the show very very indirectly and in no way does the tweet imply that the episode had only been finished two weeks prior to airing.

I don't doubt that it's less than those five months for this one - the last time we got an indirect reference to what Iwane was actually working on was when he posted about drawing genga itself digitally which was at the beginning of May 2023 and the first digital genga shown by officials by him was for an episode which would air at the end of July 2023 (episode 15 of this show). So that was like almost three months between working on the episode for key animation and the final episode airing.

And of course, Iwane is also on a bit of a different schedule than the other teams as in that he appears like twice every staff rotation with Solo Key Animation right now.
He's basically one of the animators appearing the most right now if one puts in his Key Animation bits from Takuranke episodes too.

DomiDsLP said:
I think you're missing the context of the individual animators like Iwane still not being able to openly talk about his work on the show right now on social medias after a certain incident in October 2022 just like every other anipoke animator who is deeply connected with the production of the show.

Because of that, Iwane's only been mentioning his work on the show very very indirectly and in no way does the tweet imply that the episode had only been finished two weeks prior to airing.

Can I please ask you what incident from October 2022 you're referring too? I can only recall some words by Yuyama being taken by the fandom at large to mean that Ash' adventures weren't about to end. Anyway, thank you very much for the insightful comment!

UsaghiNanami99 said:
Can I please ask you what incident from October 2022 you're referring too? I can only recall some words by Yuyama being taken by the fandom at large to mean that Ash' adventures weren't about to end. Anyway, thank you very much for the insightful comment!

First, you're welcome! Second, the words by Kunihiko Yuyama in Otomedia Spring 2023... yeah, they were interpreted way out of context and they were just from a fictional letter Yuyama wrote as a goodbye to Satoshi.

Last, but not least... the explanation of the incident will be long, so strap yourself in:
It was a incident which occurred after three recap episodes aired for the show in a span of three months with multiple breaks too and all of that during PM2019's climactic Masters Tournament arc which at the same time had a below average animation quality which largely subverted the expectations of loads of people.
A lot of people on for this one here especially important... the Japanese side of the audience were pretty mad about it and wrote highly emotional replies to official PR tweets about it.

Then the fuse of animation director and key animator Chiaki Kurakazu (倉員 千晶) about these comments broke at the beginning of October 2022 and she aggressively lashed back against these people on her personal Twitter account (@wappa_sui) by saying that they should rewatch the old episodes if they don't like the recap episodes.

Some people then asked her as a reply to that as to why the show has had this many recap episodes in such a short time and she replied with the simple "We don't have enough people." as in not enough individual key animators working on the show which one is able to see if one analyses the individual episode key animator lists of that time for at least the in-house episodes (and the relative amount of outsourced/in-house episodes also amounts to it). This entire incident made decently big news online on some news sites as well as in the anipoke fandom... getting to many people who have/had (barley) any idea about animation and very well putting the state of many Japanese anime production schedules on the big screen for many.

A day later, she apologized and then after that, tweets on the episode by all animators (and even studios and people working on other aspects of the studio outside of animation) who had written about participating with key animation or any other kind of works on social medias like Twitter like Masaaki Iwane (岩根 雅明) or Yusuke Oshida (忍田 雄介)... suddenly stopped completely which of course many would realize that it likely was in relation to that even if that was never confirmed.

This is the start of what would and still is a more difficult time to find individual animator confirmations of individual scenes... it's the reason why many of the sakuga clips of Aim To Be a Pokémon Master and PM2023 go with the tag presumed unless a private DM confirmation comes around.

(This would go on like this until basically the end of Aim To Be a Pokémon Master without a change until animator Sayuri Ichiishi (一石 小百合) posted about her scene in the final episode of Aim To Be a Pokémon Master - signaling the first lift of these restrictions. The initial one-hour special of PM2023 also then showed multiple animators posting about their work on the show again after over half a year like Yusuke Oshida, Kyoko Ito (伊藤京子) and even the aforementioned Chiaki Kurakazu herself (also the freelancer artist Otumami as well for people outside of animators). However... after this, that reduced to only being Oshida consistently writing about his work on the show (Kurakazu also coming in one singular time) until around OP2 came around.
The Malaysian studio Chuckle Mouse Studio would be the first studio to talk about their work on the show for episode 25 and later 37... and for OP2, alongside Oshida and Ito, Shuhei Yasuda (安田 周平), Yong-Ce Tu (涂 泳策) joined in with the posts about their work.)

Ito however posted for her OP2 post that he had to "get permission" to post this - signaling and showing that the (mostly in-house) animators are still on a tight leash when it comes to talking about the show on social medias and this is where we are right now basically still (OP2 was in October 2023 for the relation).

DomiDsLP said:
-Cut-

I don't know how to thank you for taking the time to provide all this interesting information! I also wonder why no news of this incident reached any of the Pokémon fandom spaces I usually frequent, but maybe all the speculation around Yuyama's words took absolute precedence, lol.
In any case it's sad to remember how well-scheduled the rotation and the production in general had been from Pokémon's inception until the Coronavirus outbreak and compare it with the latter two thirds of Pokémon Journeys! Although the writing department had already had its fair share of last-minute directives from the higher-ups, that's a different story I guess. Once again, thank you oh so much for your detailed response! <3

UsaghiNanami99 said:
I don't know how to thank you for taking the time to provide all this interesting information! I also wonder why no news of this incident reached any of the Pokémon fandom spaces I usually frequent, but maybe all the speculation around Yuyama's words took absolute precedence, lol.
In any case it's sad to remember how well-scheduled the rotation and the production in general had been from Pokémon's inception until the Coronavirus outbreak and compare it with the latter two thirds of Pokémon Journeys! Although the writing department had already had its fair share of last-minute directives from the higher-ups, that's a different story I guess. Once again, thank you oh so much for your detailed response! <3

You're welcome once more first!

From the timeline, it was like this incident was in October 2022 and Yuyama's words were in a magazine interview which was released at the end of February 2023, so it's quite far apart actually.

And... to be fair, the incident did reach some news outlets even like I had said before, but I suppose it didn't reach whereever you were.

The production of the Pokémon anime... yeah, ever since the end of SM, it slowly started getting worse in the background and Covid was like a nail into it at a very vulnerable state. But even without it, many of the action animators from SM days (those who weren't specifically in it due to being invited to work on the show by SM character designer Satoshi Nakano (中野 悟史)) did just leave the production of the main anime on their own terms for completely different projects during early PM2019 even before Covid - someone like the XY and SM legends Yasushi Nishiya (西谷 泰史) and Aito Ōhashi (大橋 藍人) or late SM star Takeshi Maenami (前並 武志).

During most of PM2019... if one judges schedules purely through the amounts of animation directors per episode, it was still decently fine with many in-house episodes just having 2 per episode. But the more with big events stacked Year 3 of PM2019 and especially the Masters Tournament at the end of PM2019 put the schedule and the too small pool of in-house key animators into a new mess which likely was softened up a bit through Aim To Be a Pokémon Master afterwards though the schedule would remain quite... bad for most parts of the rotations (AD counts going from 3 to 7/8 often) until even now with just some specific episodes of PM2023 getting the extreme priority which usually showed in having three animation directors (which is the current optimum for in-house episodes in PM2023 at that).

To be honest, when comparing the AD counts of PM2023 right now with the other currently airing OLM shows from the other production lines OLM has... it's average to slightly below average.

Will it ever get consistently better again all throughout the rotation? Maybe. Some wild-card freelancer animators are also seen sometimes right now and... not project or production-line specific OLM in-house animators come and go from and to Pokémon consistently too.