“Yutaka Yamamoto, Toshio Okada Criticize Production Committee System”, 2017-01-05 (; backlinks):
[2023 Okada comments] They claim that it incentivizes smaller production budgets.
Anime director Yutaka Yamamoto, and former president of Gainax Toshio Okada…focused their attacks on a topic often considered taboo: the production committee system.
Both men considered the system, which originated as a way to disperse risk among numerous stakeholders and to simplify fundraising, a “shackle” around anime.
The companies that make up the production committee have an incentive to maintain control of their anime, which translates to at least 40% of the copyright. Despite the presence of Chinese communications firms who are willing to put up as much as 3 billion yen ($31.66$262017 million) to produce anime, production committees are often loath to accept this much if it means sacrificing their controlling stake. Yamamoto said if the managing companies can only put up 40 million yen ($421,342.83$346,0002017), that means the production budget will be set at only 100 million yen ($1,053,357.07$865,0002017).
Okada went on to say that if the Chinese firms still contributed a large figure like two billion yen ($21.07$17.32017 million), then the production committee will split the money among 10 different projects.
This is a factor in the increasing amount of anime in production today, although it (according to Okada) comes at the expense of quality.
“If we had a billion yen, we could make a really good anime movie”, he lamented. But this would come at the cost of its funding being 100% Chinese.
“People want the production committee system because they want money.”