Biography
Shin Itagaki is a Japanese anime director whose credits range from action and horror to romantic comedy. He directed Devil May Cry, Black Cat, and Basquash!, then took on the high-profile job of directing the 2016 and 2017 seasons of Berserk, along with Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight and Cop Craft [1][2]. He later directed So I'm a Spider, So What? and served as chief director on I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in The Real World, Too [1]. Itagaki has also written publicly about production conditions in the anime industry: in a piece for the trade site Web Anime Style, he described how it had become normal for episode directors and animation directors to redraw 80 to 90 percent of the key animation submitted to them, and pointed to a shortage of qualified animation directors as a structural problem facing productions like his [2]. He noted that studios competing for a small pool of animation directors leaves smaller productions especially exposed during crunch periods [2].
These days, it is normal for the unit/episode director and animation director to redraw 80-90% of the key animation that is submitted.