There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not show up in production schedules. It is not burnout in the clinical sense. It creeps in slowly, episode by episode, in the way a character's walk loses its rhythm by episode 28. In long-running animation series, we call this pĥenomenon animation fatigue: the gradual erosion of quality that happens when talented people repeat the same work for too long without the right systems around them. This article is for animation directors, production