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Answerman - Why Doesn't Anime Have Deleted Scenes?

Anime can and occasionally does have extra scenes that exceed the allotted running time, but they aren't that common and can be hard to detect. They usually arrive in the home video version of the show, and become obvious when you notice that one episode is a minute or so longer than the others, or when they appeared on television. There's little fanfare about it, and most people never notice.

Didn't Escaflowne have a lot of deleted scenes? I know there is supposed to be a edit they released in Japan with a lot of deleted scenes added back in.

cels were produced for a particular sequence and were later discarded because the shading was changed or the character ended up facing the opposite direction in the final version

“I never wanted to work in movies,” he says. “Producers don’t know about music, and then try to tell me what they want when they don’t know. And they’d fiddle with what I did. They’d come back and say, ‘Oh, sorry, this bit of music we asked for, it needs to be three seconds shorter’… Three seconds! And I would say, ‘WHAT!? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY MUSIC!?’” He laughs again, hearing himself ranting like a prima donna. But there is a glint in his eye. He looks at me, as if daring me to say he’s wrong. “But anime,” he said. “These boys came to me with an anime job. They said, ‘It needs to sound like this. It needs to be two minutes and seventeen seconds.’” He smiles in bliss. “Two minutes and seventeen seconds. Exactly. I went away and wrote it, and then I handed it to them, and that was that. Isn’t that wonderful? Because anime is all planned in advance, you see. They have storyboards for every scene, down to the nearest second. They already knew before they started exactly how long it had to be.” He pats the old Audiofile machine with a grin. “They didn’t change a single note.”

Clements, Jonathan (2009-09-15). Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade (Kindle Locations 379-389). A-Net Digital LLC. Kindle Edition.

Animation in general rarely has deleted scenes, and if the BDs/DVDs have them included, they're only ever gotten to the sketches or maybe a simple animatic whether the movie was analog or 3DCG. The decision to cut always comes before any real time or money is spent, so you're not going to see a fully animated and colored sequence of a Disney film that's been cut.

They can be pretty noticeable in some cases, as they're frequently ultra-racy "too hot for TV" fanservice scenes that're memorable for one reason or another. For instance, the 2003 action/harem series Lime-iro Senkitan goes from moderately ecchi in the TV version to borderline hentai on DVD, thanks to its added scenes.