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Japanese Anime Industry In Danger Of Fragmentation
ChibiOne writes "The Asahi Shinbun has a story about the critical state that the Japanese animation industry currently faces, claiming: 'As merchandisers grow rich, the animation industry is losing jobs to cheaper labor abroad.' The article quotes Oh Production President Koichi Murata as saying: 'Unless something is done, Japanese anime will be ruined.' An animator, toiling away on cels in a tiny Tokyo studio, might be fortunate to pull in just 50,000 yen [about $500 USD] a month."
Considering the enormous quantity of anime which can be downloaded for free on the internet, sometimes including very high quality fanmade subtitles.Maybe the independant Japanese animator could try to find a business model similar to that of the RIAA ?
Something like selling anime directly to the masses who can't wait to see the next episode, using the internet. Maybe he could make a small company with some of the fan translator.
The interest here would be once more to shorten the chain between producer and consumer. For everything which can be stored and transmitted on electronic medias, the internet still seems to be the best solution.
When business wins over talent, the business fails and the talent eventually pops up again. Just remember what happened with Atari and its developer relations. Games were mass produced, programmers paid poorly, and cheap products were rushed to launch. This isn't so much of a danger to the anime industry as the landfills. Fortunately, anime merchandise is easier to dump than 4 million ET carts.
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An average person is greedy and couldn't care less about the aspirations of a random artist on the internet. People believe something is popular largely because corporations make them popular and get lots of money to pay their artists (outsourced or not). This is reality.
This is not all that new. Japanese animation work (esp. inbetweening, cel painting) has always been outsourced to Korean and Chinese studios. Some of the threat has come from the fact that there are a shortage of _good_ animators and keyframers in Japan, and there is more demand for new Japanese animation right now that what Japan has the ability to output.
Also, Japanese animators have always been underpaid. Osamu Tezuka (the "father of manga") started his influencial animation studio within the ideal of producing cheap limited animation via underpaid animators. And it worked, and the industry was born.
Additional ranting:
Right now there are 130 (!!) new TV episodes airing in Japan every month. There are just not enough employees to produce that much animation w/o outsourcing some of the labor. But 90% of it is crap anyway (naruto, inuyasha, etc.etc). Who cares if that gets outsourced more and more. We'll still have quality animated works from studios such as Production-IG (Innocence) and Madhouse (Satoshi Kon movies) so what's the worry if those fast-made 100+ episode franchise series gets outsourced? Were they worth that much to begin with?
I haven't seen a decent anime made after 1998.
Then you haven't seen Lain, FLCL, Spirited Away, Cowboy Bebop, or any number of other series I could name.
I always see this criticism that "anime sucks" now, that it was better in the good old days. Well, as with most things, there really was no "good old days" and you're probably just remembering anime as you first encountered it, when it was new and different to you. But anime itself is not very old (the 1950's, really, was the start of it), it generally wasn't really much better than the level of American Saturday morning cartoons until at least the mid 1980's (and even then the good stuff was mostly confined to guys like Miyazaki and Leiji Matsumoto), and it's actually diversified since then. Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there was *always* a lot of crap... there's also some good stuff too these days, in a variety of styles that didn't even exist a decade or so ago.
It's true, though, that the money has run out on a lot of studios, and it shows in many cases. Series are shorter than they used to be - there are fewer long-running TV series now, and OVA's (straight-to-video releases) now usually run just a few episodes. But a series like FLCL demonstrates just how much you can do with a short series and not much money - it's a brilliant satire/parody of anime cliches, and one of the most energetic, fun, funny, and in the end seriously well-written series I've ever seen. As in, actually somewhat profound.
I don't necessarily think financial hard times are always a bad thing in art and entertainment. The appetite for anime in Japan is insatiable - it's everywhere, and it's not dying anytime soon. If producers are forced to work on shoestring budgets with compacted storylines, maybe they'll focus a bit more on plot, character, and *interesting* animation rather than just overblown Hollywood-style productions. FLCL showed the way, we'll see if others can pick up where it left off.
like rising unemployment because of outsourcing
Um... you don't think that little dot-bomb bust we had 4 years might have been responsible for the jump in unemployment we had then? Besides, unemployment in the USA has been going down, not up for the past few months now. And to put it in an even better perspective, it is at the same rate now that it was when Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, but of course no one complained about "high" unemployment back then.
And if you think Kerry is going to do anything about outsourcing, then perhaps he should demonstrate some leadership on that issue by selling all of his stock in the Heinz company, which rakes in millions of dollars a year due to outsourced labor abroad. Or he should reject all contributions from the Hollywood Left, which has been outsourcing jobs to Canada for many years now.
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I still can't believe that thing was in a double-bill with Totoro when first released. Watching Grave for the first time I couldn't help but see Mei in Setsuko...
And that was correct! The reason of the "double-bill" release of both features was that they were the first major acts in Japanese culture to acknowledge the enormous suffering of Japanese civilians in 1940's due to American air raids. Until then, it was a sortof taboo subject ("now we have communists to worry about, so we should hush hush all our grievances about our powerful occupant-cum-ally"). "Totoro" talks about the same topic - why do you think the whole family moved to the countryside in the first place? They escaped from air raids. Obviously, Miyazaki (in his typical style) tells the story in much more subtle way, putting the whole suffering in a bracket metahpor of daughters-missing-their-parents etc., but it's the same story, after all. Setsuko's suffering IS Mei's suffering.
If you are a genius, and by that I mean an actual creator of fine art, you will always be in demand. Simply put anyone can rip off one idea, but if people want more, they'll come crawling back.
This article sounds more like the whining of an executive not getting his cut than the plight of the animator itself. I'm not saying that animators aren't being treated unfairly. I'm saying that the president of any company generally cares more about what's in his wallet than some paeon animator's.
Anyone following baseball should know the senario. If George Steinbrenner wants the city of New York to give anything to the Yankees he says, "Oh, if I don't get it, the cost of business will increase SO much that I'll have to move the team to New Jersey." Then he goes back to sleep on his bed of mint $10,000 bills.
Let's take a look at a key sentence in this article.
"Yet an animator, toiling away on cels in a tiny Tokyo studio, might be fortunate to pull in just 50,000 yen a month."
The important word here is "might." This implies that the author does not know what an animator makes. Without any sources for that figure other than a nameless 26 year-old animator, you have to conclude that the statement is at best suspect, at worst a lie.
From what I have read and heard about Japan, they face the same problem we have here. The cost of living is higher in Japan than in nearby countries. However, has cheap Mexican labor ruined CARS? No. Even the Fords made in the good old US of A will flip over and explode.
If Japanese production companies are so important to Anime, they can demand more money. Anime is far too lucrative to die out. What is more likely, however, is that these are Anime stripmines, churning out series like Harlequin churns out romance novels, or that these are just a bunch of guys who have a knack for tracing.
Like I said, maybe I'm wrong about the "Oh Productions" that the article speaks of, but you can't have it both ways. If you are the genius behind the anime, than you will be able to command the money. If you are just some guys who copy and color, then you are probably a dime a dozen in Japan and a dime for 2 dozen in Korea.
Either way, Anime itself is not ruined. At least, not by ink and paint jobs leaving Japan.
SW
Bush didn't suddenly start outsourcing. I hate the guy as much as the next level-headed person, but let's not blame him for this one. Outsourcing isn't a good thing. It's not a bad thing, either. It's economic ebb and flow. At the moment, the jobs are going away from the US. Before, they've been going to the US. Give it a few more years, and the jobs will be coming back.
Complaining about this, as fashionable as it is, underlines the lack of objectivity when discussing this issue. How someone can defend themselves and their friends being paid vastly overblown salaries (and yes, US salaries are high, even when compared to cost of living) when people in these countries are just as able (which they are - India has schools too, yet Indian society places more emphasis on the importance of studies than American society - which favors athletic prowess), and more needing of the salary. It's being selfish.
Want to get jobs back to the US? Lower the wages. For US IT professionals to demand comparatively high salaries almost demands their jobs are sent elsewhere, especially when we're dealing with one of the most "footloose" industries present. If you want to keep your job, make sure you're the only one who can do it. Get special knowledge. Make yourself irreplacable. If you just sit at your desk all day, hammering out code anyone could do, you are replacable. It's not just IT this principle works for. Almost every single labor market out there works this way. If the workforce demands a higher salary than an alternative workforce, guess what? The work goes somewhere else.
Please folks, I can understand exactly where you're coming from on this one, but no-one moaned when this same phenomenon was working the other way round, and it's just plain immature (and selfish) to complain now.
Have you seen recent fansubs? I started collecting the fansubs of Ghost in the Shell - SAC after trying to follow the absymal DVD subs. I just watched an episode where they color-coded the personal pronouns to elaborate the fact that a character had multiple personalities and specify which pronoun refered to which personality.
While I don't know Japanese, that doesn't strike me as low quality. The community has moved way beyond bootleg VHS tapes. I'd rather have a fansub than an offical sub.
Exchange "anime" -> "books", "making" -> "writing", "Adult Swim" -> "Amazon" and you have a nice description of the fiction market. Do the same for music and it fits there as well. Ditto sculpture, photography and so on.
Most of anything creative is bad, almost by definition. As a poster pointed out elsewhere, you have a situation with millions of people willing to do the craft, with an inverse exponential talent distribution - and subjective criteria for what constitutes a good instance, so you can not reliably actually separate the wheat from the chaff. You will end up with mostly crap no matter how you do it. Today you may have a thousand releases, 950 of which are no good (in your eyes, of course). If you allowed only twenty releases a year, you would end up with 19 lousy examples and one good one.
Hollywood is no different. Most of it is bad. What is not bad for everyone is good for some people, but bad for others. Very, very few movies (Hollywood or other) are actually good for a large majority of recpients. You can even argue with some plausibility that Hollywood is streamlining its process to such a degree that they increase its hitrate for one audience segment (male, european/american, 15-30) at the cost of losing most other demographics altogether.
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I don't think that the overall quality of anime is particularly different from what it was five years ago. At that time, I was actually trading VHS tapes with a physician in Osaka. I mailed him the American dub of Sailor Moon and he sent me Evangelion (what a deal that was), and other programs taped off of Japanese TV.
One of the tapes he mailed me was his annual opening title/end credits tape of virtually all anime that was broadcast new that year. After watching about twenty minutes of this, I came to the conclusion that Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Anime. By the end of the tape, I was even singing my own theme song, "Another f*cking show about a bunch of f*cking kids, f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck".
And by the way, Edward rocks. She provided much-needed comic relief in Cowboy Beebop, until she was removed just prior to the last few episodes which were all chock full of angsty torture (and which were also very good).
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I hate the guy as much as the next level-headed person
"Hate" is level-headed now?
If by "before", you're talking about the 1960s or something, then yes, you would be correct, but America has been running trade deficits for an extremely long time--jobs have, for my entire lifetime, always flowed out of the United States. The countries they flow to change, the direction does not. There is no ebb, there is only flow.
How someone can defend themselves and their friends being paid vastly overblown salaries (and yes, US salaries are high, even when compared to cost of living) when people in these countries are just as able (which they are - India has schools too, yet Indian society places more emphasis on the importance of studies than American society - which favors athletic prowess), and more needing of the salary. It's being selfish.
I don't defend the level of my salary--I defend the fact that I have a job at all. After all, the problem isn't that wages are falling, the problem is that people are losing jobs. Being unemployed in America doesn't suck much less than being unemployed in India. Not being able to afford food or medical bills sucks wherever you are.
I don't mind so much if U.S. wages fall if it means otherwise starving countries like India will actually have food. What makes me angry is that the profits of outsourcing aren't going to just Indians--they're going to the super-rich Americans at the top of the economic ladder--the people who no longer have to work for a living, if they ever did. The free-traders chant how selfish we Americans are and how we should sacrifice for poorer workers abroad--yet they say nothing about the people in America who benefit from outsourcing. In other words, the particular Americans who are richest and sacrificing the most, end up being the ones who sacrifice nothing!
If we are going to have fiscal and monetary policies that force the worst-off Americans to sacrifice to help the rest of the world, then we need redistribute incomes in this country. Otherwise, your complaints about the selfishness of American workers are very deceitful.
Want to get jobs back to the US? Lower the wages.
Or subsidize health care and education like Europe and Canada. Or eliminate regressive Social Security taxes. Or make regular income taxes more progressive. Or have the government stop borrowing so much money from Asia. Basically, have the goverment stop doing everything it possibly can to make sure Americans don't have jobs.
Get special knowledge. Make yourself irreplacable. If you just sit at your desk all day, hammering out code anyone could do, you are replacable. It's not just IT this principle works for.
Who's just talking about IT? How do you expect 250 million people to find "special knowledge"? If you want to make sure there's no place in society for unskilled American labor, fine, just don't complain when unemployed factory workers start mugging you--it's the only job left them, now.
Please folks, I can understand exactly where you're coming from on this one, but no-one moaned when this same phenomenon was working the other way round, and it's just plain immature (and selfish) to complain now.
I wasn't alive to moan when the phenomenon was working the other direction. Were you? The only selfishness I see are those at the top of the American pyramid stealing the last few scraps of bread from those at the bottom.
Good God. I've heard some stupid claims before, but this one's just the icing on the cake. I don't even want to acknowledge that I just read an article quoting some complete moron bitching about how anime will lose its hideous industrial manufactured look because other more intelligent companies have realized "wait, you mean there are artists outside of Japan that are at least as good?"
It's a clear ploy, if I ever saw one, to pretend this guy's little company has some sort of place as a pioneer. But here's the painful reality dude: If you stick with the sucky artists you have right now and pretend nobody exists outside your general area, you were doomed from the start, and posing as the holder of a meaningless 20-year tradition of Japanese animation (which was begun by artists using American techniques) is not, by a long-shot, going to save your dead-end company. I bid you a good pre-riddance.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
That article admits that payroll figures have still fallen--and that fact is surely in far more headlines than your lies. Fewer people are working (payroll), more people have been born. No one disputes these two facts. Is that too convoluted for you? That an apparently illiterate fellow like you is apparently making such great money is a sign that something is amiss. So there is a shortage of one particular category of worker in the labor force--workers who have already been trained in the specific machinery mentioned in your article. Not a big deal--and indeed, why should workers retrain to operate it, when if past history is any guide their jobs will be sent overseas as soon as they graduate from their technical school?
And how will it help a damn thing to redistribute income in this country, at least anymore than it already has? I don't know about other people, but I work hard so I'm rewarded.
Umm...if you don't know about other people, let me fill you in. Other people have spent a whole lot of money on their own education, only to be earning nearly nothing as their jobs were shipped overseas. Other people have been working damn hard their entire lives only to die with nothing. (You were asking where Bill Gates's and your money came from? That's where the fuck you stole it from, you fucking leech.). Other people are either working three jobs without health insurance or lost their job because the company moved to Canada where businesses don't have to pay for their worker's health insurance.
If I don't get the fruits of my labor, why should I work hard at all? If the government took more and more of my money as my paycheck increased, that would greatly lessen my motivation to increase it. Work twice as hard for only 1/4 more pay after your wealth redistribution scheme takes the rest?
Why not? Plenty of people work twice as hard for only 1/4 your pay. Of course, taxes were raised under Clinton, and plenty of people found incentive to work then--because there were actually jobs for people to work at.
Incentives for labor is what I'm all about. That's why I'd like to see capital gains taxes raised, and taxes for the working poor eliminated--how can you expect them to work themselves out of poverty if you insist on stealing the bread from their mouths?
Their socialized health care systems are swirling down the drains of decay since they implemented the system you think is so wonderful. When you seperate the decision to pay for services so far from the decision to seek services, you raise demand while restricting supply, and everything goes to shit. Really, look into it. Socialized health care is an abject failure.
Are you even a fucking American, or are you some sort of Frenchman conspiring to destroy our economy? How am I supposed to believe that you've ever actually worked in America, when you appear to be completely ignorant of the fact that health care costs are rising at double-digit rates, and the fact that tge decision to pay for services has been seperated from the decision to seek services ever since the Great Depression, when health insurance became linked to employment? Your complaint says more about our system then theirs--our health-care system is like a strange bizzarro-socialism, neither egalitarian nor utilitarian.
Have you ever stopped to consider how even those who rate as 'poor' in the united states typically have a TV, plenty to eat (obesity is the number one health problem of the poor), and a car?
Obesity and malnutrition sometimes mix. So the poor have plenty of subsidized sugared processed grains, cheap imported consumer goods, and a powerful military that guarantees they can fill their ancient clunkers with cheap gas. They still can't afford fruits and veget