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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."
Didn't know Indians could do anime, too...
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.
Anyone notice that a lot of the AMERICAN cartoons we like (Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, Clerks, and I believe Invader Zim) are all animated primarily by Korean animation farms? Also, I will take this opportunity to interject my worthless 2 cents about current anime: It sucks. I haven't seen a decent anime made after 1998.
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.
download games I make at: http://www.shippysite.com
Where the hell can you live in Japan on 50K yen a month? When I lived in Okinawa, I think the cheapest rent on the island was about three times that.
50,000.00 JPY = 451.859 USD, about 5422.30 USD per year
per capita GDP is $28,700 (2002 est.)
factbook on japan
Matsumoto said one U.S. toy manufacturer offered his company about $10 million (about 1.1 billion yen) for the rights to market merchandise featuring the characters of an animated cartoon his company hadn't even completed. The figure was particularly eye-popping for Matsumoto because it was 100 times what animated films earn on average from broadcasting rights in Japan. - One has to wonder why their aren't any regulations regarding corperate responsibility and minimun wage laws on this matter.
It's worth pointing out that the people interviewed in the article who are complaining about the death of anime, are employed by production houses who work on the very family-friendly anime - and with specific reference to "Chibi Maruko-chan" there was a well-known legal case from the voice-actors last year, as they weren't being paid residuals. I suspect that the situation is rather different for companies which make otaku-friendly anime - and I [i]KNOW[/i] it's different for companies who work with NHK. Actually, it's the otaku-friendly anime, and bishoujo anime specifically, which is powering Japan's anime boom.
I saw a program about this on Japanese TV not so long ago.
The main problems with outsourcing animation is that the Koreans and Filipinos doing the animations are going to get better in these industries and create more competition for the Japanese animators themselves later on.
Even though this is the case, from what I've seen from Japanese schoolchildren with no formal art training in comic animation, there's no danger of Japan running out of creative talent.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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 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
Before you know it, their cartoon characters will start having lips and noses...oh, the horror.
Is budget cuts the reason why we have 30-second-long scenes where the only thing moving on the screen is the lips of the character?
Or the reason why Rurouni Kenshin spends 5 episodes doing "powering up discussions" and then another 5 episodes jumping towards his enemy while exciting music plays in the background, and in the end you don't even see him slashing the ****ing opponent, because conveniently, "KENSHIN IS 2 FAST A SWORDSMAN 4 U 2 C!"
WTF!?
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.
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!
A lot of our favorite toon-shows were animated in Korea. If I'm correct, these included the original G.I. Joe series, Gem, He-Man, the Snorks, and pretty much most of what was aired on Saturdays in the 80's. When I was in elementary school, I recall having wondered why there were goofy names sporadically mentioned in the credits of such cartoons. Then I realized I was Korean and that my name was goofy too.
The anime industry in Japan has mostly moved away from cels to to computer-based animation. Only a few legacy shows, like Chibi Maruko-chan or Sazae-san (which has been running since the 60s, I think) still use cels. Most new shows are of the digital ink-and-paint variety and many also feature a lot of 3D CGI assist. 5 years ago this was not so true, but practically every show made in the last 2 years is almost entirely digital.
This has stemmed the flood of outsourcing to a small leak. Almost any show you watch has a batch of Korean names in the end credits, but it's still mostly japanese. And all the top jobs are still held by japanese animators.
I know someone who was a former animator, ran a small studio in the late 90s, and was later a consultant for a DIP software company (Animo). One thing he said sparked the changeover was this: In order to make sure that work farmed out to studio XYZ in Korea matched the next scene farmed out to studio ABC in Thailand, the industry created a standard set of colors for cel paint. Being a relatively small industry, this led to one company making all the cel paint for everyone. A small, old, established company that had been doing it forever. And an old man who had been doing the job of master pigment mixer forever, having things his way, etc. Well, one day he, the only guy who really knew how to mix all the colors, had a heart attack and the industry realized their livlihood rested on the health of some crotchety old man at the paint company. Most studios switched over to digital within a year. ^_^
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
Its like any other media endeavour. The talent that is actually most directly responsible for creating the product gets a very small chunk of the pie.
For animation, the publishers get the money.
For videogames, the publishers get the money.
For books, the publishers get the money.
For music, the publishers get the money most of the time.
The only exception is for movies and for music, where the stars get a big chunk of money. But that is because a singer is always directly associated with the song, and can choose not to sing so no one gets any money.
TV and Movies (moreso for TV though), a particular actor usually comes to be known for the character and can destroy the endeavour by not co-operating.
And the same happens with authors, though they need to hit it big before they can get a reasonable deal.
Animation and videogames are more collaborative though, and one person is not able to just pull the plug on the deal as above.
You will not get paid adequately for your services if your reasonably replaceible, or of the publisher can do the deal without you.
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