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Studio Ghibli Animation Software Going "Open Source"; Details Pending (toonzpremium.com)
Michael Tiemann writes: Digital Video, the makers of TOONZ, and DWANGO, a Japanese publisher, announced today they have signed an agreement for the acquisition by Dwango of Toonz, an animation software which was independently developed by Digital Video (Rome, Italy). Digital Video and Dwango have agreed to close the deal under the condition Dwango will publish and develop an Open Source platform based on Toonz (OpenToonz). Effective Saturday March 26, the TOONZ Studio Ghibli Version will be made available to the animation community as a free download. Not yet clear is which existing open source license will be used for the software, if any. If it is properly licensed as open source software, then we should all celebrate this event by drawing unicorns and rainbows. If not, many will be dis-spirited away. Animation World Network also reports this news, and adds a few more details, but is similarly vague about the license terms. I hope the terms are such that we'll soon see Toonz in media-centric Linux distros, and in widespread classroom use.
Ghibli might stop producing feature films, but I don't think they've yet confirmed that. The reason why they've been on hiatus has nothing to do with piracy or sales. It's because they've lost Hayao Miyazaki. He retired from feature films in 2013, and he was Ghibli's breadwinner and most famous filmmaker, almost being synonymous with Ghibli itself (Isao Takahata is the other famous filmmaker at Ghibli, and he will probably not make another film either). Pricess Mononoke became the highest grossing film of all time in Japan until it was bested by Titanic, but then Miyazaki came back with Spirited Away which became the new highest grossing film of all time and still remains so (both films also won the Picture of the Year Oscar-equivalent in Japan, i.e. won against even live action films, until animated films were shoved into their own award category). His last film The Wind Rises was the highest grossing of 2014.
Ghibli has apparently had trouble developing new talent, and they've been too invested in Miyazaki. On the other hand, Ghibli was founded by Miyazaki and Takahata (and producer Toshio Suzuki) so they could make the films they wanted to. They probably just don't know where Ghibli should go from here, or if it should go anywhere (as an animation studio).
You're conflating two very different things here: Ghibli and the television anime industry. Ghibli is a mega successful household name with their own museum that brings in a lot of revenue, they own their productions (not always the case for anime studios), and as a film producer they make most of their money at the box office. In terms of home video sales they're in a very different league than TV anime. Late night TV anime relies a lot on disc sales (there's no ad revenue), but there's relatively few people who buy them since they're expensive, there's too many shows on the air, and most people just don't watch late night anime at all. Daytime anime is watched by many more people, but disc sales are not important.
Low wages in the anime industry (at least in the early stages of one's career) go back all the way to the beginning of anime and have nothing to do with piracy. People don't even have to buy anime in Japan as they can just watch it for free on TV. But for the relatively small number of serious fans that isn't enough, so they buy Blu-rays and merchandise. A show can also profit by making people go buy the source material it's based on (e.g. sales for the KonoSuba series of light novels tripled thanks to the recent anime adaptation).