Quote:
"A typical 30 minute cartoon requires over 3,500 pages of drawing and takes three months to make. Sometimes as much work goes into a 10 second action scene as five minute conversation scene in which there is little movement except for the mouths. Japanese animators are known for putting in long hours, often 12 hours a day, including weekends. Before deadlines they are known for not leaving their studios and sleeping under their desks.
Japanese artists are trained in two-year courses at high-tech schools like the Nippon Engineering College. After graduating they get jobs in Japans anime studios. To cut costs Japanese anime producers are farming out work to South Korea. China and the Philippines. Poor pay and long working hours has resulted in the migration of workers to more lucrative jobs in the video game industry and a shortage of talent.
People employed on the anime industry are poorly paid. One survey found that those in their 20s earn only about $11,000 a year while those in their 30s earn only about $21,400 a year. Even, skilled veteran artists in their 40s and 50s earn only about $30,000 a year. Nearly 50 percent have no contacts and 40 percent have no healthcare coverage"
That’s poor pay for Japan. I have been there twice competing in karate tournaments and all the parents were grumbling about how expensive everything was. I can’t see $21k going very far over there.
Plus they ran schemes to provide financing recieved by the Japanese Government, for studios and train new talent in 2010 and 2011, the new talent get to work on short films with the studio’s senior staff training them on the job. The short films screened early 2012 in Japan.
The Japnaese government knows that the anime industry is being affected by sending work out to other asian countries and are spending to train new home talent. I think the Japanese Animation Creators Association is still running but I can’t read Japanese so I don’t know what they have on their official website(anyone want to translate)-
How old is this article? They’ve been saying the same things since I was last there, at that was in 2002! I think some things have changed by now. Salaries, unfortunately, are not one of them. The DVD market has dwindled considerably, though, and I think rentals are nearly dead due to online.
Also there is no mention of studios experiments with online distribution, not that any found noteworthy success there. I am glad they made mention of the new indie scene happening in Japan. I think that is where the future will be found.
Jumping down to the end I see the article is a few years old and simply updated recently. That is good.
It is poor pay but it also depends on where you are living in Japan.
You don’t have to live in the large cities/prefectures to work in them.
Most gaijins when first visiting Japan typically complain about the high costs there.
And who the hell expects to be paid anything more than grunt wages for filling in cells?
Probably those who have been following their dream…
Totally affordable to pay for on your own.
Many employees in Japan have no “business paid for” health insurance.
The 2D animation biz has been a lousy occupation even here in the states.
I had a neighbor in Los Angeles who worked as an artist, cell painter for a couple of the big name cartoon creators in the 40’s, 50s and 60’s and she had nothing nice to say about her experience. She was also dying from cancer that she believed she contracted from exposure to the various paints, inks and solvents that she used.
Follow your dream?
Might just be a nightmare in disguise…
First, cel painting is hard work. Not everyone can do it successfully.
Second, I thought digital ink-and-paint replaced cels in traditional animation. Do cels still exist in modern anime productions?
Third, the article suggests that these are the top wages given to designers, board artists and animators drawing key character poses. The late Satoshi Kon may have received a pittance for his stunning storyboard work. I would have expected Ghibli artists to make more than $30,000/year for drawing Arrietty.
I am aware that it is done digitally, I use the term “filling” but I could have been more specific.
And yes, those artists are not paid very much. Lots of people chasing few jobs
makes it work out that way esp. in Japan where the average folk do not make wonderful wages eking out a living. I have lived and worked in Japan over the past 35 years and that is what I have seen. Fortunately my occupations there were not arts related.
nime auteur Makoto Shinka was a pioneer of the new indie anime model in Japan. He created his first anime short, She and Her Cat, entirely on his own, from photographs he took and imagery drafted on the computer tools that were available in 1998. He then wrote, directed and produced his first feature-length anime, Voices from a Distant Star, on his Apple Power Mac G4. Shinkai told me in New York last year that his goal as an artist was to tell his audience, “You will be OK”–a particularly urgent sentiment in the wake of increasing calamities, he said, not just in Japan, but worldwide. [Ibid]
This Boy Can Fight Aliens,
Quotes from the article. Looks like a silver lining.
I would like to know more about the indie animation scene in Japan and how to get into it.
Teruchan can you elaborate? I know you’ve been in that market. Or anyone else? Any ideas?
Back when it was still all acrylic on acetate they were already offsetting (locally) and outsourcing (to SE Asia) the colour by the dots work, and a lot of it would end up with house wives and pregnant women with absolutely no art education, only requirement was a steady hand, so the top CV requirement was for skills such as seamstresses had and so on (precise manual work and dexterity).
Cells from a lot of anime would also be moved in stashes and then sold relatively cheap, and because of how cheap this was and how easy it was to offset, photocopies of the acetates would be brought home by some of the inkers and handed out to the family for a quick paint, then sold as if they were original for even less (and that’s how desperate they were for money).
That’s how easy the colouring was in the 80s and early 90s, since it was largely flat fill-in.
We’re not talking Disney’s complex rendering and early use of digital here, you are literally talking about filling the back of a transparent sheet with photocopied ink with diluted acrylic paint. It was paid in cents per sheet.
Unless you talk a hero cell of a very prominent franchise or film, you could get a full frame shot of a protagonist of a fairly popular series for peanuts (I have a handful actually, and not one of them costed more than 40$ back then, some as little as 8$, and they were that “pricey” because certified, and imported to the other side of the world).
Not that it matters much anymore, but for the sake of fun facts and all
The funny this is that they had to form a labor union
he Japanese Animation Creators Association (JAniCA) is a labor union representing workers in the Japanese animation industry. The group was formed back in June 2007 as a non-profit organization dedicated to raising the living standards of workers in the anime industry including livable wages.
Here is the irony of the reaso nthey had to do this…
JAniCA is the first labor union to be formed for the Japanese animation industry since anime production began. On October 15, 2007 over 500 animators gathered together to announce the formation Toyoo Ashida Among the other creators who spoke at the October 13 press conference were director Satoshi Kon, animation director Moriyasu Taniguchi, Tokyo University graduate school professor Yasuki Hamano, editor Nobuyuki Takahashi and animation director Akihiro Kanayama.[2]
In June 2008 the union was legally incorporated as an Unlimited Liability Company intermediary corporation to further continue improving the work conditions in the Japanese animation industry.[3]
In 2010 JAniCA launched their “2010 Young Animator Training Project.” The animation labor group received 214.5 million yen (about US$2.27 million) from the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, and it distributed most of those funds to studios to train young animators on-the-job during the year. One of the reasons for the support of the Agency for Cultural Affairs is the concern that more of the Japanese animation process is being outsourced overseasthus leading to a decline in opportunities to teach animation techniques within Japan. In 2011 the Agency once again provided funding for JAniCA to select more young training projects under the same budgets
And here is more on the subject:
Labor Group: Animators in Their 20s Earn US$11,600 a Year (Updated)
A symposium was held in Tokyo last Friday on the working conditions of the anime industry in Japan. The Japan Animation Creators Association (JAniCA), a labor group established by directors, animators, and other animation staffers, held the symposium to discuss the results on its survey on the workplace. According to the symposium, young anime staffers in their 20s earn an average annual salary of just over 1 million yen (US$10,500), and the industry is not training a big enough talent pool for its needs.
Well the part of the article you quoted pretty much tells you how to do it. He made something really cool on his own and they came to him. That’s pretty much what worked for me too. Because of Understanding Chaos, most of the good deals I ever got came to me. Soubi did things a little differently. She finished her full length video first, even working on it while she was still in school. That way works too, though it is more difficult if you have to do something while keeping your day job or finishing school. (I was working in EA and did Chaos on nights and weekends. I don’t think I could do that today.)
TOKYOPOP paid me an advance so I could work on the stuff full time. Comix Wave did the same for Shinkai. I am sure Soubi, whose second film is already out actually, can work full time on her stuff too.
Exactly. Cel painting and inbetweening is grunt work. In the office in Shanghai we had a whole 2D team doing both on Japanese and US show. I saw them working on Thundercats even! They were all kids. Some looked not even old enough to have graduated yet. They get about $0.50 (50 cents) per drawing. Background painters get about $15 per drawing.
If you had all your designs and layouts in place, think of how cheap it would be, from a numbers standpoint, to get your whole show done here! I was in Fujian once and there was this studio claiming they could do an anime show for 2000 RMB per minute. That’s just over $300 (three hundred dollars) per minute!
Their line quality and drawing looks the same as anything out of Japan. As to why a majority of original Chinese productions don’t look this good, I can only guess that is due to the lack of design and layout being done for them by the experienced Japanese artists and directors, but that is whole other thread.
As to labor unions and all that, there really is no excuse for the wages in anime. All this talk of the industry struggling does have some falsity to it. The publishers aren’t struggling. The TV channels aren’t struggling. The merchandizers aren’t struggling. Some of them are making millions, or hundreds of millions, off this stuff. The money is not trickling down to the animators who actually make the stuff.
Go back to the thread about the death of Veggie Tales. Many anime creators have the same problems. They are in it for the love. They don’t sign good contracts. They often get no royalties whatsoever. The publishers or toy companies pay them a tiny flat rate to deliver a show and then they run off and make millions on it. Sales of some manga have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled because the anime came out. That money all goes into the publisher’s pocket and the animators don’t see a dime. They accepted their flat rate and that was that.
Did you know that most directors, even some famous ones, are normal salaried staff at the studios where they work?
It is important to understand that the manner in which a labor union works
in Japan differs significantly from how a labor union operates for example in the states.
Labor union memberships are pretty much in decline in the US and in Japan and as such, so does their influence.
“As to labor unions and all that, there really is no excuse for the wages in anime. All this talk of the industry struggling does have some falsity to it. The publishers aren’t struggling. The TV channels aren’t struggling. The merchandizers aren’t struggling. Some of them are making millions, or hundreds of millions, off this stuff. The money is not trickling down to the animators who actually make the stuff.”
Can anyone provide some hard facts regarding the profitability of the average anime
produced within Japan?
I spent time up in Fukushima/Sendai last summer to visit friends and relatives there who are living in temporary housing for at least the next 5 years. Plenty of folks young and old with no jobs and few opportunities to do much other than receive a government check.
Japan’s economy has been in mothballs for over a decade and with the recent earthquake disaster they have a load of problems to deal with.
I am not sure that the labor issues of a small band of passionate artists will rise to the top of the “to do” list there.
It’s difficult to quantify because, for example, profits for the publishers appear as more sales of their manga or light novels, due to the anime. Profits for toy companies appears as more sales of their toys.
I did, however, find a list once that showed the sales volumes of top manga before and after the anime was released, and the difference was huge. Some manga jumped from the hundreds of thousands to several million because of the anime release. If I can find that again, I will post the link.
Years ago I took an animation class from Bud Hester, who had worked for decades as a traditional animator at Disney. He told the story of how he and his co-workers watched the women paint the cels on Robin Hood, and they thought it looked easy. So they asked if they could try their hands at cel painting. The ink-and-paint department humored them by giving them a shot at ink-and-paint.
He showed the class the results of his handiwork. It was not pretty. Instead of floating the paint onto the cel, he had pressed down with his brush and left streaky brushstrokes that could be seen through the other side. The paint was not a consistent thickness – you could actually see through areas of the paint. He had not kept the paint colors consistent within any given area, either – another error that could be seen on the other side. On top of that, the paint had smudged over the borders within the character.
In comparison, he showed a cel that had been painted correctly. It looked like a precision machine had laid down the paint. All you saw on the other side was perfect, flat and consistent areas of color.
I believe it.
Animation paint is also different from regular acrylic paint–I had some tubes of it–really fine quality. I tried using it for poster art–gives a really nice look.
Same with inking the animation. Another task that seems brainless but is actually exceptionally challenging to do, especially if the animator keeps their line work extremely loose.
Japanese artists are trained in two-year courses at high-tech schools like the Nippon Engineering College. After graduating they get jobs in Japans anime studios. To cut costs Japanese anime producers are farming out work to South Korea. China and the Philippines. Poor pay and long working hours has resulted in the migration of workers to more lucrative jobs in the video game industry and a shortage of talent.