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NEWS: Study: New Entry-Level Animators Earn US$9,200 a Year in Japan

configspace wrote:

A boycott will simply shut down smaller studios. It's a tough situation because animation, especially quality animation is already extremely damn expensive as it is at these low rates.

As a person that enjoys anime from smaller studios that wouldn't get much of a chance to be animated otherwise... shutting down a few studios might be exactly what needs to happen.

Animation studios are pushing out 80% crap and are rarely profitable. Of course they're paying their workers crap. To me it seems they should focus on taking time to make stuff that will actually sell instead of throwing crap at a wall every season and hoping some of it sticks.

Not that I'm saying that cutting back on anime production is a magic solution by any means. Heck, at first it will probably be worse by lowering the demand for animators (and therefore lowering wages even more) buuut... focusing on new ways to actually be profitable is a good start.

How much does an independent manga artist make?

Otaku of all kinds (not just anime fans) started buying the videotapes and laserdiscs, and they bought them at those high prices that were intended just for video stores. There was no reason to lower it. In fact, there were a few experiments to drop the price to a more affordable amount, but that usually resulted in a slight increase in sales -- not enough to make up for the drop in revenue.

For 10k+ discs sales we're looking at 5k+ discs per episode, usually, which translates to (assuming ~$60 per disc) at least ~$300k per episode, now, obviously, the price to make an episode varies a lot and the only people who know how much it costs are the ones who handle the money but rumor has it it's usually around ~$100k, I don't know about you but I think considering all that ~$300k will be plenty, especially when you consider that if an episode did cost ~$300k then the industry would be a lot worst considering most shows don't make those 5k disc sales. Obviously this is just speculation, I don't really know what I'm talking about but you'd think Aniplex and such would need to pay $9.2k to their animators when they work 11 hours a day.

Garbage truck collectors in LA make that much in a month.

I like the assumption that that, by raising prices, more of that money will trickle down to the animators. It didn't work for Reganomics in the 1980s, so what makes you think that it work now? Producers and investors would just rake in more money, and if they were interested in garnering more interest in their product, they'd hire some super amazing seiyuu or some popular idol group singer as this would possibly help to generate more sales. Giving more money to animators, especially newbies that no one has ever heard of, would, in the eyes of those holding the purse strings, be considered a waste of funds.

It's like asking American TV animators to draw like Disney quality, but paying less than minimum wage.

Is it strange at all to think, that Anime could be more profitable in home video sales in Japan if the prices weren't so god damn high?

I think the answer, then, lies in how shows are sold to companies. Perhaps Japan could benefit in adopting the American system where networks buy episodes directly for a particular price, either by episode, by season, or by multiple seasons at a time. That money is what the studios get, plain as day. Then, the network makes the moeny back by advertisements during the show. If The Simpsons can get at least a million dollars' of advertising revenue each time it airs (though it may be somewhat lower due to Simpsons merchandise), I don't see a reason why this system couldn't work in Japan too (though scaled down for the smaller population of Japan compared to the United States).

I just read an interesting article by Kotaku on the matter that included some comments from animators.