Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Do Anime Budgets Compare to American Animation Budgets?
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
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Cartoon Network show's studios try to keep the jobs in N. America. Check their credits.
American animator grunt Henry Thurlow already gave us an idea how much money grunt animators in N. America have compared to those in Japan:
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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You're still not really seeing the problem here I'm afraid. You can structure it however you want. The bottom line though is you're still trying to wring more money out of a group that's largely tapped already. There are only so many people in Japan that care about anime and those people only have so much money they can or will spend on it. That's the root issue here. The anime industry has never really had that much trouble wringing every last dollar it can out of its little niche of supporters. Between the exorbitant price of BDs and the prevalence of merchandise and figures they're doing fine on that front. Thus, changing up the exact way these people put their money towards the industry is unlikely to amount to much in the grand scheme. It's all just a game of musical chairs. At best, maybe it turns out to be a way of squeezing a few more bucks out of fans. It's unlikely to be anywhere near enough though and any significant gain are likely to just come out of the money they put toward supporting the industry in other aforementioned ways. The simple problem seems to be that the production costs given a decent wage are just wildly out of proportion from the number of people that are interested in the product, no matter how much money you squeeze out of those people.
Yeah. Feeling appreciated is important. You know what's a whole lot more important though? Being paid a living wage. Look, this is a nice idea. I'm not being patronizing. It really is. You're talking about a purely symbolic gesture here though. This does absolutely nothing to significantly address the real and practical problems facing those who work in the anime industry. It's not any sort of actual viable alternative system. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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Animator jobs? Using the power of youtube I checked their credits and what you say could not be farther from the truth™: Uncle Grandpa: http://i.imgur.com/RuoIima.png Regular Show: http://i.imgur.com/ogTsmRC.png Steven's Universe: http://i.imgur.com/fmyQkk7.png Adventure Time: http://i.imgur.com/X1ypRQk.png Gumball: http://i.imgur.com/imjZNqn.png http://i.imgur.com/kS6dPm9.png Total Drama Island: http://i.imgur.com/x8k6TwR.png http://i.imgur.com/8l9ExrE.png ------------------------------------- Spongebob Squarepants: http://i.imgur.com/HHLzt1r.png Before you claim victory in Gumball, those studios are from Ireland and Germany. Total Drama Island was indeed made by an american studio, Canadian to be more precise. No doubt there must be traditional animators working for big publicist firms on the USA, but since Disney closed their animation studio I think anyone in the USA dreaming to make a career out of animating cartoons must have their passport ready. p.s. It really irritates me that only in Total Drama Island we see a screen where you see "Animators" and more than a dozen english names, but Korean animator names are never mentioned, at least in anime they do get their names into the ending credits. *poof* Last edited by mangamuscle on Wed Sep 09, 2015 1:45 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 665 |
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Economics is a complicated matter. The fact is, industry workers get paid only as little as they are willing to get paid in their particular employment sphere - whether that sphere is local, regional, national, or international. There are many factors that affect the budgets in the US, particularly the structure of advertising and network contracts that bring in a significant portion of the money that pays those salaries. But, as noted in the article and in this thread, a lot of that doesn't go to animators but to voice talents and directors and writers. Some of the voice talent have new contracts in the $20 Million range per season.
For the anime industry to manage this for animators would end up having to raise relative wage for many other workers. That is generally the prevailing effect - once some segment of a project team gets a pay raise, another clamors for one too. You'll have writers wanting to be paid more, you'll have voice talent wanting to be paid more, you'll have basic staff - the people who get zero attention except in calculating the bottom line - looking to get paid more too. It's no simple matter to solve. And the very basic reality is that you will either have to have studios and networks cut their profits fairly substantially (will never happen) or you will see prices on everything anime related jump rather significantly. And the argument that quality and this cost situation will be solved by cutting the amount of animation done each year is misleading. Over time there may be savings, but that will definitely come at the cost of some studios shutting down for lack of work, those people there, not just the animators, all being laid off. Some of this is inevitable over time, but you can bet that this as a concerted effort industry wide would be met with tons of controversy among the very animators it's supposedly to help. As for quality, that won't really change. Studios still won't be able to read minds, so they'll put out what they're most comfortable with, some being hits and many being misses. In fact, much of the stuff derided as "terrible," all the fan-service stuff that people are quick to jump on as being a problem, are more likely to further dominate as they tend to be more consistent in their revenue projections. Those, or continued remakes of old stuff, or continuations of old franchises, are the most likely to get financed and made because they are the ones that pull in the money. The fact is, few hits are known to be hits when they're made. They are no different than any other series that came out that season, except that people caught on and gravitated towards it. There will be less risk-taking because there will be less opportunity to recoup losses. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5824 Location: Virginia, United States |
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It has been going on for decades now. The anime industry is a self perpetuating machine. Anime fans are ‘born’ and they give their hard working dollars (yen) to the industry, which is its life blood. Some anime fans dream of becoming animators themselves, and thus you have a new crop of animators ‘born’. Where else on this Earth are you going to find a “niche” product produced on such a yearly scale, that it might even come close to the yearly production of the big three (or four) television broadcast networks in the United States. Someone else can do the math, but there shouldn’t be any argument that the amount of anime produced yearly, (for a niche product) is outrageous. I think it comes down to love. The Japanese fans love the product, and are willing to spend exorbitant amounts on it, and the animators love the product, and are willing to be paid substandard wages just to be in the anime industry creating themselves. Is it fair, no. But it is going to last as long as the Japanese fans are willing to put the big cash payments out there.
I don’t see it happening. You are asking for the production to run a Kickstarter program to fund additional wages. That means they are going to have to hire someone to start the Kickstarter and to maintain the program, just like all the other Kickstarter programs. So they are going to expend money in wages and time for the Kickstarter program, for the ‘chance’ of meeting the Kickstarter goals. If the Kickstarter doesn’t meet its goals, then the production committee has lost of lot of money for nothing. Either way you are asking the production committee to expend more money and time on this, than they have or want too. If you really want to help the underpaid animators, volunteer your own time and start you own Kickstarter or donation website to fund them directly. |
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Kai99
 Posts: 89 |
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Just because the budget to make anime is small doesn't mean a lot of money isn't made off of anime. The problem here is that the amount made from an anime in terms of dvd, merchandise, etc, is not known. I have yet to find any info on how much money is made on a moderately successful anime or how much profit is made from a very successful one. Without that, we are all just speculating on whether or not animators can be paid better or not.
My guess is, anime is making good money. Very good money. It wouldn't make sense for so many anime to be created if there was no money in it. But the money made will never go to the animators hands because all they are in charge of is creating it. The budgets for anime studios are low in order to gain the most profit from an anime. The anime studios must deal with the budgets that they are given and from many of what I read from those who work in that environment, they rely on freelancers for much of the grunt work. The sad thing is that animators are the replaceables. If one leaves, another can be replace by another japanese animator, or shipped off to a cheaper location. Anime studios have to deal with the budgets that they are given or risk getting no work at all. It just like those in the factory making phones for Apple. It doesn't matter HOW much profit is made from the product, even if they could employ thousands of american workers and still make a good profit out of it, they wont do so. Why? Because they want to make the maximum amount of profit. And that means paying people in poorer countries crap wages just to maximize their profit margin. So in terms of the anime industry, animators are the factory workers. They are given crap wages in order to increase the profit made from the anime. How much profit, we can't be sure. You can look up how much profit is made from Disney's Frozen in terms of merchandise, but you can't look up how much money was made off of Attack On Titan. I remember reading an interview with those over at Square Enix about how much money creating all the episodes of Full Metal Alchemist( over 4 million dollars) and how they were able to make good returns on that anime. How much, they did not say. Will those returns help to pay animators more? Of course not. My guess is, anime industry is much like the Visual Effects Industry. Given small budgets to create the CGI effects for movies, but earn nothing of the profit if the movie does very well. http://www.zacuto.com/end-for-the-vfx-industry |
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enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
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Of course they use outsourced animation to help them out too (even anime), but if ya look at the rest of the credits, you'd notice more local names than usual. And if ya follow their workers' blogs/journals/etc, you'd see that they are trying to keep as many locals as they can. (And how they can manage to make their turnaround for episodes quicker than in the past.)
Most of those money likely goes to the merch licensor companies and other members of the production committee. Unless the anime studio owns some of the rights of those properties, they don't get a cut of those other profits or residuals. In N. America, studios tend to co-own their properties, so they get those extra profits outside of the animation itself. (Or animators are working for video games where they're paid more.) |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5920 |
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It also proves that some people simply don't have a very refined palate when it comes to quality television 
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Probably the only way to increase the wages of animators is to get more and more areas on board with the price level Japan pays. Hollywood wouldn't be able to afford its mammoth budgets without being able to count on making about as much revenue abroad as they do domestically.
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R315r4z0r
 Posts: 717 |
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So, my question is... if the wages are so low... why do these workers put up with it?
Why aren't there any shortages of anime out there? Is it because they work so many hours that they don't have enough time to look for a new job? |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9839 Location: Virginia |
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R315r4z0r wrote:
Because it is what they always dreamed of doing. Because of the satisfaction of saying "I worked on that" when an anime screens. In the hope that their ability will be recognized and that they will get one of the better paying jobs in the anime industry. Basically what keeps thousands of would be actors, singers, musicians and athletes working for little or nothing pursuing a dream. Some succeed, most get burnt out and quit. A very, very few get rich and famous. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5920 |
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Is it? I always saw it as some show that was supposed to be funny but never actually succeeded in accomplishing that. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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This. Anyone who thinks they're going in it for the money is living on a different planet. It's passion that drives them to disregard "piss poor" (I'm using this term broadly because by all accounts, they're still in better states than say a sweatshop worker in Bangladesh.) wages and conditions. Simply look up the demographics of Japanese animators. Almost all of them are in their 20's-30's and single. A good number of them could pass as anime con attendees. At most, this is just a side job to keep them entertained like a hobby. It's typical entry level grunt work. You have to understand that this is another case of cultural, economical and environmental dissonance between the West and Asia. Imagine if these workers would suddenly be granted "livable wages" by US/EU standards. Like others have said, the production companies and studios would make every show at a loss which is the last thing a niche medium wants. You don't need to be an Econ major to foresee this. No, the industry won't eventually collapse into itself if they maintain the current demand and supply model. Anime runs on trends and they will almost always get to hire new blood to count on popping out what the new hot stuff the non-jaded fans want. You can put your Apocalyptic slippery slopes away. If going by SHIROBAKO, the average animator isn't exactly working like an indentured servant like a lot of us outsiders seem to perceive. They get to attend nice after parties when the project's over. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5824 Location: Virginia, United States |
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That is never going to happen. It's bad enough that Aniplex and Pony Canyon are playing that game. The higher prices mean less people will buy in the West. Also we have been told repeatedly, that foreign sales of anime are miniscule, when compared to Japanese sales. Higher prices will mean less sales. |
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enurtsol
Posts: 14761 |
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It wouldn't have lasted as long as it did (14 years?! longest-running Adult Swim original series) otherwise, nominated for Teen Choice awards, and get referenced in non-animation mainstream shows like ESPN, if not enough people were enraptured by its zeitgeist (regularly over a million viewers).
It didn't used to be that way....... then the bubble burst.
So their overseas revenue peaked at 213 in 2006, then dropped sharply to 184 in 2007. As well as the other revenues when the bubble burst, except few like music. |
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