Forum - View topicWhy Affordable Housing for Animators Matters (and What You Can Do to Help)
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Ashtur
Posts: 15 |
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The impression that I got was that they brought in special guests to encourage the residents from time to time. |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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I think it's less about getting rid of production committees and more about putting the money first and foremost in the hands of the studios themselves. Having multiple companies still involved is fine. Like what KyoAni is doing. But as long as the studios don't get any more than a contract fee, the problem will definitely persist. Unless that contract fee goes up significantly. And it won't without a major change. Not a lot of production committees are going to pick the highest bidder for their animation studio. |
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anna.frohling
Posts: 8 |
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I'm an unemployed animation graduate with loan debt, I'd help them if I wasn't worse off than them...
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13552 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Before trying to become an animator, you have to realize the sad truth that is the abysmal pay and horrid working conditions. A person who are well aware of this yet still choose to do it is perhaps a great case of a humble worker.
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casenumber00
Posts: 154 |
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I recall at Anime Expo 2017 in Los Angeles the proceeds for their charity auction was going to a dorm project and I believe this is that very one. Hopefully someone will come along and offer more info and even say how much money they gathered.
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omiya
 Posts: 1825 Location: Adelaide, South Australia |
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What specific examples do you have of musicians being abused by production committees? |
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Banken
Posts: 1280 |
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Are anime profit margins really so thin they can't afford to pay animators a living wage?
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Ashtur
Posts: 15 |
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Very few of us here have the "inside dope" of what's really going on, but to all appearances, yes. That's why the "Production committee" is being mentioned. That's the companies that help put up money for a given anime. However, they get their own cut off the top. What's more, it may well be that the studio gets nothing more than a prearranged fee to make the anime. So yeah, any number of studios are running pretty tight margins. I'm sure it's like any business, where some are doing better than others, but one way or the other, entry level jobs are pretty low paying. |
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Sort of. It's not necessarily the profit margins themselves(even hugely popular shows like Girls und Panzer and Attack on Titan can result in the actual Animation studio not making much at all, or in the case of GuP actually losing money!), but the contract fee that the animation studios receive that is so thin. There are a lot of animation studios now and in order to get enough work to stay in business they often have to bid for projects. If they are bidding higher than the competition, they either need to have something about themselves that makes them stand out or they just won't get enough business. In this case, competition has driven the price of animation below a sustainable level and the lack of any sort of Union has made it impossible for them to fight back. The reason people blame Production Committees is because they are typically the ones perpetuating the need for this sort of bidding. If studios themselves had more control over the projects, they would have to take on more risk, for sure, but they would also be able to set prices themselves on certain things and not have to rely on such small fees for every project. |
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Mr. sickVisionz
 Posts: 2173 |
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It's sad that stuff like this is needed, but that's life.
Manga, light novels, stage plays, anime, games, pop-up shops, radio novels, disc sales, music, clothing/costumes, and then licensing from selling all of those globally. These properties get cross-branded and released in some way on every medium known to man and it's been this way since at least the 60s. So we're talking an industry running strong for 50+ years, potentially more popular and globally recognized now then ever... but in that entire mix, there's no money to be made here. 50+ years straight of no money to be made here, but companies trying to make money are in it. In it for 50+ years of seeing there's no money to be made, but they stay in it... some even magically growing despite saying there's just no money to be made here... and across all the revenue streams this stuff brings in, there's just no real money being made so no animator can get paid. It forever floats at profitable enough to have a ton of players and to grow continually, expanding globally but juuuuuuust under profitable enough to pay animators a livable wage. This doesn't add up. I can't imagine working at Toei, seeing Dragonball being popular for like 20+ years, so popular that it's gone on multiple "animate this forever, every week" runs in the multiple hundreds of episodes, merchandised out the ass, popular all over the planet... but when you talk about getting a livable wage, your bosses are like "well, there's no money being made in Dragonball. Especially in the anime. That's actually like the least popular Japanese entertainment export out there. Nobody watches that stuff and there's certainly no money to be had from it." Something doesn't add up. |
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Banken
Posts: 1280 |
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Animators need to unionize. Period. Of course, Japanese unions are basically corporate shills, so....
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SnowCentaur
Posts: 69 |
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What gives me hope that the status quo can be broken here is that these animators now find time, safety, and connections to make their own series. Indies breaking up big corp monopolies is already a thing in comics in the west, let's hope that spreads in a large scale to the animation industry, with the help of crowdfunding.
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Kadmos1
Posts: 13552 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Since I am a debt-free unemployed guy, you must envy me. |
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#861208
Posts: 423 |
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A lot of people are assuming that the production committees have all that extra money, that they take that much for themselves, that unionizing would help.
That is not the case. The vast majority of the time, the production committees do not make their money back. They pay for the anime to be made - ~$200,000 per episode when it really costs $400,000 to make (prices in USD for convenience, and because that's what the Answerman article I'm getting the numbers from used) for the animation, plus paying the voice actors, the composers, the writers, etc. (some of whom make a lot more than the animator, but that's because their names are the ones that bring in fans). So, the various companies on the production committee lose money from this. What do they get from it, then? Advertising. For the books/games/music the anime is based on. For the bands that they get to sing the openings and endings. For products they get placed in the show. For products they get to put the characters onto ads for, after the show becomes popular. A merchandise-making company will put money in in exchange for being the ones that get to make the figures and keychains. That adds up to enough, apparently, to make up for what they put into the show. Or maybe it doesn't, and they're just producing anime out of habit, but since new companies seem to be entering production committees, it looks like it works well enough for them. Presumably, these record labels, publishers, figure brands, etc. aren't so much in the red that they can't contribute more to an anime, but for whatever reason, they've decided not to. So what are the options? 1 - they could just make less anime. If every company that joins production committees decided that instead of putting x amount of money into 4 shows, they were going to put 2x amount of money into 2 shows, half the amount of anime would get made, but the animators would get paid enough. But which shows would get made, and which shows would get cut? Do you think the popular LN-based battle-harem series with ten figure releases would be denied a sequel? Or do you think that something less popular would get cut? The costs of this could be another problem. Also, if someone tried to "unionize"/"strike"/just not take work for hire at those prices without using some loaded, Western term for it, producers would just outsource the whole thing. But then, the aforementioned studios have two choices. They could sit there and wait for someone to come to them with work at a fair price, or they can come up with a way to fund their own things - crowdfunding is an option. Or, there have been mentions of Chinese companies willing to give budgets 10x the size of the production committee's (according to that Yamakan guy, at least). And there was that Silicon Valley millionaire guy who offered to fund a Re:Zero spinoff so that he could see more of his waifu. Also, the Louis Vuitton company has shown interest in anime various times over the years, maybe they'd fund something. Plus plenty of other international, essentially "outsider" companies and individuals (and even a crowdfunding option would likely be mostly from outside of Japan). So in that case, Japan would lose control over anime. Just in funding, at first, but then, those companies might encourage some of the animators to move to France, or California, or wherever else (somewhere less expensive, maybe?) and set up a studio, and train local animators in the Japanese methods. International creators are already getting in on anime, and I think that's generally a good thing, as long as it means getting anime a larger audience. (side note: getting a larger audience could solve the problem in the first place - after all, a lot of movies do make their budget back from ticket sales, or at least a higher percentage than production committees make from DVDs and streaming.) But the Japanese government doesn't want to lose anime. There was an article a while back about a law that made it easier for international students in certain fields to get work in Japanese companies with visas, and stay in Japan, and the commentary - either here or on Crunchyroll - was that this was because a lot of people study tech and animation in Japan and then take the Japanese methods back to poorer countries in Asia and start firms that Japanese companies outsource to instead of hiring local firms. So what would the government do? I don't know. On the other hand, getting anime to more people internationally makes those people more familiar with Japan. It helps raise the reputation of Japanese companies, it makes "iconically Japanese" brands like Oi Ocha easier to export, it could even make Japanese pop music more viable overseas. Maybe these benefits would outweigh the costs of letting the world learn to make anime and losing that exclusivity. |
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relyat08
Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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That money still counts as money, by the way. It's a profit that is, at the very least, tangentially resulting from the anime. |
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