Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies
hitregbroke.com
hitregbroke.com
If people were paid fairly, most productions would be untenable. There would be just a few anime per year instead of many.
But also, how would the popular ones come to be? Every new property would be a huge gamble.
As an anime and manga fan, I actually want that to happen. Pay the animators what they deserve. Give them good working conditions.
People just have to accept that means the industry will shrink dramatically. So many things will just never get made.
That also means far fewer people will get to become animators. They’ll have to find some other job as competition for the jobs that remain will be sky high.
And that competition is what brings down the wages in the first place. There are just so many people that want those jobs.
The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members of the production committee (often toy companies like Good Smile[0]) decided to deliberately take less money because they didn't want their control diluted. They're only able to do this because they can fleece animators into working longer for less money rather than having to get more capital in the project.
As for animators having to find new work... good? The current situation is one in which animators pursue their passions, and then have their passions completely take over their life and crush their soul. If they quit en masse, that would be backpressure against productions that want animators to fall on their swords, and production committees that want shit done cheaply.
[0] Who, incidentally, funded Hiroyuki Nishimura's[1] buyout of 4chan in exchange for all those J-List ads the site had.
[1] Former operator of 2channel who got pushed out in an incredibly sketchy way by his website host.
Isn’t this a paternalistic point of view? Why do you know better than the animators who are accepting these jobs? Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?
Unless you want to say that getting paid a minimum wage paternalistic?
I mean, in this scenario they wouldn't get a job, or it'd be an evergreen job that they shouldn't expect to get early in their careers. They wouldn't just laze around if they can't get paid as an animator (especially not in Japanese culture).
At best they'd try to be their own entrepreneur and make money that way, while gathering experience for these now-evergreen studios. At worst they give up or try another career. Paternalistic or not, almost every first world country has labor laws precisely so a job can't pay pennies to sustain its business. And governments do that because they don't want income hoarded by the managers and stifling the middle/low class economy.
That is how (modern) society works already on a global scale. I am not saying it's good, but it's the way things are.
Every major commodity cobalt, shoes, cellphones etc has large scale automated production. What’s going on is essentially a parallel system where people making almost nothing can barely out complete automation. However, because both are occurring at the same time consumers wouldn’t notice a significant change if 100% of that production was automated.
Granted without infrastructure and a skilled workforce you can’t instantly swap to automation, but that’s a different question.
the automate-able industries have done it, leaving behind the ones that aren't as automatable. This is why there's still many developing countries that export cheap labour. You can think of those as the "underpaid" class.
Not necessarily bad, since i believe they are not being forced under lock and chain in slavery. They are merely economically incentivized.
That’s not to say nobody is making subsistence wages making shoes, just that there’s robots making shoes in another factory. It may not be 1:1 in every niche as a train isn’t a drop in replacement for a long haul trucker, but they are still in competition.
Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.
Predictions of dire consequences rarely pan out. Fast food employees in Seattle are earning $15-20/+ per hour and prices did not double - in fact they're not significantly higher than in neighboring counties with lower wages. It turns out that labor costs are only a small fraction of overall costs.
They should learn to be hard workers, saving all the penies they can, never be sick, and some day if they don't die before it, living the dream of being their own boss.
Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
There are just plenty of loopholes and a lot of off the clock overtime that complicates things. Not just in anime but most of the Japanese workforce. That's a whole other topic to discuss, though.
>Sure we do, we call it minimum wage. Of course the ceiling is unlimited but there are defined floors.
A minimum wage doesn't guarantee "a particular wage". It only guarantees that if an exchange of money for labor occurs, that the price paid will meet the minimum. However, it doesn't guarantee that the transaction will occur, and if you're unemployed your "wage" is arguably $0.
If a job needs doing by a human at all, then that human does indeed deserve a reasonable baseline which allows them to exist and even do so with reasonable dignity.
As time goes on and jobs are done by machines, and there are fewer and fewer jobs that require a human, then the output and ownership of those machines simply should one way or another be distributed enough to have the same effect.
All they have to do to earn that is not be being a criminal right at that moment.
And this extends to people who can't do anything obviously productive too. Even a sick old grandma doing nothing but telling stories to kids for one hour a week is productive, and we have no excuse not to provide for even the ones who can't even do that.
Because even if "the Earth is a life boat", we don't exist in an environment of hardship with fixed and insufficient resources where there just isn't enough food and building material and energy to go around.
There simply is no excuse for the way we treat some people. They didn't do anything wrong enough to deserve it, and it is not forced by physical limits.
Talking about what value someone provides to earn their existence is just a way to rationalize taking advantage of others. None of this equates to "I will be forced to spend 20 years learning medicine to give my time away for free to bums!" But even if it did, why is that a bad thing exactly? Because it's what, like slavery? You mean, slavery is bad after all?
If it's 500 freelancers competing for the equivalent of 2 1-day jobs, the employer still has to pay something reasonable for a days work to 2 of them, and nothing to the rest. Or the granularity can be smaller like per hour, but the per hour rate is still some minimum that actually works.
It doesn't matter what the powerless individual worker is ostensibly "free" to do.
If you don’t like the amount being offered, then don’t accept it. This is not very complicated.
Animators are not powerless. It’s not like they are coal miners in a company town and this is the only job available for miles around. Nobody has to be an animator.
Honestly, if a friend came to you and said “my job sucks! They work us to the bone and pay us nothing!” Would you give them a speech about how their employer is evil and they are powerless or would you help them find another job?
It's particularly egregious in the US where healthcare is tied to employment, meaning that for many people a gap in unemployment would bankrupt them trying to pay for medication or care without insurance. The ACA was insufficient - policies through it are still incredibly expensive with high deductibles, and the lack of a public option for those ineligible for Medicare (or whose state governments declined medicare coverage for them) leaves them beholden to their employer.
I'm sure there are people who, at times, are in difficult situations. But those are usually not permanent. Are you telling me that someone gets one shitty job once and that is it? They permanently have that one job for the rest of their life? Empirically, that is not what happens. People do change jobs one way or another.
Yes, healthcare in the US could be better, but the article was about animators in Japan, so that is not really relevant. These aren't retail workers with no marketable skills or training. They're talented and well-trained to even be able to get the job in the first place. They just happen to want to work in one very over-saturated, highly competitive industry. Not just animation in general but specifically, anime. Anyone who could get a job there could probably get any graphic design or other job requiring art talent, they're just choosing not to because they want to do this one thing, and in the process driving down the price of labor.
It is detrimental to society to allow capital owners to pocket all the profits and drive the cost of labor down.
That can't happen by definition unless you get rid of inequality altogether, or engage in shenanigans like defining them as "contractors".
The required amount of money to earn a "living wage" is extremely high because of government interference in the economy! And whether you personally find a business model morally "valid" is not a good reason to make economic changes. People deserve a cost-benefit analysis before their livelihood is taken away. The economic consequences of increasing the minimum wage will be just the same as previous attempts. More automation, less customer service, more unemployment among low-skilled workers.
Where the line that separates goodwill custody of the commons like roads, public education, enforcing contracts and laws and "interference"?
Every time politicians decide to do good somewhere they do bad everywhere. It's not that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent (although many are) is just that free markets are the ultimate resource allocation tool and government intervention is necessarily inefficient and make us poorer.
I'm fascinated - does this hold under all conditions? Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
> It would be a great start with governments committed to not spending more than they earn and printing money to cover the deficit
Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states
Maybe not.
> Can we depend on free markets to efficiently allocate resource during an all-out war vs government commandeering industry, war-bonds and rationing goods?
I don't think we should base our choice of economical system in the eventuality of an all-out war. Regardless of what I think in the event of an all-out war government will try to appropriate the resources it wants and gear the economy towards its needs because it can. A free market always efficiently allocate resources however I imagine the goals of the economical agents would be closer to preventing the destruction of wealth and human life than winning a war at all costs but this is context dependent.
Ukraine is an example where people from all over the world on their own volition contributed to the war effort in ways beyond what state violence could achieve. And Russia is the opposite example, top-down and dysfunctional.
> Do you think government should be in charge of setting a monetary policy? If not, should anyone have that role among private entities? Or should industry just duke it out with against occasionally adversarial nation-states.
People should have the freedom to use whatever they want as exchange medium. I don't know what is best but the current system with unsustainable growing debt do more harm than occasional adversarial nation-states could.
This is very much not true for worker salaries. For one thing, workers can not easily hop from area of expertise to area of expertise like capital can — and workers oftentimes lack the ability to take the high risk that might comes with quitting a job in search of another or attempting to switch career paths.
The natural state is for owners to drive down worker compensation until it's essentially slave labor. In a "competitive" world for owners, competing means driving down costs which means an across-the-board destruction of worker benefits.
We have some protections in this country (thank you, unions!) and full-stop rules against slavery that prevent us from actually seeing this, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen.
And trust me: People in financial power would absolutely grind workers down to a penny an hour and still claim it's "fair pay" if they could. They'd say "well, if it wasn't fair pay people wouldn't do it" while making sure the entirety of society was arranged to prevent people from leaving their jobs.
Uh, last I checked, capital is not capable of hopping from area of expertise to area of expertise. A GPU cannot decide to become a burger flipping robot (much to the dismay of some crypto investors).
A investor can quickly move capital from one industry to another, but the worker cannot.
That is one hell of a hand wave.
To say nothing of the lack of other regulations making it to where even with proper payment transparency one has no clue if an employer has a corporate culture that in many states would constitute an abusive pattern in a domestic partnership yet most of those same states have at best some limited carve-outs to do anything about it.
The entertainment industry in particular seems to be really good at exploiting folks, but in IT there is still a sort of elephant in the room; So many of us who read and post want to be the sorts of folks with vested-FAANG security cushions, however we know through self or colleagues plenty of cases where many shops will have a huge uphill battle to make a huge impacting change and the result is a nice review; in the extreme cases the reward/value is in multiple orders of magnitude.
And maybe that would be OK if it wasn't for the other pressures; which is probably something animators deal with too based on general tone and the times the industry tries to cleverly sneak jokes in about the situation.
>Second, of course increased costs of production lead to consequences for end users or people who buy the content. We see that all of the time in every industry.
When possible. The issue is a lot of anime in Japan still relies in broadcast, so it's much harder to increase the cost of entry. Streaming is becoming more popular, but nowhere near as prevalent as the western streaming services.
And physical media... Well, feel free to look up your favorite anime's pricing in Japan. Not only the prices but the fact that they tend to bundle seasonal anime in batches of 2-3 episodes, not an entire seasonal box.
But the topic here is on Japan. They did increase their minimum wage last year, after the pandemic caused inflation in the Japanese economy for the first time in 30 years. Their economic situation is extremely different from the US which exploded (then receded, then kept rising) in those decades.
There are so many ways to define fair we could write essays on which method was most accurate and useful.
Free markets only exist in economics textbooks. Real markets unconstrained are always hopelessly broken. Bereft of rules most of the work would end up owned by a tiny number of companies who would agree what wages should be and agree not to hire each others workers. They would make access to all the most desirable work they control contingent on rules designed to strangle up and coming competitors in the cradle and gradually increase price to the absolute most the market would bear. Impoverishing the people who actually do the work would poison the pool of workers gradually destroying quality of content while companies increased prices to make up for lost profit and blamed piracy.
Capitalism is a toddler left on a rug with a cocked gun. The kid always finds the gun.
Income: $100,000/month
Expenses: $50,000/month
Payroll:
Cashier: $290/month
Cashier: $290/month
Cashier: $290/month
Janitor: $290/month
Security: $290/month
Manager: $1,000/month
Owner: $45,000/month
I understand the point you're trying to make, but you'd be better off using real numbers to do it. I've never come across a business owner taking 45% of total income. Competition ensures those kinds of profit levels generally don't exist.
Similarly, maybe we should have fewer musicians and less music, but at least we have an absence of the slave economy you mention. Maybe the medical profession is doing something right by limiting the flow of the pipeline.
A similar argument was used in favor of perpetuating slavery prior to the civil war.
> People just have to accept that means the industry will shrink dramatically. So many things will just never get made.
I've accepted that. Now let's pay people fairly for their time and skill.
> That also means far fewer people will get to become animators. They’ll have to find some other job as competition for the jobs that remain will be sky high.
The online independent animator community is thriving. If people create something that has appeal, they are able to at least partially subsist from subscriptions and donations. I contribute to several animators' Patreon accounts (though Patreon takes far too much out of it). If there isn't enough appeal, well... I'm sorry. Either everyone agrees to a fair wage based on these market conditions, independent efforts raise money through crowdsourcing, or... people find other ways to sustain themselves. That's just a healthy economy in action.
Perhaps we will see the same with animation; there will be a few well-paid and highly-skilled artists that are automating with a bunch of AI. I doubt that will be the solution to equality though.
Doesn’t really make things much cheaper because the people drawing those in-between frames are already paid peanuts :/
>A similar argument was used in favor of perpetuating slavery prior to the civil war.
I suspect the end result here will actually be fairly comparable to post-slavery agriculture, in that technology will eliminate a lot of these jobs. Tough to imagine that GenAI doesn't have an enormous impact on anime over the next few years.
It depends a lot on the culture there.
1) there are actual labor laws in Japan, so they can't just cut off 90% of their workforce at the snap of the finger
2) there is a much stronger culture of conformity in Japan. So it is much easier to shame a company when getting negative PR in Japan and those complaints can overcome raw profits.
Also, tech wise AI is at least 5 years out from anything animated. What I've seen in motion so far is extremely crude.
I... think you are overestimating that by a lot. We went from nothing to AlphaGo to ChatGPT to Midjourney et al within a few years, with the timespan between each shortening.
Most of the people whom I contribute to are able to work full-time on their passions through donations and make more than they would if they were traditionally employed.
What we have (in some countries) is: 1) Minimum wage: defined as the least amount legal to pay someone. 2) Living wage: loosely defined as the wage needed for minimum living standards for a given region 3) Market wage: What the market determines your value is worth based on supply/demand.
None of these are "fair" and they aren't usualy the same but sometimes can be.
Bollocks. A fair wage is a wage which is agreed upon by employee and employer, and is livable according to local cost of living. Let's not get into a semantic argument.
This is the key insight that OP is missing which makes them incorrectly think that "fair" can never be determined because it is some kind of objective goal post. It's not, it's highly subjective and local.
>But also, how would the popular ones come to be? Every new property would be a huge gamble.
So give the artists their current meager salaries and bolster it with a percentage of profits?
Seems really easy to fairly compensate the artists.
they want just the upside, not the downside as well.
What does Japanese culture think about unionization?
Yeah, but the thing is people go to see superhero movies and sequels and remakes. And have been for a long time.
When people stop going to superhero movies, they'll stop getting made. Except for Spider-Man; Sony is going to keep rebooting that and doing another series of three movies until they are bought by Disney; if they lose that license by not making a film in time, they'll never get it back.
It's always unfortunate hearing commentors thinking "people are tired of Marvel" when seeing low sales for The Marvel's, when the reality is much more boring external factors like Disney+ cannabalizing sales and cinemas still not truly recovering from the pandemic.
Short story is that Marvel licensed Spiderman for cheap with a clause that Sony could keep the license so long as they produced a movie every N years.
This further reduces the budget of productions so that all kinds of junk can be produced at rock bottom prices and still have a chance at making money.
And let's be honest, the vast vast majority of anime is utter crap.
If things were different however, anime might end up as a more hit-driven industry the way Hollywood productions (or heck even startups) are.
Companies will find a way to make things work even if labour costs more. Every company and neo liberal says that same thing about regulation, employee wages, tax increases .... Funnily enough when those same regulations/wage increases/taxes come in they do not leave the market ... Strange.
Edit: clarity
Companies can and will adapt.
The way is to move / outsource to where it costs less. There is a reason that iPhones are mostly made in China.
If they were made in the US and cost $2000 instead of $1000 people would still buy them.
But socialists never think about this stuff. They just pretend there are no downsides to central control of prices.
We have the same problem, "dog hotels" are too expensive. We just pay someone to come to our house a few times a day. A kid we know in the neighborhood, don't tell the government but they charge less than minimum wage! shock
< /rant>
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/t5illb/comment/hz57d...
Also, you seem to be terribly confused by "the company is not making much profit on paper" and "the people in management and running the company are paid plenty." You think management is paid as lowly as the animators?
This is no different from hollywood where studio management make plenty of money and the army of people actually doing the lion's share of the work, especially GFX/SFX, are poorly paid, and accountants make it look like the film barely breaks even.
No amount of legislation or shame articles will change the reality that market forces have profound effects, and these effects are difficult to break. Unions try. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a successful one yet for software, but I’m ignorant of the art world; maybe they have one. But be prepared to receive exactly what the union can give you, and no more.
People need to stop being so naive as to accept poorly paid jobs because they think the subject matter is 'funner'. Game Devs are the first example I thought of here.
If you love games, that's great.. but why not go work in literally any other software dev work for maybe 2x the pay and/or 1/2 the hours.
As Don Draper said 'That's what the money is for'.
Plenty more money and time to buy & play games.
People really can get themselves out, though. I did. There’s no reason for individuals to subject themselves to it unless that’s what they really want. I.e. it doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing that situations like these exist.
It sounds like you actually have a wildly incorrect view of how unions can and do work. you may want to do some more reading and research. For example, the WGA and SAG unions do not pay based on seniority nor does everyone make the same. They do mandate minimums for certain kinds of work but that’s about it. They also have rules about what the studios can and can’t do.
That being said, it probably does come at the cost of fewer people being able to find employment than the talent pool exists but it’s hard to measure / support that claim considering there’s more actors and writers now than ever before.
Thanks. If you have any references on where specifically to start reading, feel free to drop them here. Otherwise I’ll start at the acronyms you mentioned.
Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074679 are making me think twice, but there must be some catch with unions, or else everyone would do it.
As for rewards, look at how actors, writers, directors etc get paid - the vast majority of those professions you never hear about and only hear about the ones that are making insane amounts of money from it. The union rules also covers things like residuals and stuff but again afaik it’s all about establishing minimums - the exceptional talent can always negotiate a better deal when they are in demand.
Of course, when you make 2 + 2 = 5, there's always a -1 floating out there that someone else has to suffer for. Right now, the animation industry sets the price, so the individual animators take the hit. If the animators unionize, then they can push back on that. The market forces here are that artists cost money, but the production committees and studios don't want to pay for them, so they arrange the industry in such a way as to keep artists out of the picture.
You're implying that being paid by seniority isn't already the case for most of the tech industry. Last time I checked, most job adverts are looking for "X years of experience in Y".
> Or at least, I haven’t seen particularly persuasive evidence that unions can do more than make everyone collectively equal
The work culture in europe is largely based on standardized work contracts, enforced by unions. For example, the entire railway industry in Germany is collectively unionized (~40k members) and is holding negotiations right now, to renew the terms of these standardized contracts.
The goal of a union is not to "make everyone equal", it is to enforce collective bargaining rights. This usually does lead to better employment conditions for everyone involved though.
Why? If I was really passionate about something, I would not mind low pay. For me, the blocker is that I'm not quite so passionate about anything. I suspect a lot of people think they're passionate about games but really are just addicted.
You see a lot of hobbyists elbow into paid work, to the detriment of people actually making a living of it. It puts a ceiling on what people are willing to pay for the typical work - engagement, wedding, headshot photography for example.
Photojournalism is a bit of a weird case because, in my opinion at least, its always been populated by nepobabies and other sorts who weren't commanding proper living wages because they didn't really have to.
From a different perspective: teachers. From most absolute criteria, teaching is a horrible profession. Significant credential requirements, lousy pay, hard hours, dealing with occasional rotten child/parent. Yet millions agree to do it because they want to impact the next generation.
I think a lot of people go into it because they have a comfortable middle/upper-middle class suburban upbringing, reasonably bright (but not like super high achievement focused), without any specific areas of interest (STEM), and teachers play an outsize role in their life as far as non-family adults. Teachers being an uncreative lot, suggest to them - hey, why not pursue teaching.
In theory teaching should be a good, portable middle class job in that you aren't restricted to 2-3 mega cities like tech or finance or whatever. In practice it doesn't really work out that way. For one thing the certification process varies by state so your degrees are not immediately portable.
Further, in teaching you literally have to wait for someone to retire or die to get a shot. Most of my cohort who went into teaching had to slog it out in bad districts, bad schools, hard/bad roles (ie - special ed) in precarious employment (substitute teaching for years, or non-union/tenure schools like charters).
There is maybe 2 people I know who actually made it teaching back home in their hometown like they intended. The rest eventually found a full time role within 30 miles of where they were willing to live, after 5 years or more bouncing around in precarious employment.
1. Work is still half your waking life for decades. Why not attempt to make it quality work instead of a slog if you can help it?
2. Less money =/= barely afford rent. I was still making $160k at my last role with 7YOE, so we're not talking "can barely pay rent". I'm a single 20's male with no car or school payments to make, and pretty low maintenance hobbies (hiking, games, art). Even in a high CoL area, doubling my salary won't necessarily double my QoL.
3. Gamedev is still a craft, so the more time you spend honing it the better a dev you become (generally). Even if I chose to leave gamedev as hobby work on the side, it reduces my ability to progress.
4. Gamedev works on similar "it's who you know" logic. And the best way to connect with fellow devs in a meaningful matter is to be in the industry. If you have aspirations to open your own studio one day these connections and portfolio is priceless for selling yourself to others.
5. Playing a game is very different from making one. Just because you like playing games doesn't mean you will enjoying making one yourself. The opposite can be true as well. Gamedev digs into domains like graphics, physics, UI/UX, and even psychology in applied ways that challenge engineers, even ones who rarely play games. A graphics programmer is a wizard who will be snatched by many industries if they open up, but if you wanna home your craft, you don't have too many other places for such specific work. Games, 3d animation, GPUs, and a few research labs (often looking for PhDs though).
The thing is that gamedev is one of the few industries you reliably hear people bully 60/80/100 hour weeks outside of say - medicine, law, finance. Or startups where you grind for a couple years hoping the lottery ticket of your equity pays off.
However, it does not pay anything near medicine, law, or finance wages. Nor do you get equity like a startup. And the labor practices of game studios in terms of benefits, layoffs, etc have always sounded far worse.
If the ROI is worth it for you, great (and $160k ain't bad to be fair, I've heard lower than that in gamedev). People just need to go into it with eyes wide open though and not foreclose their options early (by overly focussing on gamedev niche coursework in college for example).
(We had layoffs unrelated to the union and more related to a bad monetization scheme and high costs, during which the union negotiated increased severance and health insurance coverage vs we were initially offered.)
Union successes are definitely growing in tech.
For union members pay, layoffs, etc. are often decided by seniority and not by ability or how hard you work.
Whether or not that's worth it is up to you.
A more subtle "downside" is that unions represent the workers—including the workers you _don't_ like. That project manager who you hate is also a laborer with rights who deserves protection from the union, and at some point you will need to come to terms with cooperating with people you think have horrific political views or whatever. I use quotes because I don't think this is a real downside at all. Unions are not simply a cost-benefit option you choose because it helps you personally, they are the counterbalance to the implicit power employers have over their employees. Even if your benefits are great and you're paid very well, you should still have a union to represent you.
Well, as a software engineer game development is among the lowest-paying jobs you can have, and you usually don't need any special training to switch to something more remunerative. As an artist, though, there's nothing hugely better you can just switch to without doing a lot of training, which is a tough bargain given how expensive art school can be. Sometimes people successfully pivot to graphic or UI design, which is generally more lucrative, but that's about it.
Ironically, game dev at a medium or large studio is actually one of the more stable and lucrative careers in the art world, unlike software development where it's the opposite.
> To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a successful one yet for software, but I’m ignorant of the art world; maybe they have one.
Yes, animators in L.A. at many major studios (e.g. Disney) are unionized, and as a result they're among the best jobs you can get in that field. They still work long hours, but you can earn six-figure compensation with good benefits if you specialize in the right things (generally the more technical you are, the better off you are).
(Source: lots of friends in that industry.)
Only if the market for animation is efficient.
* Switching costs for changing careers are high.
* Collusion between employers.
* Collusion between employees.
* Products being exchanged are not commoditized.
"Free markets" work great for determining prices for easily manufactured commodity products like toilet paper. They work way less great for basically everything else.
Employing someone to create artwork is just about as far from an efficient market as I can imagine.
The Film Actors Guild is a union in the art world with pretty significant market power.
No, I suspect absolutely everyone with any knowledge of animation knows animators are paid terribly. The article itself has a meme image about the pay.
But part of the compromise that Western animation does to be more productive is that it all looks bad. There's a fake-anime style Superman cartoon on I saw that has the artistic quality of maybe a Japanese elementary schooler. And then Netflix makes animated sex comedies that look like old Flash cartoons.
Amazing show and it has a beautiful style that looks like it's hand drawn and Japanese, but it's actually French made CGI. I suspect that even this industry can be disrupted by technology.
Exhibit A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH
Exhibit B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Egypt
Exhibit C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Into_the_Spider-Ve...
Though I've heard things like Castlevania are good, haven't seen it though.
A bunch of WB properties outsource their animation to Japanese anime studios.
(And coloring. I feel like it's easy to spot American attempts in particular because all the colors are too contrasty and oversaturated, and then they put glowy neon effects on top.)
Note, fake anime in other Asian countries is getting really good these days, and in fact is starting to take over Japan because other countries don't use the Japanese industry strategy of "never change anything and never try to make any money". Was just there and all the ads were for Blue Archive/Azur Lane/Honkai, which are Korean and Chinese.
> My Adventures with Superman is an American animated superhero television series based on the DC Comics character Superman. The series is developed by Jake Wyatt, produced by Warner Bros. Animation and animated by Studio Mir in South Korea.
I'm not sure how payscales work for Korean outsourcing vs Western animation, though I guess I'd like to know.
South Korea has long been a place to outsource animation to to cut costs. Plenty of Japanese animated works with Korean names in the credits as well.
That's not the entire reason of course, they also have larger budgets.
Nothing is technically stopping an animator to go and do their own thing. It's just a hugely difficult and expensive undertaking that requires a decent amount of investment. Especially nowadays you could put it on YouTube, but it probably wouldn't be worth their while.
(Maybe in the future pleeease create chapters/paragraphs so that it's easier to read than a single block of text? Highlighting "Blank lines separate paragraphs" mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc )
>...it needs to cut how much random noise they produce. Look at Western animation. You get a handful of shows a year. Anime you get 3 years of content every 3 months.
I think that I understand what you mean about the "random noise", but I personally don't think that a direct comparison makes sense on multiple levels (e.g. anime in Japan being watched by a large range of audience with sub-groups focusing on specific themes, low/middle-cost western animation primarily focusing on kids, etc...).
Cheers!
With such conditions there will never be an increase to pay. It's just the way things will be in these segments - forever!
1. Big movie studios have been overproducing content with reduced returns.
2. Business model change to direct-to-consumer (streaming).
3. Regulatory changes (DEI minority interests - Oscars).
4. Technological changes (generative AI).
5. Customer preferences (watch the review on Youtube).
Looking at exchange rates is the wrong way of looking at things since they vary widely in the space of 5 years or so. You need to look at purchasing power in their local currency. Like eating out in japan is WAY cheaper than in Europe for anything comparable.
And looking at the bubble that is programmers salaries is ridiculous as a benchmark, because then it mostly depends on whether there are large actors to drive such salaries up in said countries.
This is a really bad take, I've lived in Tokyo for 6 years. As a western developer (in IT as we say here in Japan), you will most certain improve your quality of life by moving to e.g. Tokyo vs most USA cities. While what you said it's true, there's also other truths:
- As others comment, as a foreigner working in Tokyo with some experience, you can opt to much higher salaries than the local graduates (for so many reasons). It'd be easy to make 6-8M JPY in Japanese companies, and depending on other factors 8-10M JPY is not rare. Since we are in HN, I'm sure many here can even opt for 10M+ JPY.
- If you can, just work remotely for US/EU while living here, or for a branch of a EU/US company, since salaries will be much higher. That is true. That way you can make 10-30M JPY easily, and with that you can live _very_ comfortable. Only issue you might have is how you manage to get a Visa.
For reference, you can live well as a single guy in Tokyo with 4-5M JPY. Lifestyle is different though, so it depends on what you value, e.g. houses ARE smaller, but neighborhoods are walkable and beautiful (highly depends where you come from). If you do want to have your cake and eat to, meaning living in a "very big" house for Japanese standards while having everything else nice from Japan, yeah you'll need to be making 8M+ JPY for sure.
But I think for professions like these, the "they have free will" argument is pretty compelling. If they were being exploited in a low-skill, low-status job, where there are few to no alternatives, sure, definitely an industry that needs worker protections. But no one needs to be an animator at a big anime studio to survive. They're there because they want to be, and many/most/(all?) could find gainful employment in an adjacent industry or field where they'd have better pay.
To me it's similar to game development. Game devs famously get paid poorly (compared to other devs) and work under stressful conditions. They don't have to do that. They can get a job as a web developer, or an embedded developer, or... some other kind of developer, and get paid more, and experience less stress. But they want to build games, so that's what they do.
I'd definitely support all these folks if they wanted to unionize. But I'm not sure I'm convinced legislation is warranted. (Well, except for strengthening and actually enforcing sanctions against union-busting efforts.)
This isn't actually true. Occasionally animators can pivot to UI or graphic design, for example, but often times not. Animation is fairly specialized.
The problem is mostly in the small studio space, where a lot of them are freelancers. There are a few studios like KyoAni/PA Works/ufotable that use mostly their own employees and pay better.
There's no "but their job is cool and they could do something else" caveat that makes someone less worthy of professional advocacy.
There is a surplus of game developers and animators and a league like the NBA for game dev doesn't exist (unless you count working for Valve or other prestigious organizations "the NBA of game development").
As for "mafia-style"... I mean, are we calling Hayao Miyazaki a mob boss now?
[0] Remember back in 2010 when Steve Jobs and Larry Page formed a wage fixing cartel?
There's media companies literally trying to starve out striking workers: https://www.lendingtree.com/personal/medical-debt-statistics...
There's the biggest kind of theft, wage theft: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-u...
On and on, this applies to everyone in every industry.
Weekly schedule is usually done for the sake of broadcast channels, which is still a bit more relevant in Japan than over in rhe West.
We could band together and change it, but we don't.
And executives getting paid super-well is an American thing. They don't get paid well in Japan either. Nobody does.
As a western metaphor, think of anime studios similar to the VFX industry where many bid based on some anime the committee wants to make. Sometimes studios pitch their own anime, but most can't afford to put down their own money for that arrangement.
s/worse/better
Soon the creators and artists will be able to make full films without studio capital in the mix. This should start happening by the end of the year.
The studio system exists because film and motion media is hard to make. It requires a lot of people, a lot of logistics, and a lot of capital. That's not going to be true for much longer.
Soon the webcomic / fanfiction creator will be able to build their own anime shows and audiences.
Kenshi Yonezu started as the vocaloid producer Hachi, and went on to have numerous hits, including a few anime openings and recently the end credit songs for The Boy and the Heron and Final Fantasy XVI.
Yoasobi had one of the most popular music videos, globally, on YouTube last year and is playing Coachella this year. One half of Yoasobi is the (active) vocaloid producer Ayase. (Hatsune Miku is also on the list for Coachella, as well as a new North America tour...)
Ryo/Supercell has been big for awhile, Giga (who used to work with Reol) just did a Pokemon X Hatsune Miku collab and does work for Hololive songs occasionally...
And that's all before discussing how this will affect monetization. Indies already feel soft capped at $20/work and almost hard capped at $30. Will the same consumers pay those prices for what they feel is "lesser art" now? Indie gamedev can barely break even on $10-20 as is.
Gamedev takes too damned long. You can't experiment and rapidly try new things.
Regardless, the comparison point here would be that fan artist would be able to scale to the level of making feature length films. A AAA game and a Feature length animation (or perhaps a "season" of an animated series) aren't that far apart in scope. They both require a cross discipline of art, sound, and text to properly pull off.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/165cmc2/sd...
https://old.reddit.com/r/aiArt/comments/17zmx1n/unreleased_1...
would you also make the same augument about industrial automation taking away the work of apprentices?
Paid apprenticeships may even be something the animation industry could consider, but even that would cause a massive reduction in the size of the talent pool they draw from today. What we have now is basically a meat grinder/lottery system where most animators burn out or suffer in poverty and obscurity while a small number get selected to advance, but at least people have an opportunity to develop their skills, show off their work, and develop industry connections
This is exacerbated in Japan, that already has a significant salaryman culture. However, I'm not sure this could be fixed through regulation. It's very wrapped up in human nature, and is a problem that you see across the world. Ultimately, the people involved have to make a choice about how they spend their lives. I might be wrong, but people have tried to fix the systemic issues for longer than I've been alive.
if you wanted a cathedral or a city hall built they held all the leverage
Your theory can also be countered with another theory: people making a certain amount of money will simply leave the country, leaving you with less tax revenue than the current system.
Also, how does one tax unrealized stock market gains (which is what most wealthy people's wealth are)? I have not seen that policy anywhere and I imagine it would be very difficult to implement.
For example, owning land that is empty or an empty building for years just so it appreciates deprives the community. Tax the shit out of it so it forces the owner to use it productively or sell it so someone else can figure out how to use it productively.
Driving giant pickup trucks for no productive reason also uses up a societal resource, and increases societal risks, so I would not mind seeing extra taxes on those compared to more reasonable methods of transport, and a case could be easily made that all personal vehicles should be taxed much higher to incentivize public transit construction and use.
Society is not losing out much if you don’t use your ski boots since college, but maybe society does benefit if you consume less throwaway things, so a generally increased tax on consumption, perhaps based on mass and distance (since more mass moved further distances takes more energy to move) might work. Easiest way to do this is simply 10x tax on fossil fuels, it will flow down to everything.
Tax things you don’t want. Taxing the result of productive work (income) is disincentivizing something we do want. We want people working hard and striving to do the difficult tasks that are in short supply of expertise (and higher income).
Do you understand that for many people in the world, the car you or at least people in your peer group might drive would be the equivalent of a giant pickup truck to them? Who decides what a reasonable method of transportation is? For example, the bus system is terrible where I live. Am I allowed to have a giant pickup truck under your scheme or should that be taxed the same as if I had a better mass transit system near me? How would you monitor use of my giant pickup truck to be sure I was using it practically in a way that meets your requirements for proper pickup truck usage?
> Do you understand that for many people in the world, the car you or at least people in your peer group might drive would be the equivalent of a giant pickup truck to them?
Yes, I am aware these schemes would require reducing consumption for quite a few people.
> Who decides what a reasonable method of transportation is?
Society? But it has to be planned with long term consequences in mind. Are we prioritizing pedestrians over individual car owners and detached single family home owners or not, because the two are wholly incompatible.
> For example, the bus system is terrible where I live. Am I allowed to have a giant pickup truck under your scheme or should that be taxed the same as if I had a better mass transit system near me?
You are allowed to have whatever you want, just like you can have a $10M home right now, but society does not need to give you the streets and parking lots to use the giant pickup truck.
The mass transit system will come about eventually, but probably will take decades of rezoning. I think voters making this kind of sacrifice is realistic at all, people’s priority at the polls is which politician will allow them to consume as much as possible.
> How would you monitor use of my giant pickup truck to be sure I was using it practically in a way that meets your requirements for proper pickup truck usage?
Again, high fossil fuel prices take care of this, especially at marginal tax rates. Use a little fuel? Less tax. Use more fuel? Higher taxes. At some tax rate, it will no longer make sense for 90% of people to use a pickup truck if they don’t need it.
The purpose of the tax is to dissuade frivolous use that harms society at large. If the use is valuable enough, it will be reflected in the prices of the services it helps provide.
The taxes you are proposing are literally designed to inhibit people from buying the vehicles they want.
Yes, the tax is supposed to dissuade people, but obviously if you are paying $5 per mile in tax to use the pickup truck, but earn $20 per mile profit from the work accomplished using it, people will still be able to buy and use the truck for a productive purpose.
Could you explain the reasoning by which the policy you propose would be expected to produce these outcomes?
Lacking that, power dynamics are such that workers need protections enshrined in legislation. If salaries are a race-to-the-bottom, nobody benefits except the ones doing the hiring. You may have a "job," but the market salary average would be depressed while the companies enjoy a large talent pool of replaceable workers.
If I didn't know history too well, I likely wouldn't hold this position. But it's clear as day if you crack open a history book.
The first example to jump out in my mind is gov't contractors, which isn't a direct analogue to workers but the mentality of undercutting your competition to get ahead is basic human nature IMO.
Two candidates vying for the same job wouldn't consciously sabotage each other (let's assume). But if they both give a salary quote, why wouldn't the lower-priced candidate be a more appealing hire? With no protections, it would come down to whoever is willing (or able) to cut more pieces of their body off to win the job.
And that behavior is not conducive to a well-functioning economy that supports a large and contented middle class, which is the preferred economic status of all state actors.
This is why I think it's become common practice for tech companies to profit share. We take it for granted now, but it's not common...especially for artists.
https://www.theverge.com/23789935/sega-union-cwa-unionizatio...
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-activision-bl...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/13/marvel-vfx-artists-unanimous...
https://iatse.net/avatar-vfx-artists-file-for-union-election...
It also must be said that during the Hollywood strikes last year, it was the Writer's Guild that drove the talks and were the ones to get the studios to capitulate. And I find writing to be the building block of creativity and passion for a lot of industries. Every story starts somewhere, these days usually on a writer's PC.
That the WGA is demonstrably one of the strongest unions in America makes me very happy, but a little forelorn other unions aren't nearly as strong. IATSE isn't regarded nearly as respectfully in Hollywood, for instance.
People who get in these industries often want to get paid for what they already do for fun, being doodling or coding small games. Or maybe they see the big projects like a popular anime or a game they loved and want to be part of it. But in many cases, what they only get is a repetitive, not very creative, and high pressure job, with all the fun sucked out of it. Which would be fine if the pay was worth it, but it isn't, and the prospects are not great either, because the really interesting positions are few compared to the grunt work.
Problem is that newcomers don't know that, or maybe hope they are special, and companies really play on that, schools too. What happens is that a few years later you get a bunch of guys that are completely drawn out, hopefully they find a better job elsewhere, to be replaced by a new batch of kids with a soon to be broken dream. Some are luckier and get the job they really wanted (it probably won't be you), and others are really unlucky because their skillset doesn't translate well to other industries and end up with burn out, depression and poverty.
that said, there are no other countries like Japan, so what works there has limited applications elsewhere, even for casual conversation.
College kids flipping burgers made more and got leftovers. If there’s one set of people from that era I can never find on LinkedIn, it’s game developers. No idea what happened to any of them.
It is simply supply and demand. There are many people that can draw the characters, so their employees are fungible.
I am sure the creative directors are paid well, but the people drawing each frame are probably a dime a dozen.
People need to learn some basic finance if they want to influence how creator economy businesses run. If you can't do that make friends with business experience who you can trust and rely on. If you can't do either, don't get into a creative field.
Most of the time creatives just hand over all financial decisions completely to some one else.
And then guess what, the financial engineers gain much more influence over how the business run. Even Disney is being pushed around (see Nelson Peltz). And the reason Peltz and finance logic hasn't totally over run them is there are people with finance skills saying profit maximizing, cost cutting finance logic cannot run this shop.
You will not find a single sucess story in a creative field without someone with business skills involved.
certainly depends on the definition of success..
hahaha yep, this word exists in this article but entirely in the context of how Japanese animators have absolutely no union.
I ain't saying the US animation union is perfect but at least there is one; if I hear that some big production like Spiderverse2 is at a non-union shop then it's off my list to bother seeing, even via piracy. I trained to be in this industry and burnt right the fuck out from working at a non-union shop run by a truly evil person, but I still feel solidarity with folks who stuck it out.
Jokes aside, though, yes they do. Though as far as I am aware, mostly in the traditional sense for the primary industry sector to keep companys from working employees to death physically but not really modernized in the tertiary sector.
Memberships are declining and I think a great many issues that make life difficult for people in these now more prominent sectors of industry are not openly recognized and tackled.
Since there are basically no corporations in the furry space, the only cut being taken is the payment provider cut. No management, no marketing, no shareholders. It’s not the highest paying career ever, but I’d say it’s above median.
I would rather there not be an official translation or localization process, but since non Japanese streaming platforms want to constantly expand their business no matter what, the desires of hardcore anime fans will not be respected as normal people outnumber us, so bad subs will continue to be produced.
Localization isn't just bad subs though. Localization is sometimes unavoidable due to differences in language and the cultural usage of the language. Not everything can be directly translated, as that's not how languages work. Sometimes the only way to avoid localization is to not translate, and then it's no longer a translation.
* translating a joke "literally" makes it no longer a joke and so no longer an authentic translation
* the original creators want their work to sell to people who weren't already prepared to like it
Or for people who aren't already familiar with the culture. For instance if you're translating a romance novel or otome game (romance game for women) you'd want to localize the body language it describes men using, because what Japanese women like, American women think is offputting and rapey, and a romance story doesn't work as a romance if it turns the reader off.
> Beyond that official translations often don't come with honorific
This is a giveaway you don't speak Japanese. Honorifics are not actually important or meaning-bearing.
(Last week in public in Japan I heard a woman call a boy "Haru-chan", something that supposedly never happens.)
Actually, if audiences expect this it means translators have to start translating some honorifics you don't know into the ones you do. You probably know さん but not 氏 or ちゃま.
I can, but believe what you want. I don't have a need to prove it to others.
>Honorifics are not actually important or meaning-bearing.
This is plain wrong as there are scenes where honorifics are significant. Who uses (or doesn't use) which honorific with which people is important. Characters change the honorific they use with each other. Characters talk about what honorifics people are using.
>something that supposedly never happens.
Says who?
>if audiences expect this it means translators have to start translating some honorifics
Personally, I don't think they need to translate them. The actual meaning of it is usually not important and if it is it could be left up to the viewer or put in a TL note. An exception to this is certain usages of 殿, but this is usually handled by changing the phrasing of the rest of the sentence.
>You probably know さん but not 氏 or ちゃま
I do know them.
That's just a question of character voice. You can also say a translation is inaccurate because in the original the characters were speaking Japanese and now they're speaking English.
But as they say, it can't be helped. You just need to be sure readers can still distinguish who's speaking in the result by making people sound different.
> Says who?
Most language learning material and anime fan common knowledge? Even Wikipedia, though it has some caveats.
And of course there's real life situations where people call girls -kun as well.
Fair, but I do feel that removing it is removing a social dynamic that can not simply be mapped just to the voice of a character.
>Most language learning material.
It happens in anime too, so that material is wrong and off topic from what was being discussed.
As a Japanese man, you are dead wrong.
Using the wrong honorific or inappropriately not using one at all can be tantamount to shouting "fuck you" to someone here in the Anglosphere, an insult and offence of among the highest order.
>I heard a woman call a boy "Haru-chan", something that supposedly never happens.
That is mundane to a fault.
I didn't mean it like that! I meant when they're being used normally and not meant to stand out. They're normal pleasantries and a bit of character voice, and both those things can be represented in English.
America isn't a honorific-heavy society, but there are certainly people who get offended if you don't call them Dr., etc, but this is rarely a plot point in a TV show and I don't think it's used that often in manga/anime either.
Though I don't find it that bad. My English copy of Count of Monte Cristo does have French honorifics (it uses M/Mme instead of Mr/Mrs) and that doesn't look weird. Japanese stories set in Britain also seem to like using British titles like "Milord" although, um, they don't really do it right.
Meanwhile I've seen subtitles for clips of Japanese vtubers where they don't put /enough/ swearing in. First one I ever saw had Pekora saying something was 気狂い, which they definitely didn't translate right. (Means "crazy" but it's a really bad word, kind of like "retarded".)
This exact same conversation was happening on anime forum boards 20-30 years ago before Japanese streaming platforms knew they were people interested in watching their content overseas. There are gigabytes of forum posts of_fan produced content_ arguing over whether honorifics should be included, if puns should be explained with a "TL note", references to japanese history, etc.
Fansubs ultimately ended up on coalescing on what official subs do today (before official subs even existed), so I don't believe they are doing it because of corporate greed. People prefer somewhat localized content. Fan subs killed most honorifics and translation notes before anyone made a dime doing so.