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The disappearance of Japan's animators

economist.com

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Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#31

Post by fusslo »

jdw64 wrote: post #4

After reading this article, I got curious whether there was a similar article from Japan, and there actually is. The average monthly income in the animation industry is 200,000 yen (about $1,300 USD), but the median working hours are 2,745 hours per year. That comes out to 225 hours per month, or 52 hours per week [1][2]. Considering that animators' work is essentially drawing labor, that's an insane amount of work.…

There's a japanese docuseries called 'Manben' (available on youtube) that interviews a bunch of famous manga artists. Without fail they all talk about how much work, hours, suffering goes into the first years of making manga.

It's very interesting to watch and I highly recommend it. But it's also a GREAT advertisement for avoiding the industry.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#32

Post by arkh »

jmclnx wrote: post #5

Interesting, the "training of new animators" mirrors what has/is happening in other industries. When I started programming decades ago, an experienced programmer would review my work and help me out. That started ending in the very late 80s and 90s. By 2000 or so, you were on your own as a new employee. I even mentioned it to a high level manager a while ago, he said we expected people we hire to know what they are d…

> we expected people we hire to know what they are doing

I feel this is a generational thing. Many baby-boomer parents never took the time to teach their children any skill. They thought they learnt it by osmosis I guess. Their generation outsourced everything they could.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#33

Post by numpad0 »

RobKohr wrote: post #12
jdw64 wrote: post #4

After reading this article, I got curious whether there was a similar article from Japan, and there actually is. The average monthly income in the animation industry is 200,000 yen (about $1,300 USD), but the median working hours are 2,745 hours per year. That comes out to 225 hours per month, or 52 hours per week [1][2]. Considering that animators' work is essentially drawing labor, that's an insane amount of work.…

So basically they get paid peanuts and are overworked and so no one wants to do it. Also seems like something AI could really cut into. You could have a master animator doing much of important thoughtful work and AI filling in the obvious as well as doing tweening (sound similar to programming) Really, who needs a studio if you have the creative talent and ability to leverage AI for the grunt work. Or have a couple g…

AI image generation is just not there yet. Say what you want about Luddites and whatnot, but the quality is just not good - the amount of effort given compensation that (especially Japanese) artists put into anime styled imagery makes too little sense that AI can't compete, even in generation time if time for retakes are accounted for.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#34

Post by utopiah »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #14

Not everything is bleak. The ending sequence for Frieren season 2 was entirely hand drawn with colored pencils[0] and the new Ghost in the Shell (coming out next month) is also hand drawn[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

Neat, I didn't know for Ghost in the Shell, I'll be watching it in few weeks then! Thanks for sharing.

PS: so weird to watch the trailer while working in XR. I never imagined as a kid I'd be programming in a headset but now it's banal. I even buy 2nd hand HMDs for 100 bucks. Weird times.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#35

Post by mschuster91 »

jdw64 wrote: post #22
RobKohr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically they get paid peanuts and are overworked and so no one wants to do it. Also seems like something AI could really cut into. You could have a master animator doing much of important thoughtful work and AI filling in the obvious as well as doing tweening (sound similar to programming) Really, who needs a studio if you have the creative talent and ability to leverage AI for the grunt work. Or have a couple g…

You're not wrong. But there is a common perception that we value things made by humans more. The problem is that grunt work actually serves as a pipeline for industrial training. Even with AI, the distribution of value doesn't get resolved automatically. Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates ev…

> Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society.

It's not just educational. The more thinking you offload to AI, the more your own skills degrade [1] - and it makes sense, intuitively. If you repeat tasks, you gain experience and get good at it... but if you cease that repetition, eventually your skills break down.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#36

Post by PessimalDecimal »

jmclnx wrote: post #5

Interesting, the "training of new animators" mirrors what has/is happening in other industries. When I started programming decades ago, an experienced programmer would review my work and help me out. That started ending in the very late 80s and 90s. By 2000 or so, you were on your own as a new employee. I even mentioned it to a high level manager a while ago, he said we expected people we hire to know what they are d…

Do you think this is a global phenomenon or regional maybe just in the US or the Anglosphere?

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#37

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

KyleTheDev wrote: post #8
jmclnx wrote: post #5

Interesting, the "training of new animators" mirrors what has/is happening in other industries. When I started programming decades ago, an experienced programmer would review my work and help me out. That started ending in the very late 80s and 90s. By 2000 or so, you were on your own as a new employee. I even mentioned it to a high level manager a while ago, he said we expected people we hire to know what they are d…

It'll be very interesting reading future studies on how this has negatively impacted entire generations. Hopefully people realize that you need to pay younger people living wages to learn skills, if they want people to have those skills in the future.

Let in the chronicles be written, that widespread inability to read and write endeth the chronicles.. class of mistake. Let this be a lesson to all readers of chronicles.. the big failure starts three generations before the white paper appears..

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#38

Post by asa123 »

itissid wrote: post #29
hiccuphippo wrote: post #14

Not everything is bleak. The ending sequence for Frieren season 2 was entirely hand drawn with colored pencils[0] and the new Ghost in the Shell (coming out next month) is also hand drawn[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

Noob Question: There is a famous parlor trick with generative networks(I think it was GANs but it might be some kind of diffusion based network.), you start with a canvas and draw a stick figure of what you want and the generative network draws the rest of it. Do AI platform companies actually pre-train networks to do the same for hand drawn artists? Related question: If they do train them to do that, are there any t…

re: parlor trick

Are you referring to:

https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet

?

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#39

Post by Aunche »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #14

Not everything is bleak. The ending sequence for Frieren season 2 was entirely hand drawn with colored pencils[0] and the new Ghost in the Shell (coming out next month) is also hand drawn[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? A lot of the drawing ends up being outsourced to places with cheaper labor like the Philippines.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#40

Post by programjames »

asa123 wrote: post #38
itissid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noob Question: There is a famous parlor trick with generative networks(I think it was GANs but it might be some kind of diffusion based network.), you start with a canvas and draw a stick figure of what you want and the generative network draws the rest of it. Do AI platform companies actually pre-train networks to do the same for hand drawn artists? Related question: If they do train them to do that, are there any t…

re: parlor trick Are you referring to: https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet ?

They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004
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