Hey, hi, yoohoo
whistles. Everyone gather 'round and reread this part:
Lacking proper training and a viable salary, many young animators don’t feel they can keep going. The Japan Research Institute estimated that a quarter of them quit the industry within four years, and two-thirds in eight years. This retention problem has often been viewed as a form of natural selection. “I think this way of thinking is misguided,” said Sudo Tadashi, the author of two books about the anime industry. “Truly brilliant” animators are needed for roles like director and character designer, but without enough “adequately good” animators—particularly in-betweeners—the industry wouldn’t be able to function. “I don’t think a field where only top-level talent could stay on is a good place,” Sudo said. The question, then, is how to create an environment that helps more people become “adequately good”.
You might think that this article is just about Japanese animators, but it's also about
the state of the job economy and the careers of several generations of workers in the developed world, globally. The
obsession with per-worker productivity - of only ever hiring the 10xer - is how you get here.
The grunt work still has to be done, of course. As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea). This is not a new phenomenon; I don't think the article mentioned it, but a large part of the growth of the expertise of Japanese animators in the 20th century was the work that they got that was outsourced from the US. Go ahead and look through the staff/production lists of your favorite childhood cartoons - particularly holiday specials - from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You'll be surprised what you find (or not).