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The disappearance of Japan's animators

economist.com

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Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#11

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

world2vec wrote: post #9
TheRealPomax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, that was already true in 2006. It's the thing people keep saying, and yet anime keeps coming out. Right now they're stuck in the whole "ten shows from the same budget, each run by their own 'committee' and each competing for cash that runs out well before the show's over, and the poor performance very quickly get less per episode". Great for networks, shit for shows. Even worse for animators who need to get pa…

A cursory glance of anime tv shows released in 2006 and there's a lot of good things I'd watch again: Honey & Clover, Kemonozume, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, etc. In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.

Akane Banashi was probably the best directed show this season.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#12

Post by RobKohr »

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 grunt work humans paid these rates to manage the tedious work of leveraging the AI to make it look seamless.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#13

Post by [deleted] »

world2vec wrote: post #9
TheRealPomax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, that was already true in 2006. It's the thing people keep saying, and yet anime keeps coming out. Right now they're stuck in the whole "ten shows from the same budget, each run by their own 'committee' and each competing for cash that runs out well before the show's over, and the poor performance very quickly get less per episode". Great for networks, shit for shows. Even worse for animators who need to get pa…

A cursory glance of anime tv shows released in 2006 and there's a lot of good things I'd watch again: Honey & Clover, Kemonozume, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, etc. In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.

[deleted]

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#14

Post by hiccuphippo »

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

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#15

Post by HaloZero »

world2vec wrote: post #9
TheRealPomax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, that was already true in 2006. It's the thing people keep saying, and yet anime keeps coming out. Right now they're stuck in the whole "ten shows from the same budget, each run by their own 'committee' and each competing for cash that runs out well before the show's over, and the poor performance very quickly get less per episode". Great for networks, shit for shows. Even worse for animators who need to get pa…

A cursory glance of anime tv shows released in 2006 and there's a lot of good things I'd watch again: Honey & Clover, Kemonozume, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, etc. In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.

Higurashi when they cry does the whole concept of time reset well (2006).

Trigun sequel is coming out this year.

2026 titles have caught on that trend of a really long specific title though.

“The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life”

I think anime is a big enough category that every year there’s always at least a few good ones but it’s hard to get good signal to noise. But the whole tiny girl thing is 100% a trend that’s stuck around.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#16

Post by KerrAvon »

world2vec wrote: post #6

Anime has never been more popular but honestly its quality has declined a lot. It's all isekai and supernatural-sexy-schoolgirl-whatever (kinda creepy) these days. Or the same old animes that go on forever. Every year there's less and less animes that are worth the time to watch IMHO.

What? This is a golden age of anime.

You could count the number of anime available in the west and worth watching 25 years ago on one hand, maybe two.

Now? If you can't find something, you're not looking hard enough. Off the top of my head, current anime that do not remotely fit your categories:

- Spy x Family

- Dandadan

- Dungeon Meshi

- Apocalypse Hotel

- Yumi no Tsugai (Daemons of the Shadow Realm)

- Kaiju No. 8

- Marriage Toxin

- Steel Ball Run

- The Summer Hikaru Died

- Akane-Banashi

- Dorohedoro

edit: formatting. edit 2: added Dorohedoro, good call down below

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#17

Post by shikshake »

KerrAvon wrote: post #16
world2vec wrote: post #6

Anime has never been more popular but honestly its quality has declined a lot. It's all isekai and supernatural-sexy-schoolgirl-whatever (kinda creepy) these days. Or the same old animes that go on forever. Every year there's less and less animes that are worth the time to watch IMHO.

What? This is a golden age of anime. You could count the number of anime available in the west and worth watching 25 years ago on one hand, maybe two. Now? If you can't find something, you're not looking hard enough. Off the top of my head, current anime that do not remotely fit your categories: - Spy x Family - Dandadan - Dungeon Meshi - Apocalypse Hotel - Yumi no Tsugai (Daemons of the Shadow Realm) - Kaiju No. 8 -…

I did not know they made an anime of The Summer Hikaru Died. The manga was amazing, I need to check out how they adapted it.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#18

Post by michaelrpeskin »

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.

My (probably unpopular here) opinion is just the opposite. We need more of an apprenticeship model where you're not paid a bunch because you're still learning, and you probably bring negative-to-zero value initially. When a fresh-out-of-college junior engineer brings in SV style money, the expectation should be that they already know what they're doing.

In the trades you start off low pay because you're generally more in the way than helpful, but then you gain the experience and knowledge to be valuable.

Even the resident-doctor relationship is like this. Resident are overworked and poorly paid because they are more distracting than the value they add, then there's the big reward at the end.

The grad-student/professor model is kind of like this too except for all the pyramid scheme stuff that happens there.

I think most technical fields need to go to this model where the newbie commits to learning and trying to be valuable instead of rest-and-vest. And then once they're valuable they get paid more in proportion to the value they bring to the field.

In my small company we had to switch about 5 years ago to only hiring folks with lots of experience (10-15 years). We tried hiring younger fresh-out-of-college engineers, but "market rate" was too high and they required too much attention from senior staff and it made us unsustainably unproductive. We wanted to mentor and teach the next generation, but we couldn't afford it.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#19

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

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

Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#20

Post by jackyinger »

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…

God forbid we invest in the future. Investors need those profits now!
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