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Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

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Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#191

Post by kiba »

imgabe wrote: post #133
Arainach wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. If you can't pay a living wage, comply with regulations, and be profitable, your business model is not valid and your business should fail and close. 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…

Employees also do not have a right to any particular career. That's nice that people have a dream to make anime for a living. I hope they get to realize it. But the world does not owe them a particular wage for what they want to do just because it's a job that they want. If you can't make enough money doing a certain job, maybe go get a different job then.

Nobody has a right to a business to exist or any particular job exist and yet nonetheless there are the rules of the game that people must abide by to make society works.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#192

Post by autoexec »

chii wrote: post #180
autoexec wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is absolutely going to be the end of many inbetweeners, and on one hand that's a good thing because of how exploited they are, but that's kind of a problem too because you need people to have a way to get started in the industry who can develop their skills, learn how production works, then get promoted to doing key animation or move into other roles that get paid better. If we let AI take all the work from the pe…

> If we let AI take all the work from the people at the bottom would you also make the same augument about industrial automation taking away the work of apprentices?

Not as long as there is still work for apprentices to do. If there was no work left for apprentices, or 99% of all apprenticeships went away entirely due to automation it'd be the same problem.

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

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#193

Post by Der_Einzige »

astrange wrote: post #142
nitwit005 wrote: post #78

> because people just don't particularly care enough to look through the glass. 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.

Western animators aren't paid that terribly, just anime animators, and only some of them. 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.

I'm sorry, all western animation looks bad? Such sweeping generalizations, and so wrong.

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...

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#194

Post by resonious »

steveBK123 wrote: post #20
sillysaurusx wrote: post #6

Then by definition, that’s what their time is worth. It should alarm animators that they’re paid so little. It alarmed me as a gamedev when I saw how much webdevs earned in comparison. It’s partly why I left, and I was much happier for it. 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,…

This is like a collective action problem. Any industry with enthusiasts or which is itself a hobby is subject to this behavior. 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/…

> People need to stop being so naive as to accept poorly paid jobs because they think the subject matter is 'funner'.

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.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#196

Post by johnnyanmac »

jstarks wrote: post #169
kmeisthax wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vocational awe is a curse. If you have an endless supply of people willing to work pennies then the industry will build itself around paying them pennies. This does not mean that this is the only way you can build an animation industry - just that this is the path Toei and Sunrise took. The amount of money that goes into the industry is not static. The original linked article specifically cites cases in which members…

> As for animators having to find new work... good? 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?

>Who are you to tell them that their career choice is wrong?

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.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#197

Post by stevenwoo »

jxf wrote: post #183
jandrese wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like when small business complain that "payroll is the majority of our expenses", but when you look at the expenses it is something like: 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 "How can I keep my business afloat? We've already cut the staff down to t…

$290/month? If those cashiers are working 100 hours a month they're making about a third of (US federal) minimum wage.

There’s data comparing EU prices for equal fast food like MacDonalds and the pay for workers and the cost of the final product appears to bear little relationship to worker pay, i.e. corporations crying poor at the usa minimum wage are full of it. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-workers-denmark/

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#198

Post by franciscop »

pcwalton wrote: post #79

The comments here are talking about how that's the entertainment industry for you, and that's true, but it's also Japan, where salaries are much lower in general than in the US or Europe. Per a quick Google search, at current exchange rates, it's not uncommon to see programmers with 2-3 years of experience earning $30K/year USD there, sometimes lower than that. Japan's economy has been stagnating for decades and that…

> (It's another reason why, as a Westerner, you almost certainly do not want to try to live in Japan.)

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.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#199

Post by astrange »

charcircuit wrote: post #160
astrange wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You learned nonsense right-wing propaganda.

Even so, it is true and does happen. Though I suspect it is less about pushing an ideology and more for trying to appeal to an audience of the localizer's peers. Either way the end result is that it repulsed a demographic of the distribution platform's target audience. Beyond that official translations often don't come with honorific, don't bother explaining puns, are not literal translations, try to replace a Japane…

> more for trying to appeal to an audience of the localizer's peers

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.

Re: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies

#200

Post by astrange »

ekianjo wrote: post #163
astrange wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics doesn't use "free well" to model labor markets, but it does have search costs and monopsonies. You can't wait for the ideal job to appear because you might starve first.

starvation is not a problem in developed countries which is the topic we are talking about here...

Asian welfare states are weaker than you think. The main solution if you can't afford much food is to move back in with your parents.

(Also very high rates of young women reporting doing sex work, though I don't know if that's because of poverty.)

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