Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The disappearance of Japan's animators

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 167 posts

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#41

Post by famouswaffles »

numpad0 wrote: post #33
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…

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.

>AI image generation is just not there yet.

A Japanese Animator shared this recently. Seedance output over simple 3d models

https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1ue6uf2/japanes...

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#42

Post by idoubtit »

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.

Of course quality is subjective, but my own stats on AniDB show no decline.

I've watch at least one anime produced every year from 1977 to now. For 2000-2025 I've watched 24 to 62 anime of each year. My average vote by year is surprisingly stable at 5 ±0.6.

My top votes also don't show any significative tendency. Out of my 25 favorite anime, 6 were produced in 2020 or later. Notably the film "Kaguya-hime no monogatari", but also seinen series like "Nami yo Kiite Kure", "ACCA" or "Eizouken".

BTW, "Eizouken" (2020) is wonderful, and it's about a young girl wishing to become an animator, and how she creates short animes with her friends. I strongly recommend it!

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#43

Post by toyg »

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.…

You've just described Hollywood, the music business, but even the supermarket/distribution business. The middleman tends to accumulate all the profit.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#44

Post by toyg »

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

It feels like GITS made a stylistic choice because they were criticized for going too much the other way in recent productions (lots of crap 3d/CG).

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#45

Post by numpad0 »

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…

AI image generators readily take partial images and run in a super-resolution mode(they are always in that mode). They can take a stick figure or a screenshot or anything you want. They prefer to have text description of the image, but that can be generated too if needed.

It seems Western AI platform companies generally don't prefer an architecture with multimodal non-literal inputs to closely follow intents of users, over ones based on pure literal descriptions. It was some Chinese guys that first did works in that direction. There appear to be psychological resistance to the idea of non-literal forms of thoughts among Western entities, as if there's some literal-text superiority theory deep down in people's minds. Others like researchers from Chinese labs probably don't have that.

Artists' responses to generative fill-ins are lukewarm at best, if the obvious responses were put aside. AIs tend to treat artists' intentions as deviation from the mean and tend to steer image into less interesting, more noisy directions. That negates potential productivity gains.

I don't think there's any AI trained to generate ideal strokes from prompts so to teach someone, or datasets that could be used for it, esp. with current climate regarding AI image generation - the bridge between AI and artists of many kinds are burning white hot, nothing is going through there.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#46

Post by vintermann »

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…

My impression is that a lot, if not most, anime was always cheap. Lots of stills, few frames, and CGI as soon as it got remotely good enough (and often before). Like Hanna-Barbera cheap. That was my impression when I used to be moderately "into" it 25-ish years ago, but judging from youtube channels like Mother's Basement, it hasn't gotten better.

It makes sense that they would be the first to use AI for whatever they can get away with.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#47

Post by KyleTheDev »

john_strinlai wrote: post #26
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

i love an apprenticeship model, i think most people would learn better and become competent at whatever position much quicker than straight book learning, for practically every job. however, where you say: " My [...] opinion is just the opposite [...] where you're not paid a bunch ", are you saying the opposite of a living wage? how would you expect someone to, well, live during their apprenticeship? someone starving…

+1, I'm a huge apprenticeship fan. It's worked for thousands of years, it's definitely something we should be investing more into.

You also kinda hit the nail on the head w/ your second point. I think we're expecting a lot of people now to either pay tons of money for higher education, or survive through years of unlivable wagers, to eventually get to a higher paying (I.E, livable) position. In some cases, like doctors in Residency, it's reasonable (average of 65-70k/year?) and enough for them to survive until they're fully fledged. In other cases, like any form of artisan, a lot of blue collar work, it's minimum or near minimum wage and a looming threat of financial ruin.

I think a big part of this is our move to monopolistic/gargantuan corporations, and employment no longer (for good reason) being a primary source of housing. Apprentices used to be able to survive with less payment, because they were given spare rooms, fed by the family of the business owner, and so on. Instead, they now need to be given larger financial rewards so they can procure those things themselves, which can be harder on a business owner.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#48

Post by hibikir »

Ultimately animation is built targeting a budget: From the oldest animes with massive animation reuse and very low fps to complicated things that mix 3d and 2d. It's all a multi-decade race to make anime people enjoy for a budget the studio will pay. Almost every animation project done today (barring, say, the failure of Blue Lock S2, or Uzumaki past ep1) is has more animation per episode than most series in the 90s. Something like Witch Hat Atelier looks competitive with Ghibli movies, but it comes in 12 episode seasons: So far more animation total!

It's precisely the competition, and the quest for more quality for the buck, that leads to more foreign animation, more AI, or more 3d models. If people were animating like the old days, with hand-drawn cels photographed in complex rigs, we'd not get the same actual amount of animation made, and it'd be worse, just because the cost per series would be so high very little animation would be funded, and it'd be just for smash hits with big worldwide audience potential, not, say, series about rakugo. We optimize for output, and it often meands outsourcing and higher level tooling, which will include AI in one form or another.

We are in tech here, we have to understand there's big advantages to this for consumers.

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#49

Post by kps »

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.

Sturgeon's Law: “[…] they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important.”

Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators

#50

Post by michaelrpeskin »

john_strinlai wrote: post #26
michaelrpeskin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

i love an apprenticeship model, i think most people would learn better and become competent at whatever position much quicker than straight book learning, for practically every job. however, where you say: " My [...] opinion is just the opposite [...] where you're not paid a bunch ", are you saying the opposite of a living wage? how would you expect someone to, well, live during their apprenticeship? someone starving…

I think the trouble is living wage means different things to different people.

I look back to my time in grad school. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to get fellowships so we were able to focus directly on school and didn't have to do another job or teach. But it was _tight_! I remember keeping track of every cent in a spreadsheet and we generally were at around $100 extra to save every month (which would then be eaten up by a random car repair or something). We never went into debt, but we really paid attention to our spending. No fancy going out, no travel, no avocado toast.

I think right now people put too much "fun" in the definition of living wage. So yes, I wouldn't want someone to be worried about making rent and eating while being apprentice, but it's also not going to be a glamorous instagram lifestyle.

In 2000-2005 dollars we were making a combined $30,000 a year as grad students. I don't know what that means now, but that's probably the actual value we provided to our advisors (paper writing, conference posters, etc).

Post reply on HN