71–80 of 167 posts
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You've just described Hollywood, the music business, but even the supermarket/distribution business. The middleman tends to accumulate all the profit.
Big chain stores have their profit margins at below 5%.
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.…
I'm not sure that average across the entire industry is a good measure of how animators are paid for high budget, high talent features.
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 monogatar…
Huh? Kaguya-hime was in 2013, 7 years before 2020 (after a notoriously protracted development). You really think Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli were releasing that post-COVID? (Isao wasn't even alive in 2020.)
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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…
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Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.
Even if we're still far from the golden age, Dandadan (Science SARU; though I've heard the sheer effort bankrupted them) and the recent Witch Hat Atelier (Bug Films) are quite nice to behold. Some modern romcoms like Kaguya-sama (A-1 Pictures) and The Dangers in My Heart (Shin-Ei) were nicely done too. Things are obviously not going in the right direction, but the current accelerated fall in quality the consumer sees…
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.
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
Mappa is imho the current heavyweight studio, doing everything from spectacular action setpieces with bold visual experimentation in mainstream stories like Jujutsu Kaitsen to the extremely labor-intensive stylization of Dorohedoro.
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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…
We do not value things made by humans. Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive. But expensive doesn't work in mass-media. So a hand-drawn anime isn't going to be more profitable than an AI-animated one. As for education - possibly, but this is the end of a process that started with digitalisation. I'm a huge fan of hand-drawn pre-Illustrator gr…
I read this as we do value things made by humans, we just don't incentivize the mass market to prioritize handmade things
Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.
I can also appreciate how a significant chunk of such images would make someone wince though, but I find it more than a bit confused to then bring up "proper craftsmanship" as the contrast. There's an incredible amount of extremely mediocre illustrations, anime, and other related work, that were made without any genAI tooling. High effort is reserved for the probable hits. Anime is especially teeming with extremely cookie cutter productions, and heavily overused tropes in saturated genres. I don't think the absolute chokehold that the high school romcom and isekai fantasy genres have on recent seasons needs much introduction. You can often just take one glance at a promotion visual and already identify both the genre and the quality right away. Cue the big 3DCG enemy on episode 1 (or 2).
It's also hard to reconcile this with the fundamental fact that the audience of these works is the mass market. Mass market targeting things are inherently bound by mass market sensibilities. Willingly not adopting a breakthrough technology - provided it is actually that - is about as far from proper craftsmanship in such context as it can be. So is being a one trick pony and sticking to an older fad. Making something good while locked away in an ivory tower is one thing. Making something good while simultaneously riding out the wave of actual real world circumstances is another [1]. I respect the latter a whole lot more than the former. Especially since the latter tends to devolve into self-abuse contests, to round off the self serving tendencies they inherently carried anyway. Code golf is a positive example for this. High art, maybe not so much.
I really don't see any reason to go on ideological adventures like this anyhow. You can just not like it, find it cringe, and leave it at that. It does not need some big philosophical undercurrent to suck. It can just look like garbage, be used lazily, and suck that way. And others can simply just disagree with those labels applying.
[0] A friend recently showed me their expensive sunglasses collection. They are indisputably expensive indeed. They are also the same cheap-feeling finnicky garbage as every other pair of sunglasses I've ever encountered. One can appreciate the expertise of someone who can recognize them as expensive, sure. But I think it says a whole lot more that the average person cannot. It's a sign of deep, long running cultural recursion, not unlike how when an LLM is fed LLM text, it degenerates.
[1] Could the average run of the mill show maybe look better and be more animated using genAI than they currently are? I definitely think they might just.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We do not value things made by humans. Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive. But expensive doesn't work in mass-media. So a hand-drawn anime isn't going to be more profitable than an AI-animated one. As for education - possibly, but this is the end of a process that started with digitalisation. I'm a huge fan of hand-drawn pre-Illustrator gr…
There are plenty of people who do. A minority perhaps, but your absolute statement is wrong.
> Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.
Many people don't give a shit about status signaling, but do care about supporting people and their craft. Some folks have a a niche making something by hand, but far removed from the concept of Veblen goods.
The world isn't as flat as you're making it out to be.