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The disappearance of Japan's animators
91–100 of 167 posts
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they do it by squeezing businesses upstream, who end up with even lower margins.
This means most of the profit goes to the consumer since every part of the retail chain has such little profits. Its common for retail to be as low as 3%
Downvoted, but because there is no "profit" to the consumer. We get cheap clothes of which some stand up well over time considering the cost.
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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...
That's just texturing over a labor intensive 3D animation that doesn't seem like a production quality one. IIUC, geometrically correct 3D animations are basically worthless. You're already lost if you need perfect 3D renders as the reference.
>That's just texturing over a labor intensive 3D animation
>You're already lost if you need perfect 3D renders as the reference
The reference is far from a "perfect 3D render". That's a rudimentary 3D blockout. The characters are basic mannequins without specific geometry, and the environment is composed of untextured, flat-shaded boxes. The demo uses stock assets so effort meter is even more skewed in AI's favour but even if it wasn't, this is significantly less labor-intensive than hand-drawing every frame or creating a fully rigged, textured, and lit 3D scene for traditional production.
Seedance is supplying most of the visible production value: character designs, faces and expressions, linework, backgrounds, lighting, and a coherent anime rendering. It is even generating the secondary animation: the physics and flow of the hair and clothing, which the rigid 3D models completely lack. Far more work than 'just texturing' here.
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#94Hey, 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,…
>As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea)
Good news!
You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak.
/s
I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level. Because if you think the present where the "1%" refers to the group of people to whom the lion's share of resources in society accrue is bad; imagine a future where the "1%" refers to a group that are the only people any given government and steward class need to keep everything running.
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? A lot of the drawing ends up being outsourced to places with cheaper labor like the Philippines.
At least the Frieren one was drawn by a single Japanese artist https://x.com/aoumemimei/status/2012695958824407124
I didn't realize that they redrew the parts that don't change between frames.
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why the use of AI to do in-between frames is not more embraced by artists and professionals. It sounds like a perfect use case for the technology: pure scutwork that would have been farmed out to sweatshops in a cheap-labor country anyway.
> I wonder why the use of AI to do in-between frames is not more embraced by artists and professionals. It's been being used for years. It saves time, but ultimately the results aren't good enough to replace humans. I don't expect that it ever will be. AI is incapable of creativity and sometimes it'll be faster and easier for an artist to just draw what they envision than it is to tell a computer what they want, have…
The heavy lifting in terms of realizing vision was already done in the design, layout, and keyframing phases. The in-between frames are interpolations, that's why they're sent to sweatshops. And the idea is that you wouldn't proompt them like you do Midjourney; you'd send the AI keyframes and it would geberste the in-betweens.
I can totally see where an animator might be dissatisfied with doing this on a hand-drawn production, however, and vastly prefer humans drawing every frame of the production.
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
re: parlor trick Are you referring to: https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet ?
They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004
Nope there are models that do exactly as described, completing or elaborating on line sketches. Google had (has?) at least a couple public demos. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03477
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#98Hey, 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,…
> As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea) Good news! You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak. /s I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental le…
>we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level
Who is this "we"? As if society at large gets a say? Do people owning land and houses ask the homeless of how to organize home ownership?
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mor…
Well, you're both right, sort of. Most people aren't making SV-style money out of college; they really should be paid more. But the ones that are making those types of salaries, should absolutely be paid less. So should their seniors. So should their managers, and their C-suite. And everyone else - particularly in "low skill" positions - should be making more.
I listen to the details of the lifestyles of high-earning young people - international trips, 3- and 4-figure tech purchases on a whim, $60k cars, a house - and compare that to the young people I worked with in (sales-oriented) retail: working multiple jobs to make rent; paying off bare-survival-related debt; in one case, our manager having to gift a top performer a (beater) car because she simply could not have afforded one otherwise, just so that she could leave work and get home in a reasonable amount of time (she was never late for her shift). These were the people who still physically showed up to work while everyone else locked down.
There's too much money in the top tax brackets. Compressing inequality solves a lot of problems. Including yours, actually: when both senior and junior engineer time is less valuable, as a rule, the less pressure there is to squeeze productivity out of every moment. Take a pay cut and work fewer hours. Let some of that money that was left over get taxed and put into a grant to rebuild infrastructure or fund the arts.
Re: The disappearance of Japan's animators
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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". 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.)
Maybe they meant “Chou Kaguya-hime!” (2026). I haven’t watched it yet but Cosmic Princess Kaguya was really well received on release.