This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.”
He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life.
This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice. Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common. For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak English, just that they can do the job they say the can.
My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of competent animators and the animations were more expensive to purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually, I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot more.
It may also have to do with why game companies in the US pay coders, testers and artists lower wages than non game companies. Game companies have "sold the dream" of working at a game company. Riding on a razor scooter, eating free snacks, wearing a hoodie while earning a subscale wage for the same work and longer hours during "crunch time". Executives and producers make the lions share because the above people's dreams are easily manipulated, not unlike the Anime industry in Japan.
This - but add 1) it's aspirational work which distorts some things (a lot of jobs are like this) and 2) probably lack of good Guild or Union.
Markets actually rarely function very well on their own because participants often don't have enough information to make decent decisions or there are huge power asymmetries. An Artists Guild would, in the long run, probably make everyone better off.
It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios?
At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.
Same issue with the video game industry. Even when you compare QA, a manual game tester is lucky to hit $15 an hour. A manual normal software tester can easily hit 80k.
I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things, yet game programmers make the least.
It's the problem of every dream job, no one dreams of working on software for waste treatment facilities. So the people willing to do that job can do much better than the new grads trying to work on the next battlefield or whatever
Pretty sure software for waste treatment facilities is much better than another spa garbage full of spyware, that ideally should go straight to those facilities.
> I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things
Can you give some examples? How many things does a VG programming have to account for compared to, for examples, a ML programmer, or a programmer in the HFT space?
Sure, video game programming is not a game, but I don't know why it would be "the most difficult" compared to other fields.
I don't have time to find source on the web to support that but in his graphic novel about Pyongyang, Guy Delisle describes how a lot of anime are made (if I am correct he is talking about Disney but it is all from memory so correct me if I am wrong). Basically Westerners make some designs and all the animation in between 2 designs is made in North Korea.
"Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
"But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages"
"Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
Cleanliness is booming too, but cleaning persons also live in poverty.
It's because:
(a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
This same story is playing out in the Videogame Industry.
That industry is arguably booming too, making more than it ever has in the past and growing wildly year over year.
And yet game programmers make some of the lowest salaries among all devs, last I checked. Especially at entry level.
To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when they are burned out.
> , but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
Lawyers are a counterexample. There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down.
David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism.
Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
The number of surgeons is artificially low because of limits on the number of residency spots in this country. So I agree that prices can probably come down, somewhat. However, attorneys are not limited in the same way but can still cost a fortune, because people are willing to pay a lot for perceived value when there's a high stakes outcome. Some things just aren't worth farming out to the lowest bidder.
Society is also structured in such a way that for the most part every job will have folks clamoring for it. When you are born without capital, you have to take what you can get.
Unfortunately I think it's going to keep getting worse as wealth inequality increases.
Imagine walking into a monopoly game where each piece is already bought and owned. Try to win at that. Instead, I could imagine you wind up working for someone, and feed them a majority of the profit while you get scraps.
I don't have good solutions for how to fix this, other than perhaps universal basic income would alleviate things.
>A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
How would this avoid (a) and (b) though? Your society needs to somehow balance what jobs people do. There is no real way to measure how difficult a job is. You could argue that hard manual labor is a very difficult job, yet there are many people who prefer that to sitting down, learning a lot and then doing a mentally exhausting desk job. The willingness of people to do a job needs to be accounted for when you're deciding whether a job is difficult or not, but this very much depends on the person. How would you account for this without looking at how difficult it is to replace a person doing a specific job?
Animators are more rare and much more in demand then programmers relative to the size of the industry IMO. The skill is also harder overall. Drawing and animating the human form in three dimensions is harder then programming.
I don’t think it’s a supply side problem. Another phenomenon is happening here. Animators do have the option of unionizing which mitigates these sorts of issues.
We don't have unlimited capacity for everyone who wants to make a good living doing $X to do be satisfied. They can hustle for a low-paying opportunity or they can just be told "no" by a central planner, hiring hall union, credentialing admissions process, etc.
That may solve an observer's concern about profit/exploitation, but it leaves the worker with strictly fewer options.
People not getting what they want is just as bad whether or not anyone else is benefitting at the same time.
> (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
The highest profit margin I can find is Toei Animation, which in 2020 made 11.4 billion yen in profit on 54.8 billion yen in sales[1], giving them a 20% profit margin. If every animation studio had that high of a profit margin and 100% of profits went to workers, industry wages would rise 20%. Though if that were the case, the company's profits would be zero and one bad year would end them.
>(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
You have to be careful there because the overwhelming surplus of cheaply acquired goods/services goes to the people who received the goods and services and not the person selling the goods and services.
Businesses only capture it when they have a competitive advantage (either because they have no competition or b/c the cost savings can't be matched by a competitor).
Grocery clerks are lowly paid. But grocery is a competitive, low margin business. So those low wages mostly mean cheap food.
We don't allow businesses to profit "wildly" because we don't want to pay people more. We allow businesses to profit because it isn't fair to make someone pay X when someone else is very happy to get paid a fraction of X. It's about justice and fairness. I mean I'd love to get paid Silicon Valley programmer wages, but I'm perfectly happy to program for a fraction of those wages. And it would be an injustice for me to be unemployed because my employer was forced to pay Silicon Valley wages.
And what are "wild" profits? Because most companies are making far less than 8% of revenue as profits.
>(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
Governments meddle with the economy all the time, there was a short period of laissez faire being the dominant thought in the Western World in 18th and 19th century, but after WWI. Nowadays governments command 30-60% of GDP.
Raising the minimum wage would help with that. Why would someone clean for $25/hour when they could do something less physically demanding for the same money? Then you would have to pay cleaners more in order to attract them.
People would complain about cleaners getting more money than their white collar jobs, but that's classism embeded in part because of the current situation. As soon as people realise job X makes good money, suddenly the stigmas go away.
> (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
And because we've been taught that discussing how much you earn is taboo, especially with your colleagues.
>Median annual earnings for key illustrators and other top-line talent increased to about $36,000 in 2019 from around $29,000 in 2015
So it would seem this article is truly about the animators responsible for the animation between keyframes. Unfortunately I can't find the article on the making of anime I had once read, but basically, the key frame artists are drawn by those truly responsible for the art style you see. The animation work between frames truly is grunt work (this is the truth, I'm sorry if you find this offensive) that is accomplishable by many.
And lets not pretend that shows with good animation are automatically a success. You need a good story, good pacing (direction), and in most cases you need to choose the story from a pile of hundreds of possibilities.
And, as is often forgotten when the whole "revenue sharing with employees" is brought up, the employee is staking no capital and can leave at any time. If the anime fails, surely you don't suggest "revenue sharing" that loss with the employees.
The vast majority of anime does fail, or only serves as an advertisement for the source. Just look at any given season of anime, the majority of anime is not well received.
In contrast to your statement, which sounds wise but I doubt it, I find that there's way more programmers, then there are animators; and programmers are usually paid very well.
I did some 3d animation in the past, and once in awhile do some 2d animation. I've never met anyone else who does traditional 2d animation in person, in comparison with the zillions of programmers out there in the wild.
It sounds like the same problem as the gaming industry, where people are really passionate about it and are willing to work for peanuts to be in the industry. I started doing some hobby game development, and I was suprised at how many "good enough" art and sound assets are freely available because of artists trying to get noticed.
Real money is in merchandising. Demon Slayer is big out here in Taiwan.. every kid has pencils, erasers, buttons, shirts, pencil cases, backpacks.. the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful.
Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.
Animators as a profession are like factory workers. Japanese animators compete with Chinese, Vietnamese and everyone else.
If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.
Pretty disappointed at the "its just supply and demand" rhetoric. Supply and demand curves is an indicator of the market, NOT the ground truth of the market. Policies change the elasticity. Perceived value change the elasticity. Collective bargaining changes elasticity. Consumer changes elasticity. Simply treating the curve as the truth rather than the representation of the current state is extremely disingenuous.
Clearly, animators need to lobby for additional licensure, safety and educational requirements, and restrictive trade organizations to thin the herd of “acceptable” laborers.
If by animators you mean people who create the frames between key frames designed by the character designers then I'm pretty sure this work is often outsourced to chinese and south korean studios that pay a penny to their employees.
I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.
Being from a third-world country, it it feels weird how western media so casually uses the word "poverty". Where I come from, living in poverty mostly means living in abject poor living conditions- without a decent place to live in, without guarantee of being able to secure meals for the day, etc.
People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
When there are more people who want to do a job, than there are slots for doing that job, no matter what the economic system you have to do one of three things:
1) pay lower wages until some of the people leave the profession
2) use some kind of essentially random (even if theoretically bureaucratic or administrative) method to assign those slots to people; for example, you can only do this job if your parents happen to be people in the industry
3) vicious back-stabbing politics and sharp elbows, as people who want those jobs suck up to the ones who get to choose who gets them
4) conditions (other than wages) in that profession get so bad that people become dispirited and drop out
You also see this in certain areas of academia, or in the music industry, or many other fields. There can be combinations of these methods, of course.
The best way around this conundrum (that I know of), is to do this as an avocation rather than a vocation. For example, the many people who have composed music, written novels, etc. on the side while earning their money in other ways. It's not a perfect method, but it's the best (least soul-eating) way I know of.
I have some intimacy with the American animation industry and its similar here. All artistry/design/etc. happens on the US side of operations, then the brute "{drag sliders around}/{draw intermediary frames}/{paint over broken rigs} to match the design docs" happens internationally by vendor studios who get paid next to nothing.
It's not dissimilar from things like L1 support in tech, which are often low cost international folks trained to respond using a fixed template. Both don't get paid much because their existence is expressly designed to be as easily replaceable as possible.
If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.
Obviously high supply of animators is the main reason, but I wonder if part of it is that pirating/illegal streaming sites are extremely common for anime. All of the people I know that watch anime do so without paying for it. It's trivially easy to find anime for free online, so much so that it's easier to find it for free than pay for it.
I think this has something to do with it. Piracy is a big problem for Hollywood too, but they make most/a great deal of their money at the Box Office anyway, something the this industry does not. At least in the western market.
Many anime studios in recent years have thrown in the towel despite having high levels of skill at their profession. It is repeatedly mentioned here that the reason animators are paid low is due to their abundance versus the demand, and that is certainly one reason of many. But another big reason is that it is strenuous work for which there really isn't that much pay out.
The NYTimes article flaunts a $24 billion market figure, but this figure would be the few big names (Naruto, One Piece, DBZ) and those series are making money off of physical product sales and licensing deals. The anime, at the end of the day, is not the product - it's just a commercial for the product. Every so often, studios experiment with original anime, sometimes sponsored by various other companies, but these rarely turn out to be financially fruitful and primarily end up again as advertisements or a test of some new technique or technology.
[+] [-] neura|5 years ago|reply
This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.”
He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life.
This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice. Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common. For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak English, just that they can do the job they say the can.
My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of competent animators and the animations were more expensive to purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually, I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot more.
[+] [-] UnpossibleJim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Markets actually rarely function very well on their own because participants often don't have enough information to make decent decisions or there are huge power asymmetries. An Artists Guild would, in the long run, probably make everyone better off.
[+] [-] CyberRage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios?
At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.
[+] [-] offtop5|5 years ago|reply
I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things, yet game programmers make the least.
It's the problem of every dream job, no one dreams of working on software for waste treatment facilities. So the people willing to do that job can do much better than the new grads trying to work on the next battlefield or whatever
[+] [-] GoblinSlayer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vwnghjmjew|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudul|5 years ago|reply
Can you give some examples? How many things does a VG programming have to account for compared to, for examples, a ML programmer, or a programmer in the HFT space?
Sure, video game programming is not a game, but I don't know why it would be "the most difficult" compared to other fields.
[+] [-] toto444|5 years ago|reply
EDIT : I have found this https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf
"Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
[+] [-] pradn|5 years ago|reply
Quotes from this article:
"But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages"
"Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
It's because:
(a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.
If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
(b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
[+] [-] bluefirebrand|5 years ago|reply
That industry is arguably booming too, making more than it ever has in the past and growing wildly year over year.
And yet game programmers make some of the lowest salaries among all devs, last I checked. Especially at entry level.
To me, that entire industry seems geared towards grabbing fresh faced grads who are loaded up on dreams of making games, putting them in infinite crunch, and discarding them later when they are burned out.
[+] [-] throw_m239339|5 years ago|reply
This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.
Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low.
> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.
Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
[+] [-] 0xfaded|5 years ago|reply
David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism.
Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.
[+] [-] chadash|5 years ago|reply
The number of surgeons is artificially low because of limits on the number of residency spots in this country. So I agree that prices can probably come down, somewhat. However, attorneys are not limited in the same way but can still cost a fortune, because people are willing to pay a lot for perceived value when there's a high stakes outcome. Some things just aren't worth farming out to the lowest bidder.
[+] [-] diob|5 years ago|reply
Society is also structured in such a way that for the most part every job will have folks clamoring for it. When you are born without capital, you have to take what you can get.
Unfortunately I think it's going to keep getting worse as wealth inequality increases.
Imagine walking into a monopoly game where each piece is already bought and owned. Try to win at that. Instead, I could imagine you wind up working for someone, and feed them a majority of the profit while you get scraps.
I don't have good solutions for how to fix this, other than perhaps universal basic income would alleviate things.
[+] [-] Aerroon|5 years ago|reply
How would this avoid (a) and (b) though? Your society needs to somehow balance what jobs people do. There is no real way to measure how difficult a job is. You could argue that hard manual labor is a very difficult job, yet there are many people who prefer that to sitting down, learning a lot and then doing a mentally exhausting desk job. The willingness of people to do a job needs to be accounted for when you're deciding whether a job is difficult or not, but this very much depends on the person. How would you account for this without looking at how difficult it is to replace a person doing a specific job?
[+] [-] neonological|5 years ago|reply
I don’t think it’s a supply side problem. Another phenomenon is happening here. Animators do have the option of unionizing which mitigates these sorts of issues.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
> They typically pay animation studios a set fee and reserve royalties for themselves.
> While the system protects the studios from the risk of a flop, it also cuts them out of the windfalls created by hits.
[+] [-] closeparen|5 years ago|reply
That may solve an observer's concern about profit/exploitation, but it leaves the worker with strictly fewer options.
People not getting what they want is just as bad whether or not anyone else is benefitting at the same time.
[+] [-] Eridrus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggreer|5 years ago|reply
The highest profit margin I can find is Toei Animation, which in 2020 made 11.4 billion yen in profit on 54.8 billion yen in sales[1], giving them a 20% profit margin. If every animation studio had that high of a profit margin and 100% of profits went to workers, industry wages would rise 20%. Though if that were the case, the company's profits would be zero and one bad year would end them.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20200930164251/http://corp.toei-...
[+] [-] rhino369|5 years ago|reply
You have to be careful there because the overwhelming surplus of cheaply acquired goods/services goes to the people who received the goods and services and not the person selling the goods and services.
Businesses only capture it when they have a competitive advantage (either because they have no competition or b/c the cost savings can't be matched by a competitor).
Grocery clerks are lowly paid. But grocery is a competitive, low margin business. So those low wages mostly mean cheap food.
[+] [-] merpnderp|5 years ago|reply
And what are "wild" profits? Because most companies are making far less than 8% of revenue as profits.
[+] [-] LudwigNagasena|5 years ago|reply
Governments meddle with the economy all the time, there was a short period of laissez faire being the dominant thought in the Western World in 18th and 19th century, but after WWI. Nowadays governments command 30-60% of GDP.
[+] [-] ehnto|5 years ago|reply
People would complain about cleaners getting more money than their white collar jobs, but that's classism embeded in part because of the current situation. As soon as people realise job X makes good money, suddenly the stigmas go away.
[+] [-] dkdbejwi383|5 years ago|reply
And because we've been taught that discussing how much you earn is taboo, especially with your colleagues.
[+] [-] ApolloFortyNine|5 years ago|reply
So it would seem this article is truly about the animators responsible for the animation between keyframes. Unfortunately I can't find the article on the making of anime I had once read, but basically, the key frame artists are drawn by those truly responsible for the art style you see. The animation work between frames truly is grunt work (this is the truth, I'm sorry if you find this offensive) that is accomplishable by many.
And lets not pretend that shows with good animation are automatically a success. You need a good story, good pacing (direction), and in most cases you need to choose the story from a pile of hundreds of possibilities.
And, as is often forgotten when the whole "revenue sharing with employees" is brought up, the employee is staking no capital and can leave at any time. If the anime fails, surely you don't suggest "revenue sharing" that loss with the employees.
The vast majority of anime does fail, or only serves as an advertisement for the source. Just look at any given season of anime, the majority of anime is not well received.
[+] [-] koonsolo|5 years ago|reply
Most people want a steady paycheck at the end of the month and (a feeling of) security. This seems to cost money indeed.
At least in Europe, when you are a freelancer, you earn considerably more for doing the same job. Why? Because of the earlier mentioned point.
You would think most people would start freelancing because of this, but it's not true. Most prefer the safety.
[+] [-] rasz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heldrida|5 years ago|reply
I did some 3d animation in the past, and once in awhile do some 2d animation. I've never met anyone else who does traditional 2d animation in person, in comparison with the zillions of programmers out there in the wild.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] blhack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn8788|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinghtown|5 years ago|reply
Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.
[+] [-] syntaxing|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] germinalphrase|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulzeraj|5 years ago|reply
I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.
[+] [-] dartharva|5 years ago|reply
People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|5 years ago|reply
1) pay lower wages until some of the people leave the profession
2) use some kind of essentially random (even if theoretically bureaucratic or administrative) method to assign those slots to people; for example, you can only do this job if your parents happen to be people in the industry
3) vicious back-stabbing politics and sharp elbows, as people who want those jobs suck up to the ones who get to choose who gets them
4) conditions (other than wages) in that profession get so bad that people become dispirited and drop out
You also see this in certain areas of academia, or in the music industry, or many other fields. There can be combinations of these methods, of course.
The best way around this conundrum (that I know of), is to do this as an avocation rather than a vocation. For example, the many people who have composed music, written novels, etc. on the side while earning their money in other ways. It's not a perfect method, but it's the best (least soul-eating) way I know of.
[+] [-] AaronM|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ
[+] [-] meetups323|5 years ago|reply
It's not dissimilar from things like L1 support in tech, which are often low cost international folks trained to respond using a fixed template. Both don't get paid much because their existence is expressly designed to be as easily replaceable as possible.
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png
If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.
[+] [-] rcheu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SllX|5 years ago|reply
One Piece is younger than both Lord of the Rings and James Bond but as a franchise has grossed more than either of those. [1]
Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball are also in higher positions on this list than One Piece.
[1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-...
[+] [-] missedthecue|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] accounted|5 years ago|reply
The NYTimes article flaunts a $24 billion market figure, but this figure would be the few big names (Naruto, One Piece, DBZ) and those series are making money off of physical product sales and licensing deals. The anime, at the end of the day, is not the product - it's just a commercial for the product. Every so often, studios experiment with original anime, sometimes sponsored by various other companies, but these rarely turn out to be financially fruitful and primarily end up again as advertisements or a test of some new technique or technology.
[+] [-] CyberRage|5 years ago|reply
Most "anime" is being created in Japan(That's the literal definition of anime) hence the issue.
You don't hear about starving Pixar animators or Disney artists overworking to extreme levels.
This is part of the Japanese culture. Moreover, I would say that anime is having more difficult time making profit and being sustainable.