As you may have noticed from previous blogs, I am a big fan of shows that use a defined color palette in order to change the meaning or atmosphere of a shot. Now where colors become even more apparent in animation is the way characters are designed to become memorable in the eyes of the audience. There’s a lot that goes into the design of a character – the design needs to be simple enough so that the animators have enough time to draw the frames, but also interesting enough that the viewer’s eyes are focused towards them.
Yona from Akatsuki no Yona
Characters, essentially, are just a collection of personality traits placed in a certain setting, and we want the design to reflect that. For example, the character Yona from Akatsuki no Yona changes from a naive princess to a fiery girl bent on reclaiming the throne from a usurper. Her bright red hair shows off the intensity that she can have, her earrings give off a royal impression, and her eyes are large, indicating that she is still very much a girl. Her design also includes a green cloak that hides her distinctive hair as she travels in exile (and also complements the color red). So there is quite a lot to consider when looking at a character!
Ensemble Cast
One of the most obvious ways that animation in general utilizes color is when they have to balance multiple colors. You might have noticed how in shows like Teen Titans, Beast Boy is green, Raven is purple, and Starfire is orange. Well it becomes even more apparent with larger casts when each character is essentially represented by their color. A good example of this is Mekakucity Actors:
9 characters, all with their own color
It’s basically a rainbow over here, with each character having their unique color (although some of their hair colors have been changed to fit the scheme) and type of clothing. Coupled with the different expressions they have it’s easy to quickly assess what these characters might be like in the show. It’s even easier to identify the characters and recognize them in the show.
Color Tropes – Red and Blue Oni
As more and more anime are created, like any other medium, tropes will often pop up and different meanings will be associated with visual imagery. One good example of this is the Red Oni/Blue Oni trope that associates two closely related characters with vastly different personalities. The red symbolizes passion and defiance while blue might symbolize calmness or an intellectual person. A pretty striking visual example comes from Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show where one could say many personality tropes were popularized.
The personalities of Rei and Asuka from NGE can be pretty easily determined from their hair, one of the most prominent parts of a character’s design.
Framing
Differences of warm and cool colors can also effectively change how you look at a character. For example, Spike from Cowboy Bebop wears a dark jacket with a yellow shirt underneath that protrudes out around his face.
This effectively draws the viewer’s eyes towards his face, ensuring that they pay attention to him while he talks, for example.
Another example of good color framing in character design is in Houseki no Kuni. In real life, one major way that geologists determine a gem’s identity is from their color. It’s similar in this anime about anthropomorphic gems.
Each character wears essentially the same black and white funeral uniform scheme, deflecting the viewer’s attention from their bodies and towards their hair, which forms the majority of the gem’s identities. If instead the character’s clothing were to be shiny and flamboyant it would distract from what is really important to their character (additionally this design shows that the gems are relatively disciplined, the funeral uniform adds to the graveness of their day-to-day fighting, and it’s easier for both the manga artist and the animators to draw.
When characters are designed to specifically stand out and catch the viewer’s eye, it’s often that they happen to take priority over the setting’s art. For example, the reason why an anime protagonist might sit in the back is often so that the animators don’t have to draw other students in the background when the camera is focused on the main character.
Other times, however, the background art is allowed to shine and takes over the entire show with its beauty. Shots of characters walking past seashores, through bustling cities, or even just a pan over a beautiful countryside house can all contribute to the overall atmosphere of the show. Think of how the original Blade Runner used slow shots of the city to invoke that sort of atmosphere.
Shows that excel in displaying their setting often draw in their viewers by immersing them in the surroundings of the show. It takes a lot of effort, however to not skimp out on the details. Take a look at this process drawing video by members of Studio 4C.
I’m back to doing normal art/animation stuff. I’ve already done a blog about Makoto Shinkai’s background art, so today I will highlight three different series that excel in different ways. I’ll also talk about how the background art of these shows emphasize the themes and style of the show’s plot.
One recent anime that has taken the anime community by storm is Made in Abyss, a story about Riko, a young girl, and Reg, a mysterious robot found in the first layer of the Abyss, a gigantic hole in the middle of civilization that has never been fully explored because of the costs of descending.
Once an explorer descends one layer down into the Abyss, they cannot ascend without suffering light dizziness or nausea. By the fourth layer of the Abyss, if they dare to ascend they will bleed from every orifice of their body. By the seventh layer, they are guaranteed to die if they go upwards. Despite this knowing that the journey will end in death, Riko and Reg go on a one-way trip to find Riko’s mother who disappeared years ago in the seventh layer. The show captures the urge to discover and the thrill of exploration, and it could not have done that without its use of beautiful shots to convey the vastness of the Abyss.
Even in action scenes, Made in Abyss’s background art complements the events perfectly, creating a world of wonder from many paintings.
Immense credit has to be given to Osamu Masuyama, a background director/artist who formerly worked on Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, and Up on Poppy Hill.
Nagi no Asukara is a masterpiece of the color blue. Set partially under the sea, the romantic drama revolves around five teenagers who are part of a tribe that can breathe underwater.
A lot of themes and the character’s way of life connect back to the idea of the ocean and water, so it’s important that the background art lives and reflects that. Additionally, background art serves as a great focus for the viewer’s eyes if the characters are changing location, and helps make slower scenes more interesting.
The full album of gorgeous art can be found here. It’s an album of 337 images taken over the 26 episode show.
Kazuki Higashiji can be credited for his amazing art direction in Nagi no Asukara, and he has worked on many other shows at P.A. Works.
Hyouka is a “slice of life” anime that centers around Oreki, a boy who “priortizes energy conservation above all else”. It’s about his transformation from a passive and apathetic person to someone who takes more interest in his surroundings. Thus, it makes sense for the show to display earthly colors to show the atmosphere of the show. Browns, olive, and grass green abound in the scenery, with the occasional cherry orchard poking out to signal his transformation towards a “rose-colored life”.
To add onto this, I found a graphic displaying the color palette of Kyoto Animation shows such as Hyouka, and it’s really cool to see how the art directors match the colors to the atmosphere of the shows.
Art director Shuuhei Okude can be applauded for his beautiful country backgrounds and depiction of everyday scenery. Art becomes so much better when it connects back to the story, and Hyouka pulled it off here.
Credits:
sakugabooru.com yet again.
/u/akanyan on reddit for compiling giant image albums of these shows.
In America, becoming an animator is a pretty decent job. According to Payscale, the median salary for an animator is around $50,000. For more prestigious jobs like at Disney, they can make $116,000-$125,000 a year, according to their official job site. This puts skilled animators in a well-off place, with most being able to live comfortably.
On the other side of the Pacific, the average Japanese key animator makes $26,271, according to an 2015 anonymous survey by the Japanese Animators Creation Association. Keep in mind that key animators are generally considered to be more experienced, with a few years of work already under the belts. New animators are even more likely to be underpaid, with the average inbetweener (the person that makes the key frames flow together) making around $10,000 a year, less than $900 a month. This is far lower than Japan’s minimum wage, which pays out at around $17,500 a year as of 2015.
Now, considering that 2D animation takes considerable skill and training, and that animators are always under deadline and are forced into unpaid overtime to complete a project, it becomes quickly apparent that animating in Japan is a ridiculous affair. Imagine getting out of animation school through a large amount of effort, getting paid below minimum wage, working 10-11 hours a day six days a week, and being forced to live with your parents just because you dared to have the passion to draw some anime. People are overworked to the breaking point. Your life expectancy is legitimately shorter, often due to karoshi, the Japanese term for “death from overwork, which usually takes the form of stress-induced heart attacks or strokes.
Pathetic, really.
Thundray, an animation studio based in Shanghai – Chinese animators can be just as underpaid as Japanese animators. Chinese and Korean studios are often outsourced to by Japanese projects.
Overtime, Overwork, LifeOver
One of the biggest reasons that I would never want to work in Japan, even as a fan of Japanese media, is because of the work culture. It’s well known that Asia in general, but especially Japan, has a gigantic problem with overwork, with workers constantly expected to work overtime that can in some cases go up to 80 or even 100 hours in a week. According to the survey by the Japanese Animation Creators Association, over half of its respondents reported that they had four or fewer days off per month, including weekends. This can become even worse when an animation studio is under a looming deadline, with employees just staying at the studio to work and sleep and never going home. They can be called on to show up when the studio needs them. Sometimes animators end up committing suicide.
New Game! is an anime about video game production, and could be placed under the “moe” category. This anime, which is carried by the cuteness of its characters, frequently depicts its characters sleeping at the studio as a completely ordinary occurence, which goes to show how normalized overwork and overtime is in Japan.
Here’s a quote from Thomas Romain, a French animator living in Tokyo, on the working conditions he saw firsthand during his time in the industry.
The problem is that in the traditional Japanese way to behave in society, people tend to say yes when they are asked to work under impossible conditions. For the sake of the studio and the project team, they will do the impossible, even stay several days at the studio in a row, and therefore put their own health at risk. I’ve seen people going home only once per week, or working 35 hours in a row. I’ve even met an animation director who was going home only once per year to their parents—she wasn’t renting an apartment. She was living at the studio, using the public bath and manga cafes to rest a little bit from time to time. A married couple, a director and his wife character designer, were camping in a corner of the studio, sleeping in sleeping bags until the production was finished. Some people also don’t allow themselves to take a break even if they are sick, because they don’t want to spend their small wage on health care.
Every Frame A Dollar
The main reason that a low-level animator’s salary is so low is because they don’t actually receive an hourly salary. Most studios pay out per frame, so that the pay is dependent on how much the animator is able to get done and also on how complicated the frame might be. Almost all of your income is determined by how many sketches you can do, and new animators often struggle to catch up.
In a Reddit AMA, American animator Henry Thurlow commented on his pay during his stint with Nakamura Pro and Studio Pierrot.
The amount of money you earn from day to day changes … since it’s based on how many frame you draw. On Monday I might draw simple corrections on a whole bunch of frame (adding effects that were forgotten by other animators, or “Kii energy” or something like that) resulting in me being able to draw 40 drawings in one day and make over $150 depending on the series. Tuesday-Thursday however, I might have to do the trace-back and inbetweens for a super detailed shot from Tokyo Ghoul (which is really fun btw)…but results in me only drawing 5 frames per day each of those days ($12 a day or so). Each month at Pierrot I earn about $1000. Each month at my previous “slave-labor” studio, I earned about $300 a month.
Still, he says that the experience of working on high-quality films has been worth it. There’s a video of him talking about his experiences in the credits.
Trickle Down Animation
Anime has seen a giant surge of success and popularity in the past decade, but this has not resulted in the actual increase of money for anime studios or animators. Studios are struggling to pay their animators because anime isn’t actually that profitable, and other auxiliary revenue streams make the most. According to Gobiano, the highest revenue streams are merchandising, international licensing, and anime pachinko machines (pinball gambling). The lowest moneymakers come from Japanese home video, Japanese digital distribution, and anime music sales. So we can see that the nature of anime itself makes it so that both studio and animators are poor. The production costs and the number of animators required to make an anime are quite big, with this year’s Ancient Magus Bride being contracted out to 27 other animation studios other than the main one, Wit Studio. The money doesn’t go to the studio, but to the production committee that planned it out, which will then redistribute the money accordingly. The number of anime is going up and up, while the number of staff is not changing because of the barriers for training staff and the fact that many people are becoming turned off from the brutality of the industry. Here is a chart showing how anime has grown even as the studios can lose money on their productions.
Posted by Thomas Romain, a French animator in Tokyo on his TwitterPosted by Thomas Romain, a French animator in Tokyo on his Twitter
No Way Out
The culture of Japan and the nature of the anime industry makes the plight of an animator a very difficult problem to solve. Even though they’re treated unfairly and underpaid for the trials they have to go through, they survive on their passion for their work. Often they’ll end up accepting the conditions that they’re in “just because that’s how it is”. There isn’t really a union that animators could rally with and strike against anime companies, and even if animators did strike, they would quickly suffer because of their marked poverty.
A lot of production committees also outsource their project to Korea and China, with Korean animators in particular often completely animating whole episodes of many series. Additionally studios outsource work to other companies in Japan, with studios often placed next to each other so that they can collaborate (I believe I saw once that 96% of anime studios are based in Tokyo). So it’s a possibility that even if there was a large strike, that other animators could be found elsewhere. Regardless, the animators don’t want to quit, because well… this is their thing. It’s not as if I had a shitty software development job and I could quit and get another job on software development elsewhere. Almost every studio is like this.
There have been attempts to improve the working conditions of animators. One of the more respected studios, Kyoto Animation, pays its animators a yearly salary and trains all of them in house, and generally refrains from outsourcing. There is an animator dormitory set up by industry animators so that start ups can get into the anime industry successfully, but it’s only for the skilled and up and coming and … still only houses 8 animators as of 2017. Makes sense, considering that its a project just based off donations, but still unfortunate. I have no idea what the future of these animators holds, but I hope it gets better. They’re creating shows I love by trudging through countless hours of drawing, yet still getting paid chump change that they can’t live off of.
There’s a lot of misconceptions that come with this subject, and I could’ve gotten something wrong here, but I hope that this serves as some interesting insight into the dark side of the anime industry.
I’ve temporarily run out of ideas for talking about kinds of animation and cinematography, so I guess I’ll start this mini-series on how anime is produced. One of the interesting elements of anime is the way producers are forced to cut costs in order to make ends meet. In fact, almost all anime TV series end up in the red during their broadcast, and are only able to make a profit off of blu-rays and merchandise that come out alongside the series.
Shirobako, an anime about anime production
To put into perspective how cheap TV anime can be, we can compare the cost of an entire one cour(or 11-13 episodes) of 20 minute anime episodes to one singular episode of Family Guy. While an anime series might cost $2 million to $4 million USD to make in total, Family Guy costs $2 million dollars PER EPISODE to produce. There are big reasons why Family Guy costs so much. At one point each voice actor on the show was making $300,000 an episode, which is absolutely ludicrous.
On the other hand, look at how an average anime episode is budgeted, courtesy of the Media Development Research Institute in 2010.
Original work – 50,000 yen ($660)
Script – 200,000 yen ($2,640)
Episode Direction – 500,000 yen ($6,600)
Production – 2 million yen ($26,402)
Key Animation Supervision – 250,000 yen ($3,300)
Key Animation – 1.5 million yen ($19,801)
In-betweening – 1.1 million yen ($14,521)
Finishing – 1.2 million yen ($15,841)
Art (backgrounds) – 1.2 million yen ($15,841)
Photography – 700,000 yen ($9,240)
Sound – 1.2 million yen ($15,841)
Materials – 400,000 yen ($5,280)
Editing – 200,000 yen ($2,640)
Printing – 500,000 yen ($6,600)
This comes out to 11 million yen, or $145,000 per episode. The reason that the costs are so low is because the returns are similarly small – late night anime is marketed towards an extremely niche demographic. The shows are shown in the very early hours of the morning because viewership will be low, but some interested will watch. That demographic is relied upon to buy merchandise and shell out big money – these people are called whales who love the show so much that they buy… everything.
Purportedly every sold figure of Saber, a popular character from the Fate franchise
In this way, seasonal anime can often serve as literally just an advertisement for its source material (whether it be a light novel, a manga, or a video game), and can often end with an original ending or literally no ending at all. Many anime aren’t made explicitly for the anime, but to show off the manga.
An example of this is the anime Rokka no Yuusha (Braves of the Six Flowers), which adapted the first light novel of the source material. Unfortunately the sales for the light novels after the fact were so abysmal some gave it the nickname “Braves of the Six Sales”), when it made barely over 600 sales on its first volume. It won’t likely be seeing a second season.
Rokka no Yuusha sales, courtesy of someanithing.com. The leftmost number are the volume numbers. The blue numbers are the sales.
Ones, Twos, Threes
What do the terms ones, twos, and threes, mean for animation? It represents the number of frames that an animator is “skipping”. Ones means that each frame is drawn. Twos means every other frame is drawn. Threes mean every third frame is drawn. When the standard anime is rendered to be at 24 frames per second(fps), this means that ones, twos, and threes are drawn at 24, 12, and 8 fps respectively. The video in the credits gives a visual example of this idea.
This scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion shows how the frames are created and then transferred into its final form. The way that anime can jump from frame to frame smoothly results from the work of inbetweeners, who draw intermediate frames between the “key frames” that are drawn at ones, twos, and threes, to give anime the illusion of motion. Generally you’ll see most motion in anime animated in twos and threes, and when the production team really wants to go all out and please the viewer’s eyes, you’ll see it animated in ones.
Here’s a trailer for the movie Redline, a movie of such production value that it took seven years to make and 100,000 hand made drawings to create an overload of the visual senses.
Still Frames and Flapping Lips
Still frames are extremely common in anime. They save money because they can just draw one image and then pan over the image with the camera in order to create some semblance of movement for several seconds without the need to actually draw more frames. This is known as the Ken Burns effect in western television, and is a pretty standard technique overall. Here we can see it used in the ending song of Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash. It’s literally one image throughout the 1 minute 30 second runtime (and fuck is it a really pretty painting, just like the rest of the show), but it’s a lot cheaper than having six characters being animated and running around.
Another technique that is used in animation in general is flapping lips when characters talk. A show can end up just focusing on a single shot of characters talking, with the only movement being the up and down movement of their lips. The animators don’t even need to draw more than a few flips for that sort of motion, because they can reuse the same lip flapping over and over again during the scene. Here’s an example from my favorite series, Kara no Kyoukai.
There are several instances of lip flapping and panning shots – but hey, you can’t fault the animators – they have to save time and money somewhere in places nobody will really notice to produce stuff later on in the same movie like THIS.
CGI Usage
I’ve talked in previous blogs about CGI and how it can be done well, but the main reason for CGI in anime is to conserve budget. For large crowds of people, city movement with cars and people, etc. CGI is often used so the animators don’t have to hand draw it, which would be extremely time-consuming. Here’s an example from the anime The Asterisk War.
You can see that the background characters look really awkward and stilted, but during the show you probably won’t notice because you’re focused on the main characters, so they use it to cut costs here.
CGI in anime can also be used for creative camera movement, as in normal 2D animation it’s generally more difficult to get a rotating camera shot or something similar. Here’s two examples from Arslan Senki and Kara no Kyoukai.
Both of these scenes experiment with 3D backgrounds, and I know the second scene in particular used 3D modelling to get the action right. It can be really awesome to add this CGI into the show, but another important reason is that scenes would also be very time and money consuming in 2D animation.
Literal Slavery
The working conditions of animators is atrocious!!!! This was clickbait, check out my blog next week for more 13 reasons why slavery exists in Japan!!! Number 6 will SHOCK YOU and RENDER YOU SPEECHLESS.
Ahem.
Conclusion
So those are just a few more obvious ways that the anime industry saves money and time on their product. Hope this was interesting and stuff like that!
There are a number of different animation styles available to animators, and one of the more unique animation styles is one of rough lines and constant movement. Animation is all about squashing and stretching body proportions in order to express motion and emotion, and animators can often take it to the extreme. In this blog post I wanted to showcase some excellent examples of how animators can go against conventional techniques to create some pretty cool stuff.
Each anime will have their specific style of animation, but often they stick to already used types of character design, character animation, and linework. For example, this well done clip from the anime Hyouka might be an example of a well done scene, with movement suggesting the character’s emotions and such. Nice.
But other anime take more risks. Here director Shinichiro Watanabe, renowned for his work on famous anime such as Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, harnessed the talents of animator Shinya Ohira in order to create a visceral scene in Blade Runner Blackout 2022. Here Iggy, a replicant, describes his war experiences on the fields of Calantha.
If you watch these clips you’ll notice how fluid the lines are and how much the background and characters move during the shot. The way that the dust is portrayed with the outlines of the soldiers running through is really cool. This is just one part of Blade Runner 2022 that greatly deviates from the style of the rest of the short. (It’s a 15 min short that I would recommend watching if you’ve seen Blade Runner at all).
On the farthest end of the spectrum there’s shows that incorporate this sort of animation for all their episodes, choosing to use such rough lines at all times. One director that uses a lot of this unique animation is Masaaki Yuasa, creator of Ping Pong the Animation, Devilman Crybaby, and The Tatami Galaxy. He’s well known for his wild, free art direction as you can see in this clip from Ping Pong.
Yuasa’s style also allows for tons of symbolism (which would make no sense from just showing a clip) but I think just the “style” oozes from the opening. The loose animation lets the characters move freely and express facial emotions more uniquely than anything else I’ve seen.
Yuasa also isn’t afraid at all to exaggerate, which gives the story and characters a lot more weight when the drama is being put out there.
His style also extends to his other works, even though those take on a different style entirely. Tatami Galaxy’s direction is a surreal one as the main character desperately tries to find a “rose-colored life” at his college. It’s a show where everything seems to border on complete insanity and the style reflects that perfectly.
Another example of his colorful and insane animation is the trailer for his film “The Night is Short, Walk on Girl”, an experience that can’t be described, only felt. The trailer for the film perfectly shows what the rest of the film is like (and in fact it’s probably crazier).
So Andy, you might say, you’ve given me all this weird ass weeb shit, why should I care at all? Well I’ll let you in on my trigger, when people think of anime and they think:
or
So I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of stuff out there that you and I haven’t experienced, and to have an open mind towards different forms of Chinese cartoons and such. Animation is a medium that is able to express a variety of topics and themes. Anyways, I’ll get off my soapbox now and I hope my blog post has been relatively interesting and maybe entertaining.
