Cutting Costs

Introduction

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.

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.

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.

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!

Credits/More Info:

Sakugabooru again.

How much an episode of anime costs

How studios make money in anime

Rokka no Yuusha sales source