Sweatshop Animation

Introduction

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.

Shirobako

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.

Three artists hard at work at Thundray, an animation studio based in Shanghai, July 27, 2016. Yin Yijun/Sixth Tone
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.

Image result for animation work in japan

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 Twitter
Posted 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.

Credits

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2017/04/16/make-40000-yen-per-month-as-a-studio-khara-animator

https://www.animationcareerreview.com/articles/walt-disney-animation-studios-career-profile

Here are the Average Anime Industry Salaries from the Past Year

https://kotaku.com/being-an-animator-in-japan-is-brutal-1690248803

Anime Industry Faces Animator Shortage Crisis that Could Damage Future Productions

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39981997

Here is How Anime Studios Make Their Money

4 thoughts on “Sweatshop Animation”

  1. This is nuts. Animation seems like a job that is really difficult and very intricate. It’s more than upsetting that in other countries where anime is so big, creators are extremely underpaid and unrecognized for their creation of art.

    1. THEM ART TYPES HAVE NO BALLZ!
      SOMEONE SHOULD MARTYR THEM SELF – GO KAMIKAZE FOR THE GREATER GOOD.
      YOU KNOW WHAT I AM SAYING !

  2. I think this really shows that people doing what they love are not always appreciated, and in this case fairly paid, and that is upsetting for people who really love the art created by these people.

  3. In order to produce images and effects for film, television, websites, and video games, and animation artist uses digital technology. To create 3D animation, it also coordinates projects and animators.

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