Project A

Asahi.com: Veteran Animators Guide Young Ones in Making Anime at Government Expense (Japanese Language)

In spite of what the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would have you believe about "Cool Japan," the anime industry is in serious trouble. Perhaps the biggest problem is that appallingly low salaries have hollowed out the talent pool to the point where even Academy Award winning directors like Hayao Miyazaki can't pull together enough people to animate an entire film by hand anymore. But finally, it seems, the Japanese government has started putting their money where their mouth is.

In an effort to groom more key animators, who create the key cel frames required to make any anime film, the Agency for Cultural Affairs commissioned the creation of four short animated films. The stipulation for receiving the 3.8 million yen subsidies was that each production trained five or more young animators. According to the Asahi.com article, the trainees spent several months under the tutelage of experienced anime directors learning the ropes of key animation.

Dubbed "Project A," details can be found on the Janica website. The four films are "Kizuna Ichigeki" (Ascension), "Ojiisan no Lamp" (Telecom Animation Film), "Banno Yasai NinNin Man" (P.A. Works), and "Tansu Watashi" (Production IG). A trailer for the films can be seen here, and they will be airing both on TV and in a limited arthouse theater run this week.

Is this a ray of sunshine among the storm clouds hanging over the anime world, or is it too little too late? It's hard to tell. There's no question that it's a step in the right direction, but there's also no question that it addresses the symptoms (the shrinking talent pool) rather than the root causes (a production pipeline that strips studios of their royalties and vitality). It's going to take more than subsidies to change the status quo, and it's telling that this tiny bit of good news is the best to come out of the industry in a long while.

Comments

[www.jadij.com]

Seems like the easiest solution would be to just...pay animators more. You mentioned Hayao Miyazaki, but one would think that well-to-do studios like Ghibli would be able to afford paying more for quality animators.

If anime were to "die" due mainly to low animator salaries, I'd say there's no one to play but the studios who would rather stagnate than set back their profits slightly.

[MattAlt]

It isn't an issue of greedy studios hoarding money -- in many cases, they make barely enough to stay afloat, particularly in the televised anime world.

If you click the "production pipeline" link at the bottom of the piece, you can read an article that describes how the current system forces studios to sign away their royalties to TV stations, sponsors, and advertising agencies, which strips them of revenue that could be used to compensate their animators. In fact quite often they barely break even on every episode they create.

This has resulted in a double-whammy "brain drain." Talented people migrate to other better-paying industries, like the game industry, meaning there isn't enough experienced talent around to create shows/films at the same level as in the Eighties and Nineties. And the remaining pool of talent is so eternally die-hard that they have a hard time creating things that appeal to the average viewer.

Which brings us back to Project A. While training new key animators is undeniably a good thing, it doesn't change the fact that they will be working at near-poverty levels until the structural issues facing the industry are addressed.

[thomas]

So essentially there is a chance that exactly the same thing happens again, and that the subsidies actually end up subsidizing better paid industries as the key animators also move on?

[MattAlt]

You mean, is there a chance the key animators trained by this program will go on to work in other fields? Sure. It isn't indentured servitude. But it's hard to see this as a minus either way, because the talent pool has drained to such low levels anyway. Check out this translated transcript of a radio talk show featuring Production IG's Mamoru Oshii and Ghibli's Toshio Suzuki.

Host:I was wondering why you decided to [use CG for the aerial scenes of "Sky Crawlers"?]

Oshii: We have to be realistic here: that was the only way we could get it done. I mean, there aren’t enough animators out there that could let us do everything hand-drawn.

Host: They've disappeared?

Oshii: They aren't around anymore.

Oshii later goes on to comment:

"All the really talented animators that are sustaining the world of hand-drawn animation, the 20 or so of them, are all over 40. They might be near 50. So think about it, in another 10 years, what’s going to happen?"

http://2chan.us/wordpress/2009/07/11/mamoru-oshii-toshio-suzuki-ponyo-vs-sky-crawlers/

[Blue Shoe]

Unfortunately it seems like the best solution may be for this to take its natural course. If studios fold because they can't make money, stations, sponsors, and whoever else will either have to live without anime as a source of revenue or else pay more for it.

This may also be an opportunity for adventurous studios. Instead of going through TV stations who barely pay them, why not air their show online and collect money either from advertising or subscriptions?

Usually when an industry experiences this kind of difficulty, individual firms (or studios, or artists) either crumble or adapt and survive.

[RMilner]

As a games industry insider I can tell you that Japanese games industry salaries are quite low compared to US or UK.

I don't know how they compare to anime salaries but, if they are competitive, the anime salaries must be pretty pathetic.

However a lot of western animation companies do their in betweening in Korea these days, so low pay is not exclusively a Japanese phenomenon.

[MattAlt]

>>the anime salaries must be pretty pathetic.

Sub-poverty, actually:

http://altjapan.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/05/the-sky-is-crawling.html

>>low pay is not exclusively a Japanese phenomenon.

Definitely not. But $11,000 a year undoubtedly goes a lot farther in developing countries like China or SE Asia or wherever than it does in the Tokyo metro area, where the vast majority of Japan's animation studios are clustered.

[Car Insurance Seattle]

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