Animator trouble in Japan

[shooraijin]

An interesting quick take on animators in Japan from the Wall Street Journal.

http://online.wsj.com/video/tough-times-for-anime-animators/B0731C1D-8B17-45A7-B1DE-8E25C1F71EA1.html

[steenajack]

Hmmm, I feel bad for all those animaters. That one girl, however, seemed to still enjoy her work in spite of everything that is cost her. She still enjoys drawing anime.

[EricTheFred]

Perhaps, but even if she is working only 30 hours a week (doubtful. She's probably working well over 40 a week if she's doing 'a few dozen drawings a day') she's not even making US minimum wage, but she's working in a city where just a train ride in from the suburbs costs about $2.00 one way, and just a basic bowl of ramen for lunch will run her $7.00. Frankly, she is barely a step above unpaid volunteer. You can run charities on labor doing it for the love of it, but if somebody up the ladder is making a profit, you aren't going to keep finding the labor. Notice that the article stated 'low pay and long hours are pushing people out of the industry'. Others will happily jump in to replace them for a while, but only until the word gets around that it isn't worth it. After that, the up-and-coming artists will stick to doujinshi for the love of it and major in something else to do for a living.

This is basically a formula for the death of an industry. If the Japanese don't want to be watching 100% dubbed foreign animation in a decade or so, they'll need to find some sort of solution.

[blkmage]

Text version.

This shouldn't be a surprise when the majority of the industry's strategy is based on sales of DVD at exorbitant prices that are targeted at a relatively small demographic. And as far as I'm aware, this is about actual animators and a lot of that work is already being outsourced. This likely isn't going to change too much for the bigger production studios (the ones who actually produce shows, not just doing animation work for other studios' projects).

Unless direction and writing and that sort of thing also gets outsourced (which I find unlikely), you probably won't notice the difference between something that's animated domestically and something that's been animated in South Korea. I mean, no one's noticed yet. Well, unless you're watching a SHAFT show, but they shouldn't have any more problems now that they're rolling around in huge piles of money from Bakemonogatari BRD sales.

[EricTheFred]

Once you've created overseas production through outsourcing, the intellectual property creation follows very easily. (The boss interviewed in the article even mentions this, worrying that the outsourcing countries will 'begin making their own movies'.) The content that they are making money on now is created by people who learned their craft while doing their journeyman work a decade or two ago. If the people now doing that journeyman work aren't sticking around, but leaving within three years (as mentioned), then they won't be in the industry a decade or two from now creating new content. The content will instead be getting created in China, Korea, or wherever else the outsourcing is going now, and it will be owned by companies in those nations.

[blkmage]

I'm not entirely convinced that once the gruntwork is in place, that suddenly means that creative work can flow. I guess there is the inference that the creative-types didn't have anything to work with, but I'm skeptical of that too. It gives them the opportunity, yes, but I don't think that means that suddenly, Japan will be usurped and left with nothing. I mean looking at anime, there's a pretty strong base of other stuff supporting it too: manga, visual novels, light novels, video games, etc.

[ST. Attidude]

Here's what I'm confused with right now:

If the major problem is plummeting DVD sales, then why do companies like Funimation let you watch most of their anime shows online?...

Not to mention, it seems that all you have to do now, is make one click to YouTube to watch your favorite anime...
It's only a gut feeling, but I think some major Japanese animation studio is gonna file a huge lawsuit on Google, which may force them to change their structure and charge you for watching anything copyrighted on YouTube.
If it can happen to Napster, then this could very well happen to Google as well...

[blkmage]

Here's what I'm confused with right now:

If the major problem is plummeting DVD sales, then why do companies like Funimation let you watch most of their anime shows online?...

Not to mention, it seems that all you have to do now, is make one click to YouTube to watch your favorite anime...
It's only a gut feeling, but I think some major Japanese animation studio is gonna file a huge lawsuit on Google, which may force them to change their structure and charge you for watching anything copyrighted on YouTube.
If it can happen to Napster, then this could very well happen to Google as well...

First of all, about Youtube, Youtube already has provisions in place that make it very easy for copyright holders to take stuff down, which they do, very frequently.

Secondly, about DVD sales. Your observation is confusing the American and Japanese industries. The problem under discussion is concerns Japanese animation studios, which care about the situation in the Japanese market, and not American licensors, who don't actually create anything but just distribute shows over here. So the concern is with Japanese DVD sales and not American DVD sales, which remain irrelevant. The reason is that if a Japanese show fails domestically, it's probably not going to get licensed anyway, and even if it does, it still won't be profitable enough to matter. Notice that there are no anime streaming site equivalents in Japan like Crunchyroll or Funimation. The reason is because they just watch it on TV.

Essentially, Japanese companies are not the ones dependent on American DVD sales (they're more like a bonus), but American companies are. So why do American licensors streams shows for you to watch? It's because they hope you'll buy DVDs. This is exactly the same model that the Japanese studios are running: air anime on TV at a loss (unlike American TV, they lose money by airing on TV) and hope that enough people like it enough to buy. The reason American companies are doing this now is because people are able to watch Japanese shows within the same week of airing in Japan through fansubs and American companies are attempting to monetize this by offering streams, since no one would buy a DVD without having seen the show anyway.

So the American and Japanese industries face very different problems the causes of which have nothing to do with each other. So no, Japanese studios do not care about what is going on over here while things are not going well for them at home.

[MasterDias]

Not to mention, it seems that all you have to do now, is make one click to YouTube to watch your favorite anime...
It's only a gut feeling, but I think some major Japanese animation studio is gonna file a huge lawsuit on Google, which may force them to change their structure and charge you for watching anything copyrighted on YouTube.
If it can happen to Napster, then this could very well happen to Google as well...

That's...easier said then done. Youtube does take stuff down if the copyright holders want it, although it's still a drop-in-the-bucket in the large bastion of copyright infringement that is the internet.
But, by and large, I significantly doubt that they are going to be throwing out very many actual lawsuits, especially against a billion-dollar corporation like Google.