The Disappearance of Japan's Animators

Ultimately animation is built targeting a budget: From the oldest animes with massive animation reuse and very low fps to complicated things that mix 3d and 2d. It's all a multi-decade race to make anime people enjoy for a budget the studio will pay. Almost every animation project done today (barring, say, the failure of Blue Lock S2, or Uzumaki past ep1) is has more animation per episode than most series in the 90s. Something like Witch Hat Atelier looks competitive with Ghibli movies, but it comes in 12 episode seasons: So far more animation total!

It's precisely the competition, and the quest for more quality for the buck, that leads to more foreign animation, more AI, or more 3d models. If people were animating like the old days, with hand-drawn cels photographed in complex rigs, we'd not get the same actual amount of animation made, and it'd be worse, just because the cost per series would be so high very little animation would be funded, and it'd be just for smash hits with big worldwide audience potential, not, say, series about rakugo. We optimize for output, and it often meands outsourcing and higher level tooling, which will include AI in one form or another.

We are in tech here, we have to understand there's big advantages to this for consumers.

Not everything is bleak. The ending sequence for Frieren season 2 was entirely hand drawn with colored pencils[0] and the new Ghost in the Shell (coming out next month) is also hand drawn[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

Just today I saw this on Twitter a good example of how AI should be used for animation.

https://x.com/i/trending/2069856897738387754

After reading this article, I got curious whether there was a similar article from Japan, and there actually is. The average monthly income in the animation industry is 200,000 yen (about $1,300 USD), but the median working hours are 2,745 hours per year. That comes out to 225 hours per month, or 52 hours per week [1][2]. Considering that animators' work is essentially drawing labor, that's an insane amount of work. But even as total production costs and promotional effects grow, none of it reaches the workers on the ground. It seems like in modern industry, the value of promotion and fame outweighs what the laborers actually produce. Actually, when you think about it, this problem is happening across all sectors of society. Ultimately, it's a system where platforms intermediate and monopolize value.

Platforms concentrate their investment in IP and star creators, and the commercial success of these creators in turn increases the platform's value, creating a virtuous cycle. However, this success ultimately ends up concentrated among a small upper tier, while the vast majority are excluded.

The article essentially says the same thing.

It seems like we're in the age of platform capitalism. Come to think of it, the programming world feels similar too

[1]https://nafca.jp/news20241226/

[2]https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000004.000121993.html

If anyone wants a beautifully animated, recent show, I recommend Arcane.

I've thought a lot about how to characterize the difference between 3D and hand-drawn stuff. I think the core of it is:

- With hand drawn animation, you draw what you have in your head, first roughly, then you refine it

- With 3d animation, you first need to model everything, then rig it, then work with the bone system to get the motions you want or else mocap, and then set up rigs and stuff so that the mocap actors can do crazy movements, etc etc. Then maybe undo some of the scaffolding the 3d software does: disconnect bones, fake perspective. You have to fiddle with lighting, textures, etc. Or you don't, and just go with whatever's easy to do in the 3d software.

Which means that spontaneity and emotion, like I think this guy's arms should be all wiggly here, are lost. Yeah, you can hand animate then 3d animate on top of the hand animation, but in an industry that's using 3d to cut costs and not because it looks better, that's not going to happen (in any way that keeps the spontaneity).

3d is awesome in that once you've done a huge amount of up-front prep, the rest is easy to iterate on and tweak, but that's a large tradeoff.

I thought that this is one area where I think AI could be a force of good. Keep the animators doing the rough sketches, and AI comes up with the lines, handles the filling, and maybe adds colors with a guide. I haven't seen this yet.

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I'm not sure I agree on the mentorship parts. IIUC all the major studios and famous animators weren't taught by someone. All the studios have unique flairs that they came up with just by playing around and copying Disney. And they got there without drawing hundreds of thousands of in-between frames for someone else.

I think that being taught the correct way to animate based on existing productions probably also reduces creativity in the field.

I wonder if the earlier creativity was due to voids though, and now that there's some amount of saturation it's harder to break in, or if somehow the increase in revenue from global interest somehow increases stakes and causes more downward pressure squashing out experimentation.

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There's a lot I don't get about this article though. It says the demand is way up, but the treatment and pay for animators is terrible... why? I didn't see it addressed. Japan has a long history of "non-monetization" though, like refusing to sell digital music overseas, or regional restrictions on streaming content.

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Lastly, I think there's still a lot of indie animation that gets glossed over. There are lots of independent animators making animations for music videos, for instance, or releasing small animations. I don't know if that grows into larger productions, but there's a level of creativity you'd never see if you just watch televised anime.

Interesting, the "training of new animators" mirrors what has/is happening in other industries.

When I started programming decades ago, an experienced programmer would review my work and help me out. That started ending in the very late 80s and 90s. By 2000 or so, you were on your own as a new employee. I even mentioned it to a high level manager a while ago, he said we expected people we hire to know what they are doing.

I have heard similar things have occurred in manufacturing too.