26 ms·

Anime is booming, so why are animators living in poverty?

312 points by polm23 6y ago

s314159265358 6y ago
Well the answer to the heading is just hyper capitalism imho
blhack 6y ago
Because there are a lot of people willing to live in poverty to be animators.
- snarf21 6y ago
  While this is true, I think there is more nuance to it. We also value cheap food but we don't care that migrant food pickers make $10 an hour (or less). We are a selfish race, as long as we get a deal, screw everyone else. As long as the exploitation benefits us, we don't care. Amazon, diamonds, food supply, new mobile phones, etc.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    On the other hand, I'd like to assume that other people are making the best decisions they can in their own lives. Picking fruit for $10 an hour could likely be better than their alternatives. I've worked for much less than that as a programmer. At the time I didn't see better options. People have different limitations. Some limitations might not even make sense to others, but those are the constraints that they work around.
    - snarf21 6y ago
      I agree. I was only trying to highlight that we basically don't value other's time as much as we value our own. We want to shop at the dollar store but we would never work for the wages that the hated Chinese will to make this crap. We want food delivered to our house but we don't tip because we can't "afford it" to value the minimum wage workers that are busting their ass and destroying their cars to bring to us. The thing you highlight is that a lot of people don't really have a choice so they will take anything, regardless of how exploited they are. This makes me sad as it feels like we've regressed to the 1900s. If all these gig economies eventually have to treat their works as employees and $15/hour goes national, I don't see how any of these companies are profitable except in the biggest cities.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    While that is true, it is a non-trivial task to make actionable change on any of these propositions. Even boycotting certain companies is a job unto itself.
- gruez 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_artist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_artist
- jseliger 6y ago
  Another story that can be answered with "Supply and demand," like so many news stories. My favorite sub-genre concerns adjuncts: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... All of them can be summarized as, "When supply exceeds demand, prices fall."
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  How dare you bring logic and reason into a discussion about social issues on hacker news. /sarcasm
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  Hence the phrase "Starving Artist"
gnarbarian 6y ago
Supply and demand. It's disappointing I'm not surprised by the profound ignorance of this article at what used to be a prestigious organization.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Supply and demand. It's disappointing I'm not surprised by the profound ignorance of this article at what used to be a prestigious organization. Was it also supply and demand when a bunch of silicon valley corporations decided to keep salaries low with secret agreements?
  - LesserEvil665 6y ago
    right, in OC's mind that should be A-OK. Viewing everything through the lens of supply & demand without any other consideration will make monsters of us all.
  - neartheplain 6y ago
    Do you have credible suspicion of such collusion in the anime industry? And to answer your question, no. It was a crime, and law enforcement put a stop to it.
  - gnarbarian 6y ago
    Monopolies and colluding oligopolies break capitalism. It's why we have antitrust law, which we don't really seem to use anymore (probably due to regulatory capture).
  - ggreer 6y ago
    Most people who know about that case are mistaken about certain crucial facts. The collusion was that some companies agreed not to cold call each other's employees.[1] Hiring was still allowed, as were other recruiting methods such as e-mail or LinkedIn messages. The particularly nasty bit of collusion was between Apple and a few other companies (Google, Adobe, Pixar). This collusion only happened because of Steve Jobs's vindictive personality combined with interlocking directorates[2]: Jobs was on the board of Pixar, and Google & Adobe executives were on Apple's board. Despite Jobs's best efforts, the collusion fell apart after only 4 years because the companies kept poaching from each other. It was over a year later that the DoJ filed its first complaint. Despite what most people think, it's really hard for companies to cartelize. There is a massive incentive for any one member of the cartel to pretend to collude while secretly not colluding. Typically, such arrangements fall apart unless there is a governing body that can sniff out and punish defectors. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
germinalphrase 6y ago
Clearly, animators need to lobby for additional licensure, safety and educational requirements, and restrictive trade organizations to thin the herd of “acceptable” laborers.
coldtea 6y ago
Cleanliness is booming too, but cleaning persons also live in poverty. It's because: (a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them. If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too. (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...
- Retric 6y ago
  (b) Minimum wage and safe working conditions are a thing in most developed countries. However, enforcement is another story. While Japan's prefectural minimum wages range from ¥714 to ¥932 per hour (6.71+$) for all workers, that’s often ignored.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > , but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them. This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No. Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low. > If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too. Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No. Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no. A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.
mschuster91 6y ago
> These workers earned an average of $12,000 in 2019, the animation association found, though it cautioned that this figure was based on a limited sample that did not include many of the freelancers who are paid even less. How is that either legal or possible to survive on such wages?
- orliesaurus 6y ago
  Exactly my thoughts, maybe they're all interns that live at home with their families? Idk it seems surreal! But this part .. Freelancers paid even less? What on earth?
- karaterobot 6y ago
  I'm not sure either. Minimum wage in Japan (2019) was about $8.50 USD/hour, and working 40 hours/week at that rate would be about $17,000 USD/year. My guess is they are not working 40 hours every week, or they have signed contracts that pay them less than minimum wage. I wish the article had been clearer about this. I'm sure animators in Japan work really hard and aren't paid much, but while the article made it clear how I should feel about the situation, it left me uninformed on the details, which would seem the more important part of a news article.
- deleted 6y ago
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- scruffyherder 6y ago
  They aren’t slaves they can refuse work. The problem is they keep taking these “work for hire” deals which revolves around a project not hours. There is this magical internet they can create their own IP and charge whatever they want. Nobody is obligated to buy it, just as they aren’t obligated to go into crap contracts.
  - yummypaint 6y ago
    So the entire industry is just stupid people who can't look out for themselves? They are clearly being taken advantage of and are suffering as a result.
scrame 6y ago
Because it's work for hire.
eigenvalue 6y ago
This is a sad story. I have been working on a project for a couple years now called Pastel Network (http://pastel.wiki/ http://pastel.wiki/) that is all about making NFTs/rare digital art on the blockchain accessible and affordable to everyone with very low fees. This is unlike all the hot NFT projects based on Ethereum, where it currently costs hundreds of dollars to "mint" an artwork, which makes it risky for artists in case the work doesn't sell, and also makes it impossible to sell art for low dollar amounts while still making a decent profit margin. My hope all along was that artists like this from poor countries would be able to participate, and I was thinking about anime in particular (the project started out being called Animecoin).
hn8788 6y ago
It sounds like the same problem as the gaming industry, where people are really passionate about it and are willing to work for peanuts to be in the industry. I started doing some hobby game development, and I was suprised at how many "good enough" art and sound assets are freely available because of artists trying to get noticed.
umvi 6y ago
Are the profits not shared with the animators? It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios? At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.
- minikites 6y ago
  If workers were paid more, that leaves less money for the executives, who are the real heroes under capitalism.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- gruez 6y ago
  >If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. The incentive is that if the anime is low quality, people won't watch anymore.
  - minikites 6y ago
    How does that affect the executive making that decision, who is already wealthy? It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.
    - gruez 6y ago
peruvian 6y ago
Because labor is a liability to most companies.
kinghtown 6y ago
Real money is in merchandising. Demon Slayer is big out here in Taiwan.. every kid has pencils, erasers, buttons, shirts, pencil cases, backpacks.. the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful. Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  > the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful. and the animators of shows that flop still got paid something. if you want upside risk, you have to be exposed to downside risk.
- NalNezumi 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the IP rights still remains at the publisher + the original creator (The manga writer), and often the animation studio just do it as contract work. So I would guess the studio won't get a proportionate slice of the merchandising success.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  >the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful because they are worker. they get paid with the wages that they agree on. Koyoharu Gotouge probably get a big chunk of that money since she created the manga.
nabla9 6y ago
Animators as a profession are like factory workers. Japanese animators compete with Chinese, Vietnamese and everyone else. If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.
minikites 6y ago
There are so many problems where the cause is just "capitalism" and the way it works. Sometimes the answer really is that simple.
- goto11 6y ago
  I know Eastern Europe under communism produced some great animation, but were the animators well paid?
  - minikites 6y ago
    Why is every anti-communist/socialist argument in the form of "It didn't work once, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again."
    - samr71 6y ago
      I feel that's a bit of a strawman. It's generally closer to: "Every time it's been tried it's been either bad or disastrous, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again" Which I think is fair! Hell, even the original strawman is a fair argument IMO. Fascism didn't work once, and I don't think there's much there to learn from (and we certainly shouldn't try it again).
      - minikites 6y ago
        I don't think the comparison to fascism is fair, as much as some would like to paint it that way. So many things are different now than in 1989, which is not to say a new system would be perfect, but Americans are inventive and we can improve it. We're not at the end of history.
  - tokai 6y ago
    The salary range was small so they properly got an relative okay wage. Demands of workers was heavily suppressed in the east bloc though, so the soviet system is not something championed by organized labour nowadays.
- 6y ago
ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
Truth is that if you do such job to live and eat... You'll need to not only produce the production but also handle market sells... involving rights on your product... it's usually in form of contract with big distributors... depending your shit... you'll get a certain amount of cent(s) for being used through the "distributors"... WTH you expected? :D
jayd16 6y ago
I guess Japanese animators do not have a union?
yamrzou 6y ago
https://archive.is/DuxBD https://archive.is/DuxBD
dartharva 6y ago
Being from a third-world country, it it feels weird how western media so casually uses the word "poverty". Where I come from, living in poverty mostly means living in abject poor living conditions- without a decent place to live in, without guarantee of being able to secure meals for the day, etc. People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.
- iscrewyou 6y ago
  The article isn’t talking about just western countries. The subheading is: “The workers who make the Japanese shows the world is binge-watching can earn as little as $200 a month. ”
  - dartharva 6y ago
    I know, but NYT is western media. My point was that they have too low of a bar for classifying "poverty".
    - didibus 6y ago
      You mean too high a bar?
- rtkwe 6y ago
  When you're looking at policy to address lifting up the people struggling at the bottom in various ways the only reasonable course is to define it relative to local conditions. Looking globally ignores local prices and needs for example.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- majani 6y ago
  The way I see it, constant dissatisfaction is a core part of making progress
Aunche 6y ago
Here's an estimate of how different people in the anime industry are paid (it's from an anime about creating anime): https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Keep in mind the average salary in Japan is about 66k. And only about 40% of Japanese clear that.
godelzilla 6y ago
Capitalism has always been based on exploitative relationships between the user (aka employer) and the used (aka employee). Why would anime be any different?
motohagiography 6y ago
Short answer: because you are either money or you are talent and they are totally different understandings of how the world works. Skills aren't capital - people with skills are capital. What is capital? Something that grows and creates value while you sleep. How do you get some of that productive capital? Leverage. How do you get leverage? By promising a potentially better risk adjusted return on someone elses surplus capital than they can get from interest or an index fund. How do you create the better return? By moving something from one place to another better than the alternatives, etc. While this is very high level, it is important to observe that none of this has anything to do with being really good at making hand drawn tentacle porn, or writing code for that matter.
ridaj 6y ago
Gee this makes me glad that I'm passionate about software rather than anime. I can totally imagine companies pitting workers against each other in our field too. I mean they do to some extent but people can make a reasonable living.
toto444 6y ago
I don't have time to find source on the web to support that but in his graphic novel about Pyongyang, Guy Delisle describes how a lot of anime are made (if I am correct he is talking about Disney but it is all from memory so correct me if I am wrong). Basically Westerners make some designs and all the animation in between 2 designs is made in North Korea. EDIT : I have found this https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf "Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"
- pradn 6y ago
  Super interesting, thanks for sharing! Quotes from this article: "But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages" "Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
  - estaseuropano 6y ago
    Would be interesting to see the overall social balance or GINI for north Korea with reasonable data. A huge proportion of the population has no food and there is a difference between a flatscreen 30" and second hand Chinese 16" TV from the 80s but they mkfhr both appear as 'having a TV' in the statistics, so I would be careful to draw conclusions from this.
    - toto444 6y ago
      I remember reading in Poor Economics by Duflo and Banerjee that poor people having a TV is not uncommon at all. They take the example of a Moroccan family in a rural area. They explain that because that's the only thing there is to do, owning a TV makes a massive difference to your everyday life.
AaronM 6y ago
The Trash Taste Podcast on YouTube interviews an animator working in Japan (Ken Arto), really fascinating, and directly related to this discussion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ
ulzeraj 6y ago
If by animators you mean people who create the frames between key frames designed by the character designers then I'm pretty sure this work is often outsourced to chinese and south korean studios that pay a penny to their employees. I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.
leecarraher 6y ago
Join your local unions if possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animation_Guild,_IATSE_Local_839 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animation_Guild,_IATSE_Loc... , and support union made motion pictures.
didip 6y ago
Sadly, the supply and demand of labors really press wages downwards. Especially in industries where "labor of love" marketing is really strong. If you want to maximize for total compensation, then you should work in an industry where the companies have to compete for your talents constantly.
adamredwoods 6y ago
Glamorous jobs tend to be extremely competitive, and therefore pay out less. If anyone is interested in animation as a career, I suggest specializing in design and motion graphics, it has better demand and therefore pays a little better.
meetups323 6y ago
I have some intimacy with the American animation industry and its similar here. All artistry/design/etc. happens on the US side of operations, then the brute "{drag sliders around}/{draw intermediary frames}/{paint over broken rigs} to match the design docs" happens internationally by vendor studios who get paid next to nothing. It's not dissimilar from things like L1 support in tech, which are often low cost international folks trained to respond using a fixed template. Both don't get paid much because their existence is expressly designed to be as easily replaceable as possible.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Because they’re a dime a dozen? When a 15 year old can do your job and has access to the same tools the outcome is predictable. A friend of mine runs a motion graphics studio. He does work for big names. He said his number one fear is a teenager in his mothers basement with Adobe After Effects.
offtop5 6y ago
Same issue with the video game industry. Even when you compare QA, a manual game tester is lucky to hit $15 an hour. A manual normal software tester can easily hit 80k. I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things, yet game programmers make the least. It's the problem of every dream job, no one dreams of working on software for waste treatment facilities. So the people willing to do that job can do much better than the new grads trying to work on the next battlefield or whatever
- dudul 6y ago
  > I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things Can you give some examples? How many things does a VG programming have to account for compared to, for examples, a ML programmer, or a programmer in the HFT space? Sure, video game programming is not a game, but I don't know why it would be "the most difficult" compared to other fields.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Depending on the game, you might need to do some machine learning programming. Forza heavily uses ML. You have Network programming, in there. Well I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult, it doesn't change the fact of video game programmer can make half as less as a normal business programer.
    - andrewprock 6y ago
      In addition, real-time systems, graphics programming, modelling, and more.
      - dudul 6y ago
        But usually these are 3 different jobs done by 3 different people.
        6y ago
neura 6y ago
Supply, demand and reputation. This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.” He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life. This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice. Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common. For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak English, just that they can do the job they say the can. My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of competent animators and the animations were more expensive to purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually, I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot more.
- UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  It may also have to do with why game companies in the US pay coders, testers and artists lower wages than non game companies. Game companies have "sold the dream" of working at a game company. Riding on a razor scooter, eating free snacks, wearing a hoodie while earning a subscale wage for the same work and longer hours during "crunch time". Executives and producers make the lions share because the above people's dreams are easily manipulated, not unlike the Anime industry in Japan.
  - jonfw 6y ago
    It's pretty disrespectful to game developers to imply that their 'dreams are easily manipulated' when they take less money to work in a field that's more interesting to them. This is a simple function of supply and demand, not naive developers too weak minded to resist executives. Developers interested in gaming are in high supply, while gaming pales economically in comparison to the fields where most of us work (presumably tech and fintech).
rcheu 6y ago
Obviously high supply of animators is the main reason, but I wonder if part of it is that pirating/illegal streaming sites are extremely common for anime. All of the people I know that watch anime do so without paying for it. It's trivially easy to find anime for free online, so much so that it's easier to find it for free than pay for it.
- SllX 6y ago
  The Western Markets are a drop in the bucket for anime. It is very much still a Japan-first industry. One Piece is younger than both Lord of the Rings and James Bond but as a franchise has grossed more than either of those. [1] Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball are also in higher positions on this list than One Piece. [1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-25-highest-grossing-media-franchises-of-all-time/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-...
  - Jweb_Guru 6y ago
    That's no longer true. International markets now make up something like 50% of their profits.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  I think this has something to do with it. Piracy is a big problem for Hollywood too, but they make most/a great deal of their money at the Box Office anyway, something the this industry does not. At least in the western market.
syntaxing 6y ago
Pretty disappointed at the "its just supply and demand" rhetoric. Supply and demand curves is an indicator of the market, NOT the ground truth of the market. Policies change the elasticity. Perceived value change the elasticity. Collective bargaining changes elasticity. Consumer changes elasticity. Simply treating the curve as the truth rather than the representation of the current state is extremely disingenuous.
- caturopath 6y ago
  Certainly, someone can inact policy that reshapes a market. I don't know why we'd care too much about it here. Japan's unemployment rate is 3%: as far as I understand, people are working these jobs because they are their dream jobs, not because they don't have options with better conditions. There are lots of other jobs in the entertainment industry like this - hard work, low pay, long line of people who want them - and I can't find it within myself care all that much about the outcome.
ravenstine 6y ago
My family's wealth has come from animation, I know animators, and I was going into animation before I decided to become a software engineer, so maybe my opinions on this mean something. What distinguishes animation and most other industries from software is individual leverage. A fed up software engineer has a fairly decent shot at either working freelance or starting their own operation. This is possible for animation, but there's way more of a hurdle in competing in the market with an independent company unless you have prestige or lots of money. It's really not easy to make substantial profit with a shitty animated film(unless you can afford exceptional marketing, and even then...), and it can take years of making no money to produce one. Contrast this with software, which has a possibility of being profitable in the first month, and can be improved over time, whereas with films and shows you pretty much have a few shots or just a single shot at doing it right. In other words, most animators know they can't just strike it out on their own if the going gets tough, which is one reason why unionization is more common in animation. You'd better be insanely talented if you think you're going to make a living as an independent animator, and most animators aren't excellent at all aspects of animation. There aren't many "full stack" animators. Believe me, I tried to be one. There's very disparate skills that go into making something that's production quality. There's also a general cultural difference between animators and software engineers. I'm painting with a broad brush here but, in my experience, animators tend to place more value on prestige and there's way more workplace politics at animation studios than I've ever witnessed on any software team I've joined. There's a prestige factor with software, too, but I don't think we make as much of a value judgment between someone who's a Googler and someone who's a freelancer. Again, just my opinion. Since animation is a part of the entertainment industry, it inherits the good and the bad of entertainment in general, which includes not highly valuing anyone except directors and producers. Most everyone else, besides big name actors, are expected to be treated like trash and disposed of when they aren't immediately needed anymore. One reason I ditched animation, besides my lack of talent, was that it can be very challenging to stay working at one studio for a long period of time. People do it, but they're the ones that seem to work a lot of extra hours(for no pay) and have a handful of useful talents that make them worth having around between projects. Basically, animators are used to being treated like crap and have a different sort of work ethic around it. Entertainment also attracts a different type of person. Again, another generalization, but there are way more neurotic and crazy people in entertainment, animation included, than in other fields. I think that's because it attracts both visually creative people and those who are bent out of shape easily if they aren't the ones winning, since the field can be so incredibly competitive. This leads to a dichotomy of needy animators who are always doing anything they can to "get their foot in the door" and tyrannical leads and directors who don't value their subordinates because they see themselves as Hollywood moguls. Of course this isn't true across the board, but my family members and friends in the field all have multiple stories of leadership treating people like garbage and getting away with insane things that you think would have been rooted out in the #MeToo era. In the end, it's all seen as a necessary evil on the journey to the glory of producing successful art. I don't think this is nearly as common with software(and many other things) because the average person doesn't give a flying F about software, so the drive to achieve prestige is very limited. So to summarize, for various reasons, there's far more ego involved in animation, which leads to people with power treating everyone like crap. Oh, before I conclude, we can't forget how much it costs to produce an animated film or TV show that meets the current expectations of the industry. Even though I think a wall is being hit in terms of just how much visual spectacle they can produce, the precedent to pay animators poorly has been set long ago when new studios were popping up and desperate to make something. Other industries, such as software, never went through the same cost hurdles during infancy; even back in 1996 you could start a software company easily with just one guy behind a single workstation and maybe a server rack.
HellDunkel 6y ago
This claims hand crafted anime is booming when in reality it is fighting for survival and that is why animator get paid next to nothing.
- Jweb_Guru 6y ago
  The article's point is that no, it's not. That is a common justification for why animators get paid poverty wages though.
  - HellDunkel 6y ago
    Pokemon is a mostly video game and „Ghost in the Shell“ a movie remake. One swallow doesnt make a summer. Also, Studio Ghibli has not made a new movie in 5 years.
rossdavidh 6y ago
When there are more people who want to do a job, than there are slots for doing that job, no matter what the economic system you have to do one of three things: 1) pay lower wages until some of the people leave the profession 2) use some kind of essentially random (even if theoretically bureaucratic or administrative) method to assign those slots to people; for example, you can only do this job if your parents happen to be people in the industry 3) vicious back-stabbing politics and sharp elbows, as people who want those jobs suck up to the ones who get to choose who gets them 4) conditions (other than wages) in that profession get so bad that people become dispirited and drop out You also see this in certain areas of academia, or in the music industry, or many other fields. There can be combinations of these methods, of course. The best way around this conundrum (that I know of), is to do this as an avocation rather than a vocation. For example, the many people who have composed music, written novels, etc. on the side while earning their money in other ways. It's not a perfect method, but it's the best (least soul-eating) way I know of.
password321 6y ago
I feel the solution now for highly talented yet underpaid people is to go solo on places like Youtube. Countless people are willing to learn from some of the best.
arduinomancer 6y ago
Dumb question but has a country ever implemented a mandatory profit-sharing law? I.e. still capitalism but the owners of companies are required to share X percent profits with employees?
jdlyga 6y ago
Capitalism. Animators are willing to work for what animation companies are willing to pay them, which isn't much. Do they have unions?
protastus 6y ago
A lazy and mediocre software developer gets paid more than a world class concert pianist who obsessively practices 10 hours a day. The world doesn't need pianists like it needs software engineers. This demand was also different 200 years ago. This is basic economics that not enough people seem to understand when they choose a job. Or maybe they do understand but want to ignore the problem early in their careers. As a student in my 20s, my love for mathematics exceeded my love of engineering. I studied both and was good at both, but never went far beyond undergrad level mathematics due to job opportunities. Sometimes in life we need to clearly separate what to do as an amateur (for the love) and as a professional (for the money). Sometimes the interests align, and if they do, good for you! But it's important to be honest with yourself about goals and planning.
- vinger 6y ago
  And sometimes we need to check our facts before we make ill informed decisions. A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more than any developer lazy or not. A concert pianist makes 50k a year. Getting a seat is the hard part. And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering. Your college doesn't teach how to code, you need to do that on your own.
  - protastus 6y ago
    > A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more than any developer lazy or not. Even if we picked such an outlier, the bookings would be sparse. A mediocre SWE in the Bay Area has a paycheck every 2 weeks over the course of decades. > And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering The choice in my personal story was about becoming a professional mathematician, not majoring in math and then getting a job in engineering. The latter in fact is what I did.
accounted 6y ago
Many anime studios in recent years have thrown in the towel despite having high levels of skill at their profession. It is repeatedly mentioned here that the reason animators are paid low is due to their abundance versus the demand, and that is certainly one reason of many. But another big reason is that it is strenuous work for which there really isn't that much pay out. The NYTimes article flaunts a $24 billion market figure, but this figure would be the few big names (Naruto, One Piece, DBZ) and those series are making money off of physical product sales and licensing deals. The anime, at the end of the day, is not the product - it's just a commercial for the product. Every so often, studios experiment with original anime, sometimes sponsored by various other companies, but these rarely turn out to be financially fruitful and primarily end up again as advertisements or a test of some new technique or technology.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/uCZTd https://archive.is/uCZTd
ancorevard 6y ago
Music is booming, so why are musicians living in poverty? Remember this is extremistan, top 1% of artists earn pretty much all the industry’s revenue.
bsder 6y ago
So, why hasn't someone in the US with a few bucks pulled these animators together and built their own studio simply as a "vanity project"? The anime industry seems like it should be rife for someone to pull that off. I'm always amazed at how little money artists (of any form) make. You can get really significant access to them for very little money.
CyberRage 6y ago
The issue is not with anime but with Japan. Most "anime" is being created in Japan(That's the literal definition of anime) hence the issue. You don't hear about starving Pixar animators or Disney artists overworking to extreme levels. This is part of the Japanese culture. Moreover, I would say that anime is having more difficult time making profit and being sustainable.
- pzone 6y ago
  Pixar and Disney are at the very top of the elite American animation studios. Most animators internationally, or Americans working at less competitive studios, are also wrung dry for very little pay or job security.
  - CyberRage 6y ago
    "Elite" animators in Japan are being paid pennies. it's a joke basically compared to western regions. In Japan, you are expected to deliver no matter what, working extra hours and grinding is normal. you are not compensated for any of that. Very very few publishers care about the quality of the content they ship as long as things pan out. You have so many numerous examples of that in the industry.
    - fomine3 6y ago
      "Elite" animator is called key animator (genga). they finally earn fine money for Japanese average.
paulie_a 6y ago
It has a low talent barrier and a flooded job market There really isn't much to say
cloudedcordial 6y ago
There's another anime about emerging animators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakuman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakuman The same can be say about other entertainment industry: A few on the top make the majority of the revenue. Many people are attracted by the prospects to make it to the top. Despite the low pay, they are driven by sheet passion. They are often burnt out and forgotten.
- prydt 6y ago
  If I recall correctly, Bakuman is a manga / anime about aspiring manga artists and this post is instead about animators who animate the anime.
fellellor 6y ago
My observation is that you can’t expect to make a fair amount of money even if you produce quality content, which is in high demand, unless you control the distribution. The ones who enjoy the benefits of the market oriented supply and demand mechanisms are those in charge of distribution. The most recent example of this might be porn performers who are seeing a lot of money with the advent of platforms like onlyfans. None of them made anything from the tube sites.
6510 6y ago
I think setting wages by supply and demand is a mistake. We should have a spectrum of how hard a job is and how much training it requires and base the minimum on that. Now with corona there are even more people looking for work. A disease shouldn't benefit anyone.
fomine3 6y ago
SHIROBAKO is well made anime that describe anime industry, strongly recommended.

312 points by polm23 6y ago

s314159265358 6y ago

Well the answer to the heading is just hyper capitalism imho

blhack 6y ago

Because there are a lot of people willing to live in poverty to be animators.

snarf21 6y ago
While this is true, I think there is more nuance to it. We also value cheap food but we don't care that migrant food pickers make $10 an hour (or less). We are a selfish race, as long as we get a deal, screw everyone else. As long as the exploitation benefits us, we don't care. Amazon, diamonds, food supply, new mobile phones, etc.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  On the other hand, I'd like to assume that other people are making the best decisions they can in their own lives. Picking fruit for $10 an hour could likely be better than their alternatives. I've worked for much less than that as a programmer. At the time I didn't see better options. People have different limitations. Some limitations might not even make sense to others, but those are the constraints that they work around.
  - snarf21 6y ago
    I agree. I was only trying to highlight that we basically don't value other's time as much as we value our own. We want to shop at the dollar store but we would never work for the wages that the hated Chinese will to make this crap. We want food delivered to our house but we don't tip because we can't "afford it" to value the minimum wage workers that are busting their ass and destroying their cars to bring to us. The thing you highlight is that a lot of people don't really have a choice so they will take anything, regardless of how exploited they are. This makes me sad as it feels like we've regressed to the 1900s. If all these gig economies eventually have to treat their works as employees and $15/hour goes national, I don't see how any of these companies are profitable except in the biggest cities.
- Bakary 6y ago
  While that is true, it is a non-trivial task to make actionable change on any of these propositions. Even boycotting certain companies is a job unto itself.
gruez 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_artist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_artist
jseliger 6y ago
Another story that can be answered with "Supply and demand," like so many news stories. My favorite sub-genre concerns adjuncts: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... All of them can be summarized as, "When supply exceeds demand, prices fall."
ryanmarsh 6y ago
How dare you bring logic and reason into a discussion about social issues on hacker news. /sarcasm
dennis_jeeves 6y ago
Hence the phrase "Starving Artist"

gnarbarian 6y ago

Supply and demand. It's disappointing I'm not surprised by the profound ignorance of this article at what used to be a prestigious organization.

throw_m239339 6y ago
> Supply and demand. It's disappointing I'm not surprised by the profound ignorance of this article at what used to be a prestigious organization. Was it also supply and demand when a bunch of silicon valley corporations decided to keep salaries low with secret agreements?
- LesserEvil665 6y ago
  right, in OC's mind that should be A-OK. Viewing everything through the lens of supply & demand without any other consideration will make monsters of us all.
- neartheplain 6y ago
  Do you have credible suspicion of such collusion in the anime industry? And to answer your question, no. It was a crime, and law enforcement put a stop to it.
- gnarbarian 6y ago
  Monopolies and colluding oligopolies break capitalism. It's why we have antitrust law, which we don't really seem to use anymore (probably due to regulatory capture).
- ggreer 6y ago
  Most people who know about that case are mistaken about certain crucial facts. The collusion was that some companies agreed not to cold call each other's employees.[1] Hiring was still allowed, as were other recruiting methods such as e-mail or LinkedIn messages. The particularly nasty bit of collusion was between Apple and a few other companies (Google, Adobe, Pixar). This collusion only happened because of Steve Jobs's vindictive personality combined with interlocking directorates[2]: Jobs was on the board of Pixar, and Google & Adobe executives were on Apple's board. Despite Jobs's best efforts, the collusion fell apart after only 4 years because the companies kept poaching from each other. It was over a year later that the DoJ filed its first complaint. Despite what most people think, it's really hard for companies to cartelize. There is a massive incentive for any one member of the cartel to pretend to collude while secretly not colluding. Typically, such arrangements fall apart unless there is a governing body that can sniff out and punish defectors. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate

germinalphrase 6y ago

Clearly, animators need to lobby for additional licensure, safety and educational requirements, and restrictive trade organizations to thin the herd of “acceptable” laborers.

coldtea 6y ago

Cleanliness is booming too, but cleaning persons also live in poverty. It's because: (a) we don't compensate jobs based on their difficulty or the financial success of the product, but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them. If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too. (b) we allow businesses to profit wildly while not paying enough (by exploiting (a)), because we have the taboo that not meddling with the market is the best course of action. A more englightened society that didn't pay too much attention to economy pundits working for rich people, might find a way for better revenue sharing with employees...

Retric 6y ago
(b) Minimum wage and safe working conditions are a thing in most developed countries. However, enforcement is another story. While Japan's prefectural minimum wages range from ¥714 to ¥932 per hour (6.71+$) for all workers, that’s often ignored.
throw_m239339 6y ago
> , but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them. This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No. Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low. > If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too. Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No. Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no. A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.

mschuster91 6y ago

> These workers earned an average of $12,000 in 2019, the animation association found, though it cautioned that this figure was based on a limited sample that did not include many of the freelancers who are paid even less. How is that either legal or possible to survive on such wages?

orliesaurus 6y ago
Exactly my thoughts, maybe they're all interns that live at home with their families? Idk it seems surreal! But this part .. Freelancers paid even less? What on earth?
karaterobot 6y ago
I'm not sure either. Minimum wage in Japan (2019) was about $8.50 USD/hour, and working 40 hours/week at that rate would be about $17,000 USD/year. My guess is they are not working 40 hours every week, or they have signed contracts that pay them less than minimum wage. I wish the article had been clearer about this. I'm sure animators in Japan work really hard and aren't paid much, but while the article made it clear how I should feel about the situation, it left me uninformed on the details, which would seem the more important part of a news article.
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scruffyherder 6y ago
They aren’t slaves they can refuse work. The problem is they keep taking these “work for hire” deals which revolves around a project not hours. There is this magical internet they can create their own IP and charge whatever they want. Nobody is obligated to buy it, just as they aren’t obligated to go into crap contracts.
- yummypaint 6y ago
  So the entire industry is just stupid people who can't look out for themselves? They are clearly being taken advantage of and are suffering as a result.

scrame 6y ago

Because it's work for hire.

eigenvalue 6y ago

This is a sad story. I have been working on a project for a couple years now called Pastel Network (http://pastel.wiki/ http://pastel.wiki/) that is all about making NFTs/rare digital art on the blockchain accessible and affordable to everyone with very low fees. This is unlike all the hot NFT projects based on Ethereum, where it currently costs hundreds of dollars to "mint" an artwork, which makes it risky for artists in case the work doesn't sell, and also makes it impossible to sell art for low dollar amounts while still making a decent profit margin. My hope all along was that artists like this from poor countries would be able to participate, and I was thinking about anime in particular (the project started out being called Animecoin).

hn8788 6y ago

It sounds like the same problem as the gaming industry, where people are really passionate about it and are willing to work for peanuts to be in the industry. I started doing some hobby game development, and I was suprised at how many "good enough" art and sound assets are freely available because of artists trying to get noticed.

umvi 6y ago

Are the profits not shared with the animators? It boggles my mind that an anime as popular as One Punch Man got awarded to a bottom-of-the-barrel anime studio for S2. I mean, you can see the stark contrast between seasons 1 and 2. Season 2 has very sparse action scenes, and heavily utilizes off-screen talking (i.e. the camera is panning some static background while a conversation is taking place so the animators don't have to animate). That leads me to believe the money/profits generated by the success of a season is getting eaten by ip owners and middlemen, and that the studio itself is fighting for the scraps. If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. Can anyone who knows more about the anime business model in Japan chime in? Is this a case of IP owners holding an iron grip on the rights and profits and being stingy with anime studios? At any rate, I'm surprised more American-based anime studios aren't springing up to poach Japan's top animation talent with top pay.

minikites 6y ago
If workers were paid more, that leaves less money for the executives, who are the real heroes under capitalism.
- deleted 6y ago
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gruez 6y ago
>If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime. The incentive is that if the anime is low quality, people won't watch anymore.
- minikites 6y ago
  How does that affect the executive making that decision, who is already wealthy? It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.
  - gruez 6y ago

peruvian 6y ago

Because labor is a liability to most companies.

kinghtown 6y ago

Real money is in merchandising. Demon Slayer is big out here in Taiwan.. every kid has pencils, erasers, buttons, shirts, pencil cases, backpacks.. the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful. Too many predatory gatekeepers offering dream jobs to kids who don’t know any better. It’s not just anime. In music, you got acts with albums in the top ten albums of the year lists with millions of plays making like hundreds of dollars per year on Spotify, same people are on tour each year in the red financially after being on the road. The economy isn’t kind to the creators who entertain everyone.

sigstoat 6y ago
> the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful. and the animators of shows that flop still got paid something. if you want upside risk, you have to be exposed to downside risk.
NalNezumi 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken the IP rights still remains at the publisher + the original creator (The manga writer), and often the animation studio just do it as contract work. So I would guess the studio won't get a proportionate slice of the merchandising success.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
>the animators are seeing none of that money yet they are a core part of why the show is successful because they are worker. they get paid with the wages that they agree on. Koyoharu Gotouge probably get a big chunk of that money since she created the manga.

nabla9 6y ago

Animators as a profession are like factory workers. Japanese animators compete with Chinese, Vietnamese and everyone else. If something can be produced with little differentiation – bulk or standardized quality product or service, its all about cost and supply and demand. This is how competitive market economy works. Profit margins become razor thin.

minikites 6y ago

There are so many problems where the cause is just "capitalism" and the way it works. Sometimes the answer really is that simple.

goto11 6y ago
I know Eastern Europe under communism produced some great animation, but were the animators well paid?
- minikites 6y ago
  Why is every anti-communist/socialist argument in the form of "It didn't work once, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again."
  - samr71 6y ago
    I feel that's a bit of a strawman. It's generally closer to: "Every time it's been tried it's been either bad or disastrous, clearly we have no reason to learn from it or try again" Which I think is fair! Hell, even the original strawman is a fair argument IMO. Fascism didn't work once, and I don't think there's much there to learn from (and we certainly shouldn't try it again).
    - minikites 6y ago
      I don't think the comparison to fascism is fair, as much as some would like to paint it that way. So many things are different now than in 1989, which is not to say a new system would be perfect, but Americans are inventive and we can improve it. We're not at the end of history.
- tokai 6y ago
  The salary range was small so they properly got an relative okay wage. Demands of workers was heavily suppressed in the east bloc though, so the soviet system is not something championed by organized labour nowadays.
6y ago

ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago

Truth is that if you do such job to live and eat... You'll need to not only produce the production but also handle market sells... involving rights on your product... it's usually in form of contract with big distributors... depending your shit... you'll get a certain amount of cent(s) for being used through the "distributors"... WTH you expected? :D

jayd16 6y ago

I guess Japanese animators do not have a union?

yamrzou 6y ago

https://archive.is/DuxBD https://archive.is/DuxBD

dartharva 6y ago

Being from a third-world country, it it feels weird how western media so casually uses the word "poverty". Where I come from, living in poverty mostly means living in abject poor living conditions- without a decent place to live in, without guarantee of being able to secure meals for the day, etc. People who can afford daily food and internet and computers will never be classified as living in "poverty" here.

iscrewyou 6y ago
The article isn’t talking about just western countries. The subheading is: “The workers who make the Japanese shows the world is binge-watching can earn as little as $200 a month. ”
- dartharva 6y ago
  I know, but NYT is western media. My point was that they have too low of a bar for classifying "poverty".
  - didibus 6y ago
    You mean too high a bar?
rtkwe 6y ago
When you're looking at policy to address lifting up the people struggling at the bottom in various ways the only reasonable course is to define it relative to local conditions. Looking globally ignores local prices and needs for example.
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majani 6y ago
The way I see it, constant dissatisfaction is a core part of making progress

Aunche 6y ago

Here's an estimate of how different people in the anime industry are paid (it's from an anime about creating anime): https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png https://i.imgur.com/ORAFhaN.png If this is accurate, then only A-list voice actors are making any serious money because they're scarce and in high demand. I think that most of the money in anime just gets spent on creating more anime, so very few people end up making money.

busterarm 6y ago
Keep in mind the average salary in Japan is about 66k. And only about 40% of Japanese clear that.

godelzilla 6y ago

Capitalism has always been based on exploitative relationships between the user (aka employer) and the used (aka employee). Why would anime be any different?

motohagiography 6y ago

Short answer: because you are either money or you are talent and they are totally different understandings of how the world works. Skills aren't capital - people with skills are capital. What is capital? Something that grows and creates value while you sleep. How do you get some of that productive capital? Leverage. How do you get leverage? By promising a potentially better risk adjusted return on someone elses surplus capital than they can get from interest or an index fund. How do you create the better return? By moving something from one place to another better than the alternatives, etc. While this is very high level, it is important to observe that none of this has anything to do with being really good at making hand drawn tentacle porn, or writing code for that matter.

ridaj 6y ago

Gee this makes me glad that I'm passionate about software rather than anime. I can totally imagine companies pitting workers against each other in our field too. I mean they do to some extent but people can make a reasonable living.

toto444 6y ago

I don't have time to find source on the web to support that but in his graphic novel about Pyongyang, Guy Delisle describes how a lot of anime are made (if I am correct he is talking about Disney but it is all from memory so correct me if I am wrong). Basically Westerners make some designs and all the animation in between 2 designs is made in North Korea. EDIT : I have found this https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf https://www.gpic.nl/producing_animation_in_North_Korea.pdf "Q:How is the North's animation seen in abroad? A:Compared to North Korea's general image around the world, their animation sector has a remarkably good reputation. The nation has been receiving many orders from abroad for quite some time, including many from France and Italy. The workers usually participate in original drawings and coloring. Some of the well-known foreign animation projects the North has been involved in include "Lion King", "Les Miserables", "Pocahontas" and an Italian production of "Hercules" and "Billy the Cat" from France"

pradn 6y ago
Super interesting, thanks for sharing! Quotes from this article: "But even many grown-ups enjoy [animation in North Korea] because it is one of the rare television programs in the North free of political messages" "Actually most researchers estimate that almost half of the households in the North have television sets. It's just another common misconception about the North to think that only the rich get to watch television. There are also many animated films released in theatres."
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  Would be interesting to see the overall social balance or GINI for north Korea with reasonable data. A huge proportion of the population has no food and there is a difference between a flatscreen 30" and second hand Chinese 16" TV from the 80s but they mkfhr both appear as 'having a TV' in the statistics, so I would be careful to draw conclusions from this.
  - toto444 6y ago
    I remember reading in Poor Economics by Duflo and Banerjee that poor people having a TV is not uncommon at all. They take the example of a Moroccan family in a rural area. They explain that because that's the only thing there is to do, owning a TV makes a massive difference to your everyday life.

AaronM 6y ago

The Trash Taste Podcast on YouTube interviews an animator working in Japan (Ken Arto), really fascinating, and directly related to this discussion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ

ulzeraj 6y ago

If by animators you mean people who create the frames between key frames designed by the character designers then I'm pretty sure this work is often outsourced to chinese and south korean studios that pay a penny to their employees. I think the only exception to that was Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) Studio which made fame for treating their employees very well. Unfortunately they were targeted by an arson attack in 2019.

leecarraher 6y ago

Join your local unions if possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animation_Guild,_IATSE_Local_839 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animation_Guild,_IATSE_Loc... , and support union made motion pictures.

didip 6y ago

Sadly, the supply and demand of labors really press wages downwards. Especially in industries where "labor of love" marketing is really strong. If you want to maximize for total compensation, then you should work in an industry where the companies have to compete for your talents constantly.

adamredwoods 6y ago

Glamorous jobs tend to be extremely competitive, and therefore pay out less. If anyone is interested in animation as a career, I suggest specializing in design and motion graphics, it has better demand and therefore pays a little better.

meetups323 6y ago

I have some intimacy with the American animation industry and its similar here. All artistry/design/etc. happens on the US side of operations, then the brute "{drag sliders around}/{draw intermediary frames}/{paint over broken rigs} to match the design docs" happens internationally by vendor studios who get paid next to nothing. It's not dissimilar from things like L1 support in tech, which are often low cost international folks trained to respond using a fixed template. Both don't get paid much because their existence is expressly designed to be as easily replaceable as possible.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Because they’re a dime a dozen? When a 15 year old can do your job and has access to the same tools the outcome is predictable. A friend of mine runs a motion graphics studio. He does work for big names. He said his number one fear is a teenager in his mothers basement with Adobe After Effects.

offtop5 6y ago

Same issue with the video game industry. Even when you compare QA, a manual game tester is lucky to hit $15 an hour. A manual normal software tester can easily hit 80k. I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things, yet game programmers make the least. It's the problem of every dream job, no one dreams of working on software for waste treatment facilities. So the people willing to do that job can do much better than the new grads trying to work on the next battlefield or whatever

dudul 6y ago
> I find video game programming to be the most difficult of all, just because you have to account for so many things Can you give some examples? How many things does a VG programming have to account for compared to, for examples, a ML programmer, or a programmer in the HFT space? Sure, video game programming is not a game, but I don't know why it would be "the most difficult" compared to other fields.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Depending on the game, you might need to do some machine learning programming. Forza heavily uses ML. You have Network programming, in there. Well I'm sure some specialties exist which are more difficult, it doesn't change the fact of video game programmer can make half as less as a normal business programer.
  - andrewprock 6y ago
    In addition, real-time systems, graphics programming, modelling, and more.
    - dudul 6y ago
      But usually these are 3 different jobs done by 3 different people.
      - 6y ago

neura 6y ago

Supply, demand and reputation. This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.” He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life. This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice. Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common. For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak English, just that they can do the job they say the can. My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of competent animators and the animations were more expensive to purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually, I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot more.

UnpossibleJim 6y ago
It may also have to do with why game companies in the US pay coders, testers and artists lower wages than non game companies. Game companies have "sold the dream" of working at a game company. Riding on a razor scooter, eating free snacks, wearing a hoodie while earning a subscale wage for the same work and longer hours during "crunch time". Executives and producers make the lions share because the above people's dreams are easily manipulated, not unlike the Anime industry in Japan.
- jonfw 6y ago
  It's pretty disrespectful to game developers to imply that their 'dreams are easily manipulated' when they take less money to work in a field that's more interesting to them. This is a simple function of supply and demand, not naive developers too weak minded to resist executives. Developers interested in gaming are in high supply, while gaming pales economically in comparison to the fields where most of us work (presumably tech and fintech).

rcheu 6y ago

Obviously high supply of animators is the main reason, but I wonder if part of it is that pirating/illegal streaming sites are extremely common for anime. All of the people I know that watch anime do so without paying for it. It's trivially easy to find anime for free online, so much so that it's easier to find it for free than pay for it.

SllX 6y ago
The Western Markets are a drop in the bucket for anime. It is very much still a Japan-first industry. One Piece is younger than both Lord of the Rings and James Bond but as a franchise has grossed more than either of those. [1] Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball are also in higher positions on this list than One Piece. [1] https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-25-highest-grossing-media-franchises-of-all-time/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-...
- Jweb_Guru 6y ago
  That's no longer true. International markets now make up something like 50% of their profits.
missedthecue 6y ago
I think this has something to do with it. Piracy is a big problem for Hollywood too, but they make most/a great deal of their money at the Box Office anyway, something the this industry does not. At least in the western market.

syntaxing 6y ago

Pretty disappointed at the "its just supply and demand" rhetoric. Supply and demand curves is an indicator of the market, NOT the ground truth of the market. Policies change the elasticity. Perceived value change the elasticity. Collective bargaining changes elasticity. Consumer changes elasticity. Simply treating the curve as the truth rather than the representation of the current state is extremely disingenuous.

caturopath 6y ago
Certainly, someone can inact policy that reshapes a market. I don't know why we'd care too much about it here. Japan's unemployment rate is 3%: as far as I understand, people are working these jobs because they are their dream jobs, not because they don't have options with better conditions. There are lots of other jobs in the entertainment industry like this - hard work, low pay, long line of people who want them - and I can't find it within myself care all that much about the outcome.

ravenstine 6y ago

My family's wealth has come from animation, I know animators, and I was going into animation before I decided to become a software engineer, so maybe my opinions on this mean something. What distinguishes animation and most other industries from software is individual leverage. A fed up software engineer has a fairly decent shot at either working freelance or starting their own operation. This is possible for animation, but there's way more of a hurdle in competing in the market with an independent company unless you have prestige or lots of money. It's really not easy to make substantial profit with a shitty animated film(unless you can afford exceptional marketing, and even then...), and it can take years of making no money to produce one. Contrast this with software, which has a possibility of being profitable in the first month, and can be improved over time, whereas with films and shows you pretty much have a few shots or just a single shot at doing it right. In other words, most animators know they can't just strike it out on their own if the going gets tough, which is one reason why unionization is more common in animation. You'd better be insanely talented if you think you're going to make a living as an independent animator, and most animators aren't excellent at all aspects of animation. There aren't many "full stack" animators. Believe me, I tried to be one. There's very disparate skills that go into making something that's production quality. There's also a general cultural difference between animators and software engineers. I'm painting with a broad brush here but, in my experience, animators tend to place more value on prestige and there's way more workplace politics at animation studios than I've ever witnessed on any software team I've joined. There's a prestige factor with software, too, but I don't think we make as much of a value judgment between someone who's a Googler and someone who's a freelancer. Again, just my opinion. Since animation is a part of the entertainment industry, it inherits the good and the bad of entertainment in general, which includes not highly valuing anyone except directors and producers. Most everyone else, besides big name actors, are expected to be treated like trash and disposed of when they aren't immediately needed anymore. One reason I ditched animation, besides my lack of talent, was that it can be very challenging to stay working at one studio for a long period of time. People do it, but they're the ones that seem to work a lot of extra hours(for no pay) and have a handful of useful talents that make them worth having around between projects. Basically, animators are used to being treated like crap and have a different sort of work ethic around it. Entertainment also attracts a different type of person. Again, another generalization, but there are way more neurotic and crazy people in entertainment, animation included, than in other fields. I think that's because it attracts both visually creative people and those who are bent out of shape easily if they aren't the ones winning, since the field can be so incredibly competitive. This leads to a dichotomy of needy animators who are always doing anything they can to "get their foot in the door" and tyrannical leads and directors who don't value their subordinates because they see themselves as Hollywood moguls. Of course this isn't true across the board, but my family members and friends in the field all have multiple stories of leadership treating people like garbage and getting away with insane things that you think would have been rooted out in the #MeToo era. In the end, it's all seen as a necessary evil on the journey to the glory of producing successful art. I don't think this is nearly as common with software(and many other things) because the average person doesn't give a flying F about software, so the drive to achieve prestige is very limited. So to summarize, for various reasons, there's far more ego involved in animation, which leads to people with power treating everyone like crap. Oh, before I conclude, we can't forget how much it costs to produce an animated film or TV show that meets the current expectations of the industry. Even though I think a wall is being hit in terms of just how much visual spectacle they can produce, the precedent to pay animators poorly has been set long ago when new studios were popping up and desperate to make something. Other industries, such as software, never went through the same cost hurdles during infancy; even back in 1996 you could start a software company easily with just one guy behind a single workstation and maybe a server rack.

HellDunkel 6y ago

This claims hand crafted anime is booming when in reality it is fighting for survival and that is why animator get paid next to nothing.

Jweb_Guru 6y ago
The article's point is that no, it's not. That is a common justification for why animators get paid poverty wages though.
- HellDunkel 6y ago
  Pokemon is a mostly video game and „Ghost in the Shell“ a movie remake. One swallow doesnt make a summer. Also, Studio Ghibli has not made a new movie in 5 years.

rossdavidh 6y ago

When there are more people who want to do a job, than there are slots for doing that job, no matter what the economic system you have to do one of three things: 1) pay lower wages until some of the people leave the profession 2) use some kind of essentially random (even if theoretically bureaucratic or administrative) method to assign those slots to people; for example, you can only do this job if your parents happen to be people in the industry 3) vicious back-stabbing politics and sharp elbows, as people who want those jobs suck up to the ones who get to choose who gets them 4) conditions (other than wages) in that profession get so bad that people become dispirited and drop out You also see this in certain areas of academia, or in the music industry, or many other fields. There can be combinations of these methods, of course. The best way around this conundrum (that I know of), is to do this as an avocation rather than a vocation. For example, the many people who have composed music, written novels, etc. on the side while earning their money in other ways. It's not a perfect method, but it's the best (least soul-eating) way I know of.

password321 6y ago

I feel the solution now for highly talented yet underpaid people is to go solo on places like Youtube. Countless people are willing to learn from some of the best.

arduinomancer 6y ago

Dumb question but has a country ever implemented a mandatory profit-sharing law? I.e. still capitalism but the owners of companies are required to share X percent profits with employees?

jdlyga 6y ago

Capitalism. Animators are willing to work for what animation companies are willing to pay them, which isn't much. Do they have unions?

protastus 6y ago

A lazy and mediocre software developer gets paid more than a world class concert pianist who obsessively practices 10 hours a day. The world doesn't need pianists like it needs software engineers. This demand was also different 200 years ago. This is basic economics that not enough people seem to understand when they choose a job. Or maybe they do understand but want to ignore the problem early in their careers. As a student in my 20s, my love for mathematics exceeded my love of engineering. I studied both and was good at both, but never went far beyond undergrad level mathematics due to job opportunities. Sometimes in life we need to clearly separate what to do as an amateur (for the love) and as a professional (for the money). Sometimes the interests align, and if they do, good for you! But it's important to be honest with yourself about goals and planning.

vinger 6y ago
And sometimes we need to check our facts before we make ill informed decisions. A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more than any developer lazy or not. A concert pianist makes 50k a year. Getting a seat is the hard part. And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering. Your college doesn't teach how to code, you need to do that on your own.
- protastus 6y ago
  > A world class pianist makes 25 to 75k per show. Far more than any developer lazy or not. Even if we picked such an outlier, the bookings would be sparse. A mediocre SWE in the Bay Area has a paycheck every 2 weeks over the course of decades. > And someone majoring in math can go as far as someone majoring in engineering The choice in my personal story was about becoming a professional mathematician, not majoring in math and then getting a job in engineering. The latter in fact is what I did.

accounted 6y ago

Many anime studios in recent years have thrown in the towel despite having high levels of skill at their profession. It is repeatedly mentioned here that the reason animators are paid low is due to their abundance versus the demand, and that is certainly one reason of many. But another big reason is that it is strenuous work for which there really isn't that much pay out. The NYTimes article flaunts a $24 billion market figure, but this figure would be the few big names (Naruto, One Piece, DBZ) and those series are making money off of physical product sales and licensing deals. The anime, at the end of the day, is not the product - it's just a commercial for the product. Every so often, studios experiment with original anime, sometimes sponsored by various other companies, but these rarely turn out to be financially fruitful and primarily end up again as advertisements or a test of some new technique or technology.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/uCZTd https://archive.is/uCZTd

ancorevard 6y ago

Music is booming, so why are musicians living in poverty? Remember this is extremistan, top 1% of artists earn pretty much all the industry’s revenue.

bsder 6y ago

So, why hasn't someone in the US with a few bucks pulled these animators together and built their own studio simply as a "vanity project"? The anime industry seems like it should be rife for someone to pull that off. I'm always amazed at how little money artists (of any form) make. You can get really significant access to them for very little money.

CyberRage 6y ago

The issue is not with anime but with Japan. Most "anime" is being created in Japan(That's the literal definition of anime) hence the issue. You don't hear about starving Pixar animators or Disney artists overworking to extreme levels. This is part of the Japanese culture. Moreover, I would say that anime is having more difficult time making profit and being sustainable.

pzone 6y ago
Pixar and Disney are at the very top of the elite American animation studios. Most animators internationally, or Americans working at less competitive studios, are also wrung dry for very little pay or job security.
- CyberRage 6y ago
  "Elite" animators in Japan are being paid pennies. it's a joke basically compared to western regions. In Japan, you are expected to deliver no matter what, working extra hours and grinding is normal. you are not compensated for any of that. Very very few publishers care about the quality of the content they ship as long as things pan out. You have so many numerous examples of that in the industry.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    "Elite" animator is called key animator (genga). they finally earn fine money for Japanese average.

paulie_a 6y ago

It has a low talent barrier and a flooded job market There really isn't much to say

cloudedcordial 6y ago

There's another anime about emerging animators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakuman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakuman The same can be say about other entertainment industry: A few on the top make the majority of the revenue. Many people are attracted by the prospects to make it to the top. Despite the low pay, they are driven by sheet passion. They are often burnt out and forgotten.

prydt 6y ago
If I recall correctly, Bakuman is a manga / anime about aspiring manga artists and this post is instead about animators who animate the anime.

fellellor 6y ago

My observation is that you can’t expect to make a fair amount of money even if you produce quality content, which is in high demand, unless you control the distribution. The ones who enjoy the benefits of the market oriented supply and demand mechanisms are those in charge of distribution. The most recent example of this might be porn performers who are seeing a lot of money with the advent of platforms like onlyfans. None of them made anything from the tube sites.

6510 6y ago

I think setting wages by supply and demand is a mistake. We should have a spectrum of how hard a job is and how much training it requires and base the minimum on that. Now with corona there are even more people looking for work. A disease shouldn't benefit anyone.

fomine3 6y ago

SHIROBAKO is well made anime that describe anime industry, strongly recommended.