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While there seems to be a lot of money in anime, the animators themselves are still underpaid and highly overworked: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business
by Trasmatta 2y ago
While there seems to be a lot of money in anime, the animators themselves are still underpaid and highly overworked: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business/japan-anime.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business/japan-anime.html
There are so many stories of the insane hours that animators in Japan have to deal with. Part of that is the "normal" toxic overwork culture in Japan, but animation seems to be one of the biggest perpetrators.
- Geezus_42 2y agoBecause people care about and are invested in the art they make. It makes them easier to exploit "because they should feel privileged to have the job they want." People who work in creative industries all over the world face this issue.
- Onavo 2y agoVideo games industry software engineers are usually paid peanuts
- throw_pm23 2y agoThis is exactly what the parent comment said.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWho gets to define whether someone is ‘exploited’ or not? There are artists who would rather be paid even less, but given more creative freedom and control over the final product, (deciding on dubs, script changes, etc…) Especially in anime production.
- ethbr1 2y agoExploitation = leveraging a neverending stream of young people interested in working in an industry, initially for unsustainable wages, by dangling the prospect of eventual liveable wages in front of them, death marching them, and then firing them and hiring the next crop of new grads Other industries do that, but at least they have the decency to compensate fresh hires decently. (E.g. law, management consulting)
- MichaelZuo 2y agoSo who gets to decide the threshold?
- ethbr1 2y agoIt's like pornography.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoCan you explain how or why?
- ethbr1 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
- MichaelZuo 2y agoConcepts aren't automatically relevant to each other just because you write or link some text... This has to be shown in some way... Usually done on HN via some number of arguments with some logical structure.
- ethbr1 2y agoAs opposed to minimal effort questions? Ask a better, more thoughtful question, get a better answer.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoMy last question is higher effort than a copy pasted link to a wikipedia page... This approach seems bizarre frankly, it can only be to your detriment because it implies you are putting in even less than 'minimal effort'.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoStudio MAPPA was effectively grinding down the souls of their artists during the production of Jujutsu Kaisen [0]. The linked article is just one of many. The work conditions at MAPPA seem pretty unreasonable to me, so I'd consider them exploitative. These animators aren't being given any creative freedom either. [0] https://comicbook.com/anime/news/mappa-studios-animators-work-conditions/ https://comicbook.com/anime/news/mappa-studios-animators-wor...
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow does this relate to the question?
- gruez 2y agoaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential
- lotsofpulp 2y agoAka supply and demand.
- BurningFrog 2y agoThis is typical of "cool" jobs. A lot of people grow up as anime fans and want to work with it. With high supply comes lowered prices. Something similar happens in (cool) computer games programming compared to (dull) regular SWE jobs.
- ghaff 2y agoIt happens anywhere that people will basically work for free if they can. Even where you have guilds and unions that try to set a certain floor--e.g. with films in the US--it's only somewhat effective in that the floors are fairly low and people will still wait tables to try to get their big break.
- layer8 2y agoThere is some parallel to CG artists around Hollywood, despite Hollywood making vastly more money than anime studios.
- booleandilemma 2y agoThat seems to always be the case, doesn't it? "While there seems to be a lot of money in X, the $people_providing_value are underpaid and highly overworked" They always let themselves get shafted.
- Trasmatta 2y agoIt's a spectrum though, and anime studios are on the very upper end.
- rldjbpin 2y agosimilar story for video games. common area being that both industries tend to have significant amount of passionate creators that would happy work this way. however, do note that people in anime have a trade union unlike most game devs outside of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Animation_Creators_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Animation_Creators_As...). maybe it starts to make more sense why the gaming arm of a16z wrote this. besides the overlap, there seems to be many things that work similarly between the two industries.