7 ms·

The disappearance of Japan's animators

192 points by andsoitis 5mo ago

https://archive.ph/aPMAr https://archive.ph/aPMAr

wavemode 4mo ago
https://archive.ph/aPMAr https://archive.ph/aPMAr
- AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago
  Thanks!
jdw64 4mo ago
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/ https://nafca.jp/news20241226/ [2]https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000004.000121993.html https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000004.000121993.html
- RobKohr 4mo ago
  So basically they get paid peanuts and are overworked and so no one wants to do it. Also seems like something AI could really cut into. You could have a master animator doing much of important thoughtful work and AI filling in the obvious as well as doing tweening (sound similar to programming) Really, who needs a studio if you have the creative talent and ability to leverage AI for the grunt work. Or have a couple grunt work humans paid these rates to manage the tedious work of leveraging the AI to make it look seamless.
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    You're not wrong. But there is a common perception that we value things made by humans more. The problem is that grunt work actually serves as a pipeline for industrial training. Even with AI, the distribution of value doesn't get resolved automatically. Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society. Of course, I admit my thinking is quite old-fashioned. This educational model could change. But I'm not sure whether that would be good in the long run. It could be beneficial in the long term. Humans evolve, after all. I'll reserve judgment on that part.
    - mschuster91 4mo ago
      > Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society. It's not just educational. The more thinking you offload to AI, the more your own skills degrade [1] - and it makes sense, intuitively. If you repeat tasks, you gain experience and get good at it... but if you cease that repetition, eventually your skills break down. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
    - TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
jmclnx 4mo ago
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.
- KyleTheDev 4mo ago
  It'll be very interesting reading future studies on how this has negatively impacted entire generations. Hopefully people realize that you need to pay younger people living wages to learn skills, if they want people to have those skills in the future.
  - michaelrpeskin 4mo ago
    My (probably unpopular here) opinion is just the opposite. We need more of an apprenticeship model where you're not paid a bunch because you're still learning, and you probably bring negative-to-zero value initially. When a fresh-out-of-college junior engineer brings in SV style money, the expectation should be that they already know what they're doing. In the trades you start off low pay because you're generally more in the way than helpful, but then you gain the experience and knowledge to be valuable. Even the resident-doctor relationship is like this. Resident are overworked and poorly paid because they are more distracting than the value they add, then there's the big reward at the end. The grad-student/professor model is kind of like this too except for all the pyramid scheme stuff that happens there. I think most technical fields need to go to this model where the newbie commits to learning and trying to be valuable instead of rest-and-vest. And then once they're valuable they get paid more in proportion to the value they bring to the field. In my small company we had to switch about 5 years ago to only hiring folks with lots of experience (10-15 years). We tried hiring younger fresh-out-of-college engineers, but "market rate" was too high and they required too much attention from senior staff and it made us unsustainably unproductive. We wanted to mentor and teach the next generation, but we couldn't afford it.
world2vec 4mo ago
Anime has never been more popular but honestly its quality has declined a lot. It's all isekai and supernatural-sexy-schoolgirl-whatever (kinda creepy) these days. Or the same old animes that go on forever. Every year there's less and less animes that are worth the time to watch IMHO.
- TheRealPomax 4mo ago
  Funny, that was already true in 2006. It's the thing people keep saying, and yet anime keeps coming out. Right now they're stuck in the whole "ten shows from the same budget, each run by their own 'committee' and each competing for cash that runs out well before the show's over, and the poor performance very quickly get less per episode". Great for networks, shit for shows. Even worse for animators who need to get paid a living wage.
  - world2vec 4mo ago
    A cursory glance of anime tv shows released in 2006 and there's a lot of good things I'd watch again: Honey & Clover, Kemonozume, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, etc. In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.
    - puzzlingcaptcha 4mo ago
      Akane Banashi was probably the best directed show this season.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - HaloZero 4mo ago
      Higurashi when they cry does the whole concept of time reset well (2006). Trigun sequel is coming out this year. 2026 titles have caught on that trend of a really long specific title though. “The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life” I think anime is a big enough category that every year there’s always at least a few good ones but it’s hard to get good signal to noise. But the whole tiny girl thing is 100% a trend that’s stuck around.
hiccuphippo 4mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc
- AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago
  Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.
  - a-french-anon 4mo ago
    Even if we're still far from the golden age, Dandadan (Science SARU; though I've heard the sheer effort bankrupted them) and the recent Witch Hat Atelier (Bug Films) are quite nice to behold. Some modern romcoms like Kaguya-sama (A-1 Pictures) and The Dangers in My Heart (Shin-Ei) were nicely done too. Things are obviously not going in the right direction, but the current accelerated fall in quality the consumer sees is more influenced by general unwillingness to spend and/or take risks from bean counting production committees.
    - gwern 4mo ago
      The phrase 'production committee' appears only once in OP, with no discussion of the implications or how they work or how they change things compared to TV network monoposonies. Disappointingly superficial. It just repeats a lot of random salary or wage or working hour statistics and anecdotes without ever - puzzling for a piece in the Economist! - asking how this market operates, why it keeps going like this, and why rational self-interested actors avoid raising animator salaries or investing more in them or even increasing headcount, under circumstances like the current boom, which Econ 101 would predict results in a corresponding boom in animator populations and salaries...
      - 4mo ago
rendaw 4mo ago
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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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.
otaconjh 4mo ago
We know where all the animators are, Mappa has them chained in the basement working on the next JJK season /s
hibikir 4mo ago
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.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
yomismoaqui 4mo ago
Just today I saw this on Twitter a good example of how AI should be used for animation. https://x.com/i/trending/2069856897738387754 https://x.com/i/trending/2069856897738387754
- punkbit 4mo ago
  This is actually impressive. If it can output each frame as layers, even more.
punkbit 4mo ago
Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.
- perching_aix 4mo ago
  I'm sure some people believe that genAI outputs look the same as manmade ones. But for most, I think it's pretty clear that they just find them passable enough / not meaningfully different instead (or maybe even interesting in their own way). That is not the same thing: it's not that they don't notice, it's that they do notice but don't mind it. They're not being fooled, as there is no trick from their prespective. The differences were simply never a concern for them to begin with. There isn't even anything wrong with that per se [0]. I can also appreciate how a significant chunk of such images would make someone wince though, but I find it more than a bit confused to then bring up "proper craftsmanship" as the contrast. There's an incredible amount of extremely mediocre illustrations, anime, and other related work, that were made without any genAI tooling. High effort is reserved for the probable hits. Anime is especially teeming with extremely cookie cutter productions, and heavily overused tropes in saturated genres. I don't think the absolute chokehold that the high school romcom and isekai fantasy genres have on recent seasons needs much introduction. You can often just take one glance at a promotion visual and already identify both the genre and the quality right away. Cue the big 3DCG enemy on episode 1 (or 2). It's also hard to reconcile this with the fundamental fact that the audience of these works is the mass market. Mass market targeting things are inherently bound by mass market sensibilities. Willingly not adopting a breakthrough technology - provided it is actually that - is about as far from proper craftsmanship in such context as it can be. So is being a one trick pony and sticking to an older fad. Making something good while locked away in an ivory tower is one thing. Making something good while simultaneously riding out the wave of actual real world circumstances is another [1]. I respect the latter a whole lot more than the former. Especially since the latter tends to devolve into self-abuse contests, to round off the self serving tendencies they inherently carried anyway. Code golf is a positive example for this. High art, maybe not so much. I really don't see any reason to go on ideological adventures like this anyhow. You can just not like it, find it cringe, and leave it at that. It does not need some big philosophical undercurrent to suck. It can just look like garbage, be used lazily, and suck that way. And others can simply just disagree with those labels applying. [0] A friend recently showed me their expensive sunglasses collection. They are indisputably expensive indeed. They are also the same cheap-feeling finnicky garbage as every other pair of sunglasses I've ever encountered. One can appreciate the expertise of someone who can recognize them as expensive, sure. But I think it says a whole lot more that the average person cannot. It's a sign of deep, long running cultural recursion, not unlike how when an LLM is fed LLM text, it degenerates. [1] Could the average run of the mill show maybe look better and be more animated using genAI than they currently are? I definitely think they might just.
frmersdog 4mo ago
Hey, hi, yoohoo whistles. Everyone gather 'round and reread this part: Lacking proper training and a viable salary, many young animators don’t feel they can keep going. The Japan Research Institute estimated that a quarter of them quit the industry within four years, and two-thirds in eight years. This retention problem has often been viewed as a form of natural selection. “I think this way of thinking is misguided,” said Sudo Tadashi, the author of two books about the anime industry. “Truly brilliant” animators are needed for roles like director and character designer, but without enough “adequately good” animators—particularly in-betweeners—the industry wouldn’t be able to function. “I don’t think a field where only top-level talent could stay on is a good place,” Sudo said. The question, then, is how to create an environment that helps more people become “adequately good”. You might think that this article is just about Japanese animators, but it's also about the state of the job economy and the careers of several generations of workers in the developed world, globally. The obsession with per-worker productivity - of only ever hiring the 10xer - is how you get here. The grunt work still has to be done, of course. As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea). This is not a new phenomenon; I don't think the article mentioned it, but a large part of the growth of the expertise of Japanese animators in the 20th century was the work that they got that was outsourced from the US. Go ahead and look through the staff/production lists of your favorite childhood cartoons - particularly holiday specials - from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You'll be surprised what you find (or not).
- bilbo0s 4mo ago
  >As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea) Good news! You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak. /s I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level. Because if you think the present where the "1%" refers to the group of people to whom the lion's share of resources in society accrue is bad; imagine a future where the "1%" refers to a group that are the only people any given government and steward class need to keep everything running.
Narushia 4mo ago
The archive.ph link gives me a looping CAPTCHA…
hyfgfh 4mo ago
Teachers, nurses, game developers ... Companies get away with paying less because they can exploit the "passion" or intrinsic rewards that the jobs give
- Ekaros 4mo ago
  Teachers and nurses get paid poorly because in general voters do no want to be taxed. And these areas have low efficiency gains. Pretty similar ratio of workers to those taken care have stayed around for long time.

192 points by andsoitis 5mo ago

https://archive.ph/aPMAr https://archive.ph/aPMAr

wavemode 4mo ago

https://archive.ph/aPMAr https://archive.ph/aPMAr

AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago
Thanks!

jdw64 4mo ago

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/ https://nafca.jp/news20241226/ [2]https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000004.000121993.html https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000004.000121993.html

RobKohr 4mo ago
So basically they get paid peanuts and are overworked and so no one wants to do it. Also seems like something AI could really cut into. You could have a master animator doing much of important thoughtful work and AI filling in the obvious as well as doing tweening (sound similar to programming) Really, who needs a studio if you have the creative talent and ability to leverage AI for the grunt work. Or have a couple grunt work humans paid these rates to manage the tedious work of leveraging the AI to make it look seamless.
- jdw64 4mo ago
  You're not wrong. But there is a common perception that we value things made by humans more. The problem is that grunt work actually serves as a pipeline for industrial training. Even with AI, the distribution of value doesn't get resolved automatically. Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society. Of course, I admit my thinking is quite old-fashioned. This educational model could change. But I'm not sure whether that would be good in the long run. It could be beneficial in the long term. Humans evolve, after all. I'll reserve judgment on that part.
  - mschuster91 4mo ago
    > Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society. It's not just educational. The more thinking you offload to AI, the more your own skills degrade [1] - and it makes sense, intuitively. If you repeat tasks, you gain experience and get good at it... but if you cease that repetition, eventually your skills break down. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6 https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
  - TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago

jmclnx 4mo ago

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.

KyleTheDev 4mo ago
It'll be very interesting reading future studies on how this has negatively impacted entire generations. Hopefully people realize that you need to pay younger people living wages to learn skills, if they want people to have those skills in the future.
- michaelrpeskin 4mo ago
  My (probably unpopular here) opinion is just the opposite. We need more of an apprenticeship model where you're not paid a bunch because you're still learning, and you probably bring negative-to-zero value initially. When a fresh-out-of-college junior engineer brings in SV style money, the expectation should be that they already know what they're doing. In the trades you start off low pay because you're generally more in the way than helpful, but then you gain the experience and knowledge to be valuable. Even the resident-doctor relationship is like this. Resident are overworked and poorly paid because they are more distracting than the value they add, then there's the big reward at the end. The grad-student/professor model is kind of like this too except for all the pyramid scheme stuff that happens there. I think most technical fields need to go to this model where the newbie commits to learning and trying to be valuable instead of rest-and-vest. And then once they're valuable they get paid more in proportion to the value they bring to the field. In my small company we had to switch about 5 years ago to only hiring folks with lots of experience (10-15 years). We tried hiring younger fresh-out-of-college engineers, but "market rate" was too high and they required too much attention from senior staff and it made us unsustainably unproductive. We wanted to mentor and teach the next generation, but we couldn't afford it.

world2vec 4mo ago

Anime has never been more popular but honestly its quality has declined a lot. It's all isekai and supernatural-sexy-schoolgirl-whatever (kinda creepy) these days. Or the same old animes that go on forever. Every year there's less and less animes that are worth the time to watch IMHO.

TheRealPomax 4mo ago
Funny, that was already true in 2006. It's the thing people keep saying, and yet anime keeps coming out. Right now they're stuck in the whole "ten shows from the same budget, each run by their own 'committee' and each competing for cash that runs out well before the show's over, and the poor performance very quickly get less per episode". Great for networks, shit for shows. Even worse for animators who need to get paid a living wage.
- world2vec 4mo ago
  A cursory glance of anime tv shows released in 2006 and there's a lot of good things I'd watch again: Honey & Clover, Kemonozume, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, etc. In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.
  - puzzlingcaptcha 4mo ago
    Akane Banashi was probably the best directed show this season.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - HaloZero 4mo ago
    Higurashi when they cry does the whole concept of time reset well (2006). Trigun sequel is coming out this year. 2026 titles have caught on that trend of a really long specific title though. “The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life” I think anime is a big enough category that every year there’s always at least a few good ones but it’s hard to get good signal to noise. But the whole tiny girl thing is 100% a trend that’s stuck around.

hiccuphippo 4mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

AdmiralAsshat 4mo ago
Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.
- a-french-anon 4mo ago
  Even if we're still far from the golden age, Dandadan (Science SARU; though I've heard the sheer effort bankrupted them) and the recent Witch Hat Atelier (Bug Films) are quite nice to behold. Some modern romcoms like Kaguya-sama (A-1 Pictures) and The Dangers in My Heart (Shin-Ei) were nicely done too. Things are obviously not going in the right direction, but the current accelerated fall in quality the consumer sees is more influenced by general unwillingness to spend and/or take risks from bean counting production committees.
  - gwern 4mo ago
    The phrase 'production committee' appears only once in OP, with no discussion of the implications or how they work or how they change things compared to TV network monoposonies. Disappointingly superficial. It just repeats a lot of random salary or wage or working hour statistics and anecdotes without ever - puzzling for a piece in the Economist! - asking how this market operates, why it keeps going like this, and why rational self-interested actors avoid raising animator salaries or investing more in them or even increasing headcount, under circumstances like the current boom, which Econ 101 would predict results in a corresponding boom in animator populations and salaries...
    - 4mo ago

rendaw 4mo ago

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. --- 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. --- 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. --- 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.

otaconjh 4mo ago

We know where all the animators are, Mappa has them chained in the basement working on the next JJK season /s

hibikir 4mo ago

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.

deleted 4mo ago

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yomismoaqui 4mo ago

Just today I saw this on Twitter a good example of how AI should be used for animation. https://x.com/i/trending/2069856897738387754 https://x.com/i/trending/2069856897738387754

punkbit 4mo ago
This is actually impressive. If it can output each frame as layers, even more.

punkbit 4mo ago

Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.

perching_aix 4mo ago
I'm sure some people believe that genAI outputs look the same as manmade ones. But for most, I think it's pretty clear that they just find them passable enough / not meaningfully different instead (or maybe even interesting in their own way). That is not the same thing: it's not that they don't notice, it's that they do notice but don't mind it. They're not being fooled, as there is no trick from their prespective. The differences were simply never a concern for them to begin with. There isn't even anything wrong with that per se [0]. I can also appreciate how a significant chunk of such images would make someone wince though, but I find it more than a bit confused to then bring up "proper craftsmanship" as the contrast. There's an incredible amount of extremely mediocre illustrations, anime, and other related work, that were made without any genAI tooling. High effort is reserved for the probable hits. Anime is especially teeming with extremely cookie cutter productions, and heavily overused tropes in saturated genres. I don't think the absolute chokehold that the high school romcom and isekai fantasy genres have on recent seasons needs much introduction. You can often just take one glance at a promotion visual and already identify both the genre and the quality right away. Cue the big 3DCG enemy on episode 1 (or 2). It's also hard to reconcile this with the fundamental fact that the audience of these works is the mass market. Mass market targeting things are inherently bound by mass market sensibilities. Willingly not adopting a breakthrough technology - provided it is actually that - is about as far from proper craftsmanship in such context as it can be. So is being a one trick pony and sticking to an older fad. Making something good while locked away in an ivory tower is one thing. Making something good while simultaneously riding out the wave of actual real world circumstances is another [1]. I respect the latter a whole lot more than the former. Especially since the latter tends to devolve into self-abuse contests, to round off the self serving tendencies they inherently carried anyway. Code golf is a positive example for this. High art, maybe not so much. I really don't see any reason to go on ideological adventures like this anyhow. You can just not like it, find it cringe, and leave it at that. It does not need some big philosophical undercurrent to suck. It can just look like garbage, be used lazily, and suck that way. And others can simply just disagree with those labels applying. [0] A friend recently showed me their expensive sunglasses collection. They are indisputably expensive indeed. They are also the same cheap-feeling finnicky garbage as every other pair of sunglasses I've ever encountered. One can appreciate the expertise of someone who can recognize them as expensive, sure. But I think it says a whole lot more that the average person cannot. It's a sign of deep, long running cultural recursion, not unlike how when an LLM is fed LLM text, it degenerates. [1] Could the average run of the mill show maybe look better and be more animated using genAI than they currently are? I definitely think they might just.

frmersdog 4mo ago

Hey, hi, yoohoo whistles. Everyone gather 'round and reread this part: Lacking proper training and a viable salary, many young animators don’t feel they can keep going. The Japan Research Institute estimated that a quarter of them quit the industry within four years, and two-thirds in eight years. This retention problem has often been viewed as a form of natural selection. “I think this way of thinking is misguided,” said Sudo Tadashi, the author of two books about the anime industry. “Truly brilliant” animators are needed for roles like director and character designer, but without enough “adequately good” animators—particularly in-betweeners—the industry wouldn’t be able to function. “I don’t think a field where only top-level talent could stay on is a good place,” Sudo said. The question, then, is how to create an environment that helps more people become “adequately good”. You might think that this article is just about Japanese animators, but it's also about the state of the job economy and the careers of several generations of workers in the developed world, globally. The obsession with per-worker productivity - of only ever hiring the 10xer - is how you get here. The grunt work still has to be done, of course. As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea). This is not a new phenomenon; I don't think the article mentioned it, but a large part of the growth of the expertise of Japanese animators in the 20th century was the work that they got that was outsourced from the US. Go ahead and look through the staff/production lists of your favorite childhood cartoons - particularly holiday specials - from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You'll be surprised what you find (or not).

bilbo0s 4mo ago
>As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea) Good news! You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak. /s I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level. Because if you think the present where the "1%" refers to the group of people to whom the lion's share of resources in society accrue is bad; imagine a future where the "1%" refers to a group that are the only people any given government and steward class need to keep everything running.

Narushia 4mo ago

The archive.ph link gives me a looping CAPTCHA…

hyfgfh 4mo ago

Teachers, nurses, game developers ... Companies get away with paying less because they can exploit the "passion" or intrinsic rewards that the jobs give

Ekaros 4mo ago
Teachers and nurses get paid poorly because in general voters do no want to be taxed. And these areas have low efficiency gains. Pretty similar ratio of workers to those taken care have stayed around for long time.