Could the American animation industry thrive if it were to switch to an anime production pipeline?

Could the American animation industry thrive if it were to switch to an anime production pipeline?

>Shows have music industry deals to use existing songs for intros to help promote them
>Animation done before voice recording
>Episodes are in production while the series is in the middle of broadcasting. Mistakes are fixed on DVD releases
>Dependent on DVD sales more than TV broadcast and commercial support
>Animators are paid on per drawing basis

Other urls found in this thread:

cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/japans-animation-industry-isnt-just-tough-its-illegally-harsh-110074.html
goboiano.com/average-anime-industry-salaries-past-year/
crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/11/19/a-shirobako-guide-to-anime-industry-salaries
anime-now.com/entry/2017/06/18/230038
youtube.com/watch?v=CdJf-SOMcQg
youtube.com/watch?v=7LgHOUTZ8Gc
a.safe.moe/6SOGG.webm
youtu.be/px8aiW3GEME
youtu.be/6ApWkuYg6d8
youtube.com/watch?v=DZGN9fZvQhc
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

No.

No we treat our animators too well to subject to that bullshit. Also the music industry in America is too far up its own ass to contract music out the way Japan does.

Americans
Don't like
Comics
And cartoons

At least, not a fraction as much as Japan does. I think a lot of it has to do with how important comics are to Japan; the anime industry being as big as it is an outgrowth of that (there's a reason 60% of the biggest names in anime is manga adaptations)

But americans like rap music.
I guarantee if some random cartoon had some single off kendrick's new album that shit would put the other channels out of business off sheer exposure alone.

>The only time we'll get adaptations of comics is if they're done in live-action shit

Fucking hurts.

No. The anime production and sales model is pretty terrible and relies on a) being able to work everyone involved to the bone for next to nothing in salary, and b) a niche willing to throw down obscene amounts of money on overpriced BDs and merch. It's not really healthy, and probably not going to remain sustainable in the long run.

However, I think there's a lot we could stand to learn. We can stop jerking off storyboarders and put more emphasis on individual animators (storyboarders are important, but the storyboarders-runnning-the-asylum model of Adventure Time and Steven Universe has been disastrous for tonal and visual consistency). Setting higher standards (most QUALITY looks better than Summer Camp Island). Finally, pushing for variety - for all the shit anime that gets pumped out, hundreds of new shows are released every year. Even if most of the selections are garbage, there's bound to be something for everyone, and it gives visionary directors and writers room to experiment. Meanwhile, in America, it feels like we get 10 or so new high profile shows a year if we're lucky.

The last great Sup Forums show was Over The Garden Wall. It's been 4 years already. The Japanese model is fucked, but at least they're getting something out of it.

There are things to learn from Japan, but it's not possible to simply "switch" to Japan's model, for the most part. It's a product of Japan's unique circumstances.

The animation is done by Koreans. I have never been able to find data on how much they are paid.

The biggest offender is just that the american media networks are obsessed with owning all stages of a production to make sure it fits in the network's image, and to cash in on the IP in the future.
Japanese animation is more of a loose patchwork, which isn't terribly efficient at times, but makes for higher mobility and competition.
Disc sales are becoming a thing of the past, the japs are moving from 2 episode discs to 3 or 4 to reduce the marginal costs of printing and logistics.

The system has its downsides but it's still a good system overall (for Japan), and has room for improvement. Blu-rays are overpriced, but merchandise, music and books aren't.

>Dependent on DVD sales more than TV broadcast and commercial support

What the fuck is this, the 90s? Put them on demand. Measure success by reproductions.

>10 or so new high profile shows a year if we're lucky.
More like two or three.

In this hypothetical plan of yours, where is the production funding coming from?

If the answer is still the same networks and corporations, then you don't understand and haven't addressed the actual problem.

I take some solace in the fact that no matter how terrible and stagnant the american animation industry may be, it will always, without fail, be better than the anime industry. The day we become more like japan is the day western animation is truly dead.

By what standards is it better?

These are all terrible ideas that undermind people that work in animation. Nobody wants a product that on first impression was half-assed so that it can be fixed after the fact, even though the demand is immediate. Let composers, actors, distributors and animators do their damn jobs.

>being able to work everyone involved to the bone for next to nothing in salary
it's kind of funny now that i think about it. This statement has been repeated for ages and it has become it's own meme by this point, but actually, how much of this is actually true? How much do they get paid (in contrast to the living cost of the areas where the studios reside) and how much do they actually have to work? Not to mention, does that "rumor" only is for korea outsourcing or even japanese inhouse animators?

I start to feel like people only repeat this statement because it has been said by everyone for decades now, not because anyone in the last 10 years actually bothered to look up some facts

Is there a CalArts equivalent in Tokyo? I feel like the fact that 90% of our animation artists are already severely in debt by the time they enter the workforce makes it impossible to do anything differently. Japanese artists can work for peanuts because I assume they aren't saddled with $90k+ in loans once they land their first animation gig. They can live on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis while animators need double the load just to meet monthly loan payments.

Unless I'm totally wrong and art education is just as fucked over there.

cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/japans-animation-industry-isnt-just-tough-its-illegally-harsh-110074.html

This article is only a couple of years old and I have to imagine it's still true for a lot of studios over there.

No

There's nothing with giving board artist power, but we got to stop pretending that they can write. If time permits, animators should be allowed to make scenes that aren't tied to the storyboard.

So what you're saying is that cartoons would thrive if they blow most of their already meager budgets on broadcasting rights for licensed music (let's not even get in to the nightmare that'd be distribution rights)?.

Alternatively, goboiano.com/average-anime-industry-salaries-past-year/
crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/11/19/a-shirobako-guide-to-anime-industry-salaries
anime-now.com/entry/2017/06/18/230038

Take your pick.

Why don't we just outsource animation over to Japan if they're so dirt cheap. Are Korean wages really worse than this? I mean, how do you get cheaper than $800 a month for an inbetweener?

Deals with record companies don't undermine anyone. Selling BDs doesn't undermine anyone. Doing voice recording after animation provides less flexibility for the actors but more for everyone else.

Pic related was taken from a Sakugabooru post from 2017 or 2016. Some people make little money, others make a reasonable amount. Something the chart doesn't reveal is that many people do more than one job, so their pay varies. For example an animator does an animation direction gig or storyboarding. In-betweening is also considered a training phase, not something you keep doing (which is itself a problem for different reasons).

In America there is the opposite problem: people are paid way too much.

anime is not a lucrative business in japan.

And then there was that one episode of the Kirby anime where they more or less took a shit on the animation industry in Japan

youtube.com/watch?v=CdJf-SOMcQg

i've looked at all the links, and honestly, it doesn't sound that bad at all. I would gladly give up anything i have now and go work there if i were good enough. Granted i am pretty poor, thus my standards are quite low, but still. And as said, there is opportunity to rise in your career

This was one of my favorite episodes as a kid. I love cartoon episodes where they're making a cartoon.

Do it. Buy a one way airplane ticket.

I've never heard of any issues like that in Japan, and you don't even need to study art to get an animation job. You just have to be good. People have been recruited into key animation positions based on work they posted on the internet. Some Sakugabooru article even talked about someone who started key animating before he was 18.

Japan is already overloaded with their own work, and I don't think there's any benefit to doing outsourcing work for foreign productions.

It was worth over $17 billion in 2016.

Well it's the same as any entertainment industry job: It's a shit living for years with shit pay and a lot of unpaid overtime, with the only thing keeping you going being the idea that hopefully some day you'll beat out the literally hundreds of other people going through the exact same thing that you are and actually make a career out of it. It's a job that you *have* to have passion for, because passion will be the only thing stopping you from jumping in front of a train when you wake up every morning to get back to it.

What do you do right now and what qualifications (Degrees, certifications, etc) did you need for your position?

I work at a conveniencestore, the typical Job artist do when they can't work off on their art alone. I work 30 hours a week for roughly 350$ in a job i hate and do 300$ with my art(which is fetish porn of fetishes i also don't like). Living cost here are roughly 650$ thus i barely scrap by each month doing things i don't like to do

It's true but presented under misleading contexts. What we should be looking at is the percentage of profit that goes towards employee pay. The wage of a Japanese entry level inbetweener may seem awful, but when you consider anime budgets are probably 1/10th that of an average American show, they're compensated more fairly than American animators on a profit-sharing basis.

Pay equitability is actually repeated throughout most of Japan's industries. The Japanese CEO earns 90 times the average salary of his employees, while in the US it's closer to 300 times.

Deals with record companies undermine professional composers and musician independent from that system. Waiting on blurays when consumers are already downloading undermines the creatives that would rather get their best work done on a reasonable timeline instead of being rushed and having the world already see their worse. Asking animator work without an audio track undermines them and the VAs who mostly prefer flexibility. Add to that now animators having to do more work (because of no audio track) and paying them based on what they have done, on the kind of tight schedule that anime in run on, is a big "fuck you" to them.

Record companies provide opening, ending and insert themes. There is still a composer (or several), and some composers also produce vocal tracks including openings and endings, like Yuki Kajiura and Hiroyuki Sawano. The artists that do music for anime are mostly not big names and there's many artists that have built their careers around anime.

>Waiting on blurays when consumers are already downloading undermines the creatives that would rather get their best work done on a reasonable timeline instead of being rushed and having the world already see their worse.
Rushed schedules are a problem, not a feature, and not all shows have to have any fixes done for the BDs. BDs provide some kind of a safety net, and it's not like there weren't quality issues before late night anime.

>Asking animator work without an audio track undermines them and the VAs who mostly prefer flexibility.
Animators can work more freely when they don't need to sync to an audio track, and doing voices before animation means you have to have storyboard animatics ready and all lines recorded before you can start animating. That delays production.

>Dependent on DVD sales
Do people even buy the DVDs anymore?

DVDs not so much, BDs yes. But sales are declining.

>storyboarders are important, but the storyboarders-runnning-the-asylum model of Adventure Time and Steven Universe has been disastrous for tonal and visual consistency

Haven't heard about this one, how do they differ from a normal storyboard artist who just does exactly what is told during a board meeting of writers and producers, or the second type who just gets a huge fucking script in front of them and are tasked to get all of the storyboard done with a strict deadline?

I've done the latter myself a couple of times, for animated tv ads

>Dependent on DVD sales more than TV broadcast and commercial support

And this is a good thing because...?

Animating based on nothing is a bigger waste of time. Voice tracks not only help animators but board artists. It's just more efficient, lets the actors do their jobs as they prefer and lets animators and board artists work effectively. It take less time to record pickups than to revise a storyboard/animation.

The studio and partners would get next to nothinf by doing that.
Also while other anons are paetially right, disc sales are important, nowadays anime bank more on merch sales than anything. Even the discs usually have some special edition box or some limited bonus to make them nore attractive to the fanbase and collectors.

That's why OP brought up music deals I believe, singles are one of the big attractives. That's how a show like Symphogear became such a commercial success, due to how many singles it sells, tickets to concerts galiven away with blurays, and so on.

Storyboarding is done before voice acting, and the boards have to be finished and turned into animatics so the voice actors can record their lines. Animation can't start until this is done, and this causes delays. The animators have to time the voices regardless, and the animation is not going to be done in one central location which causes logistical problems because everyone needs to be given the audio recordings. Gathering voice actors for a retake is more of a pain and an expense than just having someone adjust the animation.

Maybe if american shows mostly followed a script instead of relying so heavily on adlibbing with the fucking director voicing half the cast and changing the script to fit whatever funny thing he said on the booth doing animation before the voice recording wouldn't be such a big problem.

I feel like there are two ways to improve the industry:
The first is to find a way to create high quality animation on the cheap (through new technology or software or something)

The second is for ONE super successful high budget animation to be made, thus convincing studios that it's worthwhile to pour money into animation.

I'm not sure which of these two is least likely.

be honest
when was the last time you bought official cartoon merch?

A simple "no Motion Tween allowed"-office rule would elevate the quality of a lot of shows.

>The second is for ONE super successful high budget animation to be made, thus convincing studios that it's worthwhile to pour money into animation.
That was done in the 90's with quite a few cartoons, most notably Ducktales, and because of lack of the internet, pirating, and streaming stealing away views it was able to be a financial success.

It's impossible for a cartoon TV network formats to have million dollar budgets like before unless it's something like Simpsons or Family Guy. We have to see how Netflix treats animation in the future to see if whether or not there is a place for high budget cartoons.

>The first is to find a way to create high quality animation on the cheap (through new technology or software or something)
Mercury Filmworks is doing a fucking stellar job at making quality looking animation while utilizing Toonboom tools and puppet rigs. All the shows they've been doing for Disney look pretty damn good for low budget cartoons.

By that logic wouldn't music videos have been so successful MTV never would've switched to it's current 99% reality TV format?

no, an it will never happen, maybe korean anime, but japanese anime its basically zombie anime at this point over 80% of it is crap and the rest is good just because is copying what has done before, but adding plottwists at the middle or just plain shock value.

The first redpill is realizing that money isn't the answer, after a certain point.

>at this point over 80% of it is crap
Sturgeon's law says 90.

None of this is true. Sup Forums posts are not a substitute for actually watching anime.

Adventure Time and Steven Universe don't have a team of scriptwriters. The storyboard artists ARE the writers. This was pioneered with Flapjack and worked well in that case but evidently doesn't work on all productions. Key elements might include strong leadership, frequent check-ups/supervision, story meetings and a crew that are stylistically strongly unified in taste.

According to Rebecca Sugar though Adventure Time lacked strong centralized vision and the storyboard artists pretty much did their own thing and didn't know what the others were doing. Worth noting the original show-runner left long before the show concluded (I think he did three seasons) so this might have affected things. It is possible Sugar is recreating that environment in SU, perhaps to its detriment. Without being there it is hard to say. Evidently Sugar has a vision for Steven Universe but she might not be experienced enough to lead a a team, or perhaps her hires were bad picks that can't be corralled properly.

before 2004 there was some good stuff, more mediocre stuff, and a lot of crap stuff, that only people that watched ALL anime would watch,

now its like one or two good stuff a year, some mediocre stuff, and the rest is pure garbage.

most anime were watchable back then.

>All this talk about how to make more cartoons
>Not realizing the cartoons are probably the single most inefficient format for storytelling
>The anime industry is largely the byproduct of cross media production, intended as a means by which to market source material (manga, light novels, games) and sell merchandise

Comics are the answer. I'm not even sure I buy the notion that Americans don't read, because fuck, look at all the YA garbage that sells. That stuff's basically the same as light novels, maybe slightly less perverted. And it's not like manga has trouble selling, especially when it's got an anime attached, which ties into my first point

Again not true.

>Animators are paid on per drawing basis
KEY Animators, and then the rest is done by Korean/Chinese/Taiwanese Animation sweatshops, the exception being actually your image with KyoAni paying their inhouse animator an actual Salary unlike the per-key frame drawing basis

I can assure you that voice recording is done BEFORE animatics are. Voice actors go into a booth with a script, not an animatic. The sound has to be timed and mixed into the animatics in order to be cut into scenes for the animators. You can't expect an animator to make up work only for it to be scrapped when an approved animatic comes in. Also it's not hard to schedule and actor for a pickup and it cost far less to have them redub the scene than to reanimate it.

What people really need to understand is that there is a separation between the people who decide to commission an adaptation and the people who actually produce the adaptation, and that an anime is not somehow illegitimate just because it's an adaptation of something. Original anime is a thing too, and there is more of it than people seem to realize. There's also nothing wrong with selling merchandise. You need money to make animation and the money has to come from somewhere.

In-betweening is still very much done in Japan and is still treated as a way to train new animators.

I'm talking about the anime industry, not the US industry.

They actually make a really REALLY rought animation of the whole thing, voice it a test run, see if they change stuff, change stuff if they want so and once they get the final idea, then reshot the voice acting parts and then it goes into the animation part
youtube.com/watch?v=7LgHOUTZ8Gc

If that were the case, Titmouse would've had better luck.

"not true" isnt an argument.

>Titmouse would've had better luck
What happened to Titmouse? I thought they were slowly climbing the ladder as being a high profile animation studio. The amount of productions they get has been increasing more and more.

Neither is anything what those posts said since they're completely divorced from reality. The problem with the Western anime community is that basically nobody watches anime and they keep expecting anime to be not like anime because they don't really like anime.

>I thought they were slowly climbing the ladder as being a high profile animation studio.
They are. But as far as their business model, if it's about convincing people to pour money into animation, they should be getting more work or other studios would be be following suit instead of trying to undercut one another for the cheapest bid.

meanwhile in the west animators can afford putting a show on a hiatus for several months while doing basically nothing because you're only responsible for that show, and once you get around making an episode you just drag character skeleton around and pretend you're an animator

That the fault of the distributors, not the animators.

I'd say it's still mostly mediocre and even back then it was juat a couple of really good shows per year, it's more that everythong was fresh and seemingly original to you 15 years ago, and now you've seen enough and are jaded enough the mediocre stuff looks worse to your eyes.

>Could the American animation industry thrive if it were to switch to an anime production pipeline?
Yes, and it would involve paying the storyboard artists less. But then those wouldn't be able to afford living in their bloated utopia nightmare known as California, and then we'd have strikes

>The problem with the Western anime community is that basically nobody watches anime and they keep expecting anime to be not like anime because they don't really like anime.
This is very true. Not only for anime but for Japanese media general. I wish I got a penny every time I see see a discussion about Visual Novels as a medium by people who barely consume, don't really understand and don't really enjoy the medium outside of the few works that make their selling point to be very different from conventional or achieve meme status.

>Animation done before voice recording
Why in the world would you want this? Western animation stands out in that sense...
>Shows have music industry deals to use existing songs for intros to help promote them
Yeah, let's not write unique, meaningful cartoon themes anymore and reuse whatever the music "industry" just shat out instead!

Hell no.

OP is a little wrong about that. The songs in anime are not pre-existing licensed ones, they're made for the anime. In some cases they could be songs that are still in the pipeline and are chosen for the anime but not specifically made for it.

Sup Forums- barely disguised Sup Forums threads

>Yeah, let's not write unique, meaningful cartoon themes anymore and reuse whatever the music "industry" just shat out instead!
Well, OP is wrong anywayon the sensebthat anime doesn't recycle musoc that is out, it gets new/upcoming songs from either popular ones or ones the label is trying to make popular.
And while I see your point, there's two things to take in consideration:
- That only applies to openings and endings, in-show soundtrack is still done by a composer attached to the project.
- That partnership does allow for show specific themes to be comissioned, as making music for anime became viable. You still have lots of show specific themes and insert songs, as the labels have people fpcused on doing anime music on their catalogue to cater to that.
A lot of shows also have specific artists who alwaya work with them and having the associated record label doesn't affect much outside of distribution.
People in this thread seem to think there's no original music in anime due to record labels when thatis far from the truth. If anything the last decade saw a ressurgence of theme songs compared to the 2000s.

I think though when the user says cartoon themes, he means iconic The Simpons theme, or Spongebob Squarepants theme song, etc.

Though you could make the argument that many anime dub songs have become iconic in their own right: The Pokemon American theme for instance.

>>Animation done before voice recording
ugh

It really doesn't matter anymore anyways when shows are making their openings shorter and shorter. What value is there for promoting a pop song when you have less than 30 seconds?

Then why are anime themes often so disconnected from the show? Like listening to them, you'd never know what series they're from.

They aren't supposed to be like American theme songs with obvious "going down to South Park" type of lyrics, and they're made to be something you can sell as a full length single to be listened to outside the anime. They're made to fit the anime through their sound and lyrics, if possible.

The posts you replied to said it, those are songs that were in the pipeline and the show's producer picks the one that hopefully matches well.
That happens often but is nowhere as prevalent as it was in the early 2000s. There are theme songs that sound general enough, making them usable out of context, but that were written with the show in mimd and reflect its themes and tone. Getting one of those usually depends on how much the studio cares about establishing a cohesive identity for the show. And usually long running manga adaptations don't get this, it's more common for smaller projects and anime oroginals. Stuff like One Piece basically flipflops between random songs tha label wants to promote and actual full blown theme songs that terms and names from the show itself. These are rare for new properties but established IPs get this very often. Pokémon has nothing but this for openings, for an easy example.

>The posts you replied to said it, those are songs that were in the pipeline and the show's producer picks the one that hopefully matches well.
A song specifically created for an anime doesn't likely make it self-evident what anime it was made for. I know for example that the OP for Yuuri on Ice was specifically made for the show, and it fits it well, but you wouldn't know it just by hearing it: a.safe.moe/6SOGG.webm

The anime studio doesn't create or dictate the songs, that's up to the music production specialists. Songs are typically created for the show, whether or not they choose to use the same few artists to create cohesion.

>he thinks that if new episodes aren’t airing then cartoonists aren’t working
>he thinks networks pay cartoonists to do nothing for months at a time.

>was specifically made for the show, and it fits it well, but you wouldn't know it just by hearing it:
I mean, how is that any more different than a lot of classic sitcom songs where most of them are just talking about family love and friendship? Is anyone really going to make the argument that Family Matters theme is unique to that show? Or Golden Girls? Or Full House?

I'm speaking strictly on a lyrical level since that seems to be what it means to be "catered" to a show's content.

>people shitting on anime music
Show me a cartoon song as good as this youtu.be/px8aiW3GEME

Anime theme songs have always used the 1:30 length for a very long time, that should be a good glimpse of what the full song would sound like. It's more of a western thing to have the opening last less than a minute.

1:30 is too long for an opening. It gets annoying.

Yeah because this is so much better youtu.be/6ApWkuYg6d8

>Leaving more runtime for the episode itself

Don't see how that's a bad thing.

Look up "Dogfight" from Initial D and weep at how shitty your taste in music is.

It doesn't get you pumped up enough, which is what a good cartoon intro is supposed to do.

>We can stop jerking off storyboarders
arent they the beating heart and nerve center of a cartoon?

youtube.com/watch?v=DZGN9fZvQhc

learn from the best

Of course not, that's the writers. At least for toons that still have those.

Good openings (or endings) are something I will even watch on their own from time time. They're like miniature music videos.

Having less runtime also means less animation you have to do. In a 12 episode series, a 1:30 long OP and ED save 36 minutes (but they can also be left out or played in the background if need be). Anime has also found many creative uses for OPs and EDs.

Did you forget what a writer is?

>Good openings (or endings) are something I will even watch on their own from time time. They're like miniature music videos.
That's why full-length themes exist. 1:30 is too long to actually be part of the show.

Well clearly it's not too long since it's the standard length in anime. If it's very short like 30 seconds it doesn't have enough time to develop and doesn't work well as an advertisement for the single.