Entertainers in Japan are in a worse situation than the reader imagines, with low wages, long hours of work and even illegal hiring (many of them are hired as freelancers and do not receive the benefits they would get if they had a full-time job. , even though they work the same way for even longer hours). There have also been occasions when the animators have commented that they had to sacrifice enough hours of sleep to meet the deadlines, and even sacrifice meals of the day when they put in the balance the importance of eating or losing work due to missing the deadline. settled down. It sounds incredible considering that the anime industry in Japan is valued at 18.8 billion dollars ...
The budget given to animation studios by large production committees, which are typically made up of television stations, movie production firms, advertising companies, publishers, and other larger animation studios, is very often insufficient. This means that the studies submitted by the committees have to work in debt and, consequently, cannot adequately pay their supporters. There are even rumors that 25% of animation studios in Japan are in debt.
Entertainers are generally remunerated through a “unit pay” system, which means that their salary depends proportionally on the speed of their work. Since new members of the industry enter as "douga animators" (they participate in in-between animation), their rate is less than two dollars per frame, which means that if one of these animators wanted to earn 550 dollars in a month , I would have to make 300 frames (this is extremely difficult for an animator in his early years!). That is why the monthly salary of an entertainer in their early years is often less than $ 270, it is also a fact that most of them quit in the first three years in the industry.
Another problem is that most animation studios are based in Tokyo, one of the cities with the highest sufficiency costs in Japan, and even in the world, making it harder for novice entertainers to subsist on miserable wages.
The Animator Supporters project
The "Animator Supporters NPO" project was established by Jun Sugawara in 2011, with the aim of helping new animators in the industry and establishing a new animation production system. In its first year, the project provided each new animator with an annual salary of about $ 5,500.) The idea has two objectives:
- Provide affordable housing for new entertainers so they can focus on their work.
- Provide a place where they can get advice from experienced animators.
In 2014, the first “Animator Dormitory” was established, which consisted of a house-room arranged to accommodate entertainers with less than three years of experience (which was said to be the hardest period of work). Since then, this bedroom has housed more than 40 entertainers, some of whom are widely recognized, such as:
- Masaaki Tanaka , animation director for the third season of Shingeki no Kyojin .
- Kawano Tatsuro , director of animation on the second season of Psycho-Pass , director of animation at Koutetsujou no Kabaneri , director of opening animation and director of storyboards at Boruto , and current director at Studio Colorido and the Burn The Witch project .
- Tamagawa Shingo , director of animation Gundam Reconguista in G .
- Hitomi Kariya , director, animator and character designer.
On February 29, the “Animator Dormitory Channel” published its first video on YouTube. The video included the fictional character Ryoko, who commented on the lives of the new animators. One of the reasons they used a fictional character was because anyone who dares to show his face while talking about this situation will almost never be hired by any studio.
Future projects
Going forward, the Animator Supporters project plans to establish its own animation studio in the next three years, and it will be one that pays animators two to four times more than the current rate. In addition, they also plan to create a system where animators and other creators receive royalties whenever a show becomes popular (currently, they don't get any bonuses other than increasing their popularity as animators).
With that goal in mind, the project enlists the help of anime lovers to finance their dreams . They will have popular artists from abroad create songs and then the animators participating in the project will make the animated music videos. Currently, the project already has the support of Mason Lieberman ( RWBY composer ), and they aim to work with more artists in the future.
To show everyone what they are capable of, they will first make a thirty-second demo video (scheduled for release very soon), which will be directed by Kawano Tatsuro , with Masaaki Tanaka and Hitomi Kariya as key animators, and Yuuki Funagakure as the art director. They are also planning to host Yamashita Shingo , a man who performed some of the most popular opening and closing sequences in the Naruto Shippuden series.. With the project being funded, the animators will be paid appropriately and will have enough time to work. Additionally, the system promises to return profits to the animators and creators directly involved in the process.
Source Official Site
