[Animats]

There's a lot of outsourcing. In 2013, Rhythm and Hues both won an Academy Award and went bankrupt.

Simply providing a clipping path which separates the foreground from a background is widely outsourced. Effects movies use this heavily. It's manual green screen. Some outsourcing companies for this job:

    clippingpathindia.com
    offshoreclippingpath.com
    clippingpathasia.com

This ought to be automated by now, but apparently the automated approaches are not good enough yet.

[gjolund]

There is a lot more to that story, and to say it was entirely due to outsourcing is a half truth.

That being said the state of the industry in Hollywood, especially for animators and artists, is pretty dire.