[mrpara]

It's still true. Japanese animators are paid by the pennies and work ridiculous hours. Since they're often paid on a per-frame basis rather than hourly pay, sometimes it adds up to less than minimum hourly wage. KyoAni was actually one of the few who were known to pay reasonably well, and they also had sort of dormitories slash training facilities for their animators. As for computers, generally speaking the frames are still drawn on paper and scanned, and then colored digitally.

[moogly]

Indeed. And Kyoto Animation (a.k.a. KyoAni) is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, studios in terms of working conditions and pay, long-term hiring with training on the job, etc. It is usually held up as a model of what the anime industry could be, and not what it tends to be.

[Mengkudulangsat]

Why though?!

It frustrates me that the industry have to rely on fans / foreign distributors / bootleg to get an audience out of Japan. Leaves so much money on the table.

I would be more than happy to pay Eiichiro Oda and his team for an english .pdf of the latest One Piece delivered to my inbox the second it comes out.

[falcolas]

> Why though?!

There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.

There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime. They have to rely on fans of the existing works (typically light novels) to view the (often drastically different) animes. I've seen a few of my favorite series get dropped due to being too niche.

[buzer]

> Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.

Subbed translations at least previously were not usually very labor intensive if you didn't try to do heavy localization or typesetting everything (I remember someone translating every single book name in some bookcase). Fansubs managed to do pretty good job with just about 1MD worth of effort per episode (~20x length of the episode, extremely small amount compared to work required to actually produce the original episode). Old fansubs did need quite a bit more, but improved processes, tools & computers (just encoding & uploading used to pretty slow step) also improved the overall speed. No clue what how much CR & co need these days.

Of course, dubbing is very different case, but that's usually only done for DVD/Blu-ray releases. No clue if it's really worth to do it though, but my viewpoint is probably too biased.

[falcolas]

That’s a fair point on the subtitling. I do know that translations for Japanese dialog can differ in difficulty - there are some more esoteric writing/speaking dialects which can take a significant amount of effort to turn into English dialog (for example, “The Irregular in Magic High School” novels have very poor official translations, largely due to how it was written in Japanese).

As for dubbing, there are instances where animes are “simultaneous dubbed” for international release. A recent example is Shield Hero.

[Razengan]

> There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas ... There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime.

How even did you arrive at that deduction?

There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas. Japanese pop culture is probably second in worldwide popularity after America's.

And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.

2-3 decades ago it was a relatively small handful of fans who contributed their time and effort for free, and worked against legal prohibitions, to provide anime fansubs and manga scanlations throughout the 1990s and 2000s, until the anime fandom grew to the millions today, with adaptations, inspirations (Matrix, Kill Bill etc.), cosplayers, conventions, and even pornstars jumping in.

This is a unique case where an industry was practically established by piracy!

Many of those fans still rely on unofficial translations, reviews and torrents to get their fix, and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)

Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture. There are still tons of anime, manga and video games with lots of worldwide fans but they've never been officially ported outside Japan.

[slightwinder]

> There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas.

That's just wishful thinking. There are decades of effort tapping into that potential with mildly success.

> And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.

Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.

> and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)

Not enough. Market-localisation is too expensive to justify the risk of pampering a handful fans.

The whole japanese Pop-culture is divided in a very small number of big franchises, which make the gross of the money, and a very big number of very niche-productions which hardly make enough money to even survive. The big franchises can take the risk of going overseas, and they do that for a long time now. But the small companys don't have the money, often not even the knowledge for it.

On the other side, even with the niche-produtions we now have a rather good situation today. We now have many semi-official english localisations in timly manner for anime and games. It's just not the whole market, and not for the whole world, and manga is still very much a dead fish. But that's simply beacuse it's a different market.

> Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture.

You also only see the fraction of the big picture which you are part in, not the complete big picture.

[arczyx]

>Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.

This is patently false. There are lots and lots anime for adults and there are so many adult fans nowadays. To be honest this statement alone would probably disqualify you from giving any opinion worth considering in this discussion.

[dang]

Can you please edit personal swipes out of your posts here? This comment would be fine without the last sentence. Actually it probably doesn't need the first one either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Razengan]

> That's just wishful thinking.

That's just pessimistic thinking.

[freddie_mercury]

Seems a weird argument to be making. You can't even pay them directly to get the Japanese version, you need a Shonen Jump subscription, but you want them to offer it for English speakers?

Relying on foreign distributors, especially when you need to translate, seems to make perfect sense to me. Should Oda provide translations into English, French, German, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese? All of those are part of the "audience outside of Japan".

[Retric]

~1.5 billion or ~20% of the world’s population speak English. They also tend to be better off financially than the global average.

Written Chinese is a very large market and likely a good investment, though a significant percentage of the well off also speak English or Japanese.

After that it’s more questionable. Translation is not cheap, but US films are often translated for smaller markets.

[knolax]

Of those 1.5 Billion, how many speak it well enough to prefer to watch anime in it? I "speak" Spanish but I would never watch anime in Spanish because the cost of trying to comprehend translated Spanish is already too high for me to do it for casual entertainment.

[mrpara]

Animation is still done on paper mostly for artistic reasons, not because they can't afford tablets. Drawing on paper and drawing digitally are different processes and skill sets. Same for manga. There are actually a lot of mangaka who work digitally these days, but it's less common in anime production. That said, I don't understand how that has anything to do with foreign distribution, to be honest.

[magduf]

Because not that many people outside of Japan are that interested in it. Similarly, there aren't that many people outside of India who are interested in Bollywood movies, so you don't see them played in cinemas except in places where there's a lot of Indian expats/immigrants. Art is highly cultural, so there's usually not that much of a market for it outside its culture of origin.

Anime/manga does do pretty well outside of Japan, compared to the cultural output of so many other nations (how many Czech movies have you watched lately?), but it'll as popular as you seem to wish it would be.

[magduf]

>but it'll as popular as you seem to wish it would be.

...it'll never be as popular...

[ohithereyou]

One Piece is not a great example because you can read it online at Viz[1], and the latest three issues appear to be free to read. According to Wikipedia[2], the latest chapter out in Japan is 948, which is available on Viz's website.

[1] https://www.viz.com/shonenjump/chapters/one-piece

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_One_Piece_chapters_(80...

[_bfhp]

We just need a "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" [0] anime and 2019 will be complete...

[0] https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf

[swebs]

>they're often paid on a per-frame basis rather than hourly pay

That's interesting. Is there any in-depth source on how the anime industry operates?

[mrpara]

I don't know about in-depth, but a cursory google search brings up plenty of results regarding animator wages[1,2]. If you want to know more about how the industry operates, not so much salaries but how production works, working conditions, who's responsible for what, etc, then I highly recommend that you watch the anime Shirobako. It's an anime about anime production, and it's both very informative and simply very good in terms of storytelling, humor, etc.

[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2005-11-02/animator's-...

[2] https://80.lv/articles/how-much-do-japanese-animators-make/

[Narushia]

Just adding some relevant information: inbetweeners are paid per frame, but key animators are paid per cut.