[jdw64]

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/

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

[fusslo]

There's a japanese docuseries called 'Manben' (available on youtube) that interviews a bunch of famous manga artists. Without fail they all talk about how much work, hours, suffering goes into the first years of making manga.

It's very interesting to watch and I highly recommend it. But it's also a GREAT advertisement for avoiding the industry.

[toyg]

You've just described Hollywood, the music business, but even the supermarket/distribution business. The middleman tends to accumulate all the profit.

[badpun]

Big chain stores have their profit margins at below 5%.

[toyg]

But they do it by squeezing businesses upstream, who end up with even lower margins.

[limagnolia]

I'm not sure that average across the entire industry is a good measure of how animators are paid for high budget, high talent features.

[anigbrowl]

It probably is because wage tiers tend be set across the industry rather than being negotiated between artist and studio. Voice actors, for example, are separated into 3 tiers with strict pay scale differentiation and no residuals, so only a very few of them have negotiating power. Most anime VAs make their real money by doing work for games or corporate videos, where these industry pay scales are not institutionalized.

[RobKohr]

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]

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.

[anigbrowl]

It seems to me the problem is not having to do grunt work but that it's impossible to make a decent living at it even though it's widely agreed to be a necessity to develop higher level skills. By 'decent living' I mean being able to support yourself and have adequate rest and so forth.

[TheOtherHobbes]

We do not value things made by humans.

Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.

But expensive doesn't work in mass-media. So a hand-drawn anime isn't going to be more profitable than an AI-animated one.

As for education - possibly, but this is the end of a process that started with digitalisation. I'm a huge fan of hand-drawn pre-Illustrator graphic design, especially 1960s-80s. I think it has a liveliness and freshness that post-Adobe design is missing.

But I'm not the usual audience, almost no trained designers can hand-draw lettering today, and neither the industry nor buyers/consumers seem to care.

Likely the same thing will happen with AI. It will just become the new normal, with skills to match.

[chickensong]

> We do not value things made by humans.

There are plenty of people who do. A minority perhaps, but your absolute statement is wrong.

> Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.

Many people don't give a shit about status signaling, but do care about supporting people and their craft. Some folks have a a niche making something by hand, but far removed from the concept of Veblen goods.

The world isn't as flat as you're making it out to be.

[bluefirebrand]

> We do not value things made by humans. Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.

I read this as we do value things made by humans, we just don't incentivize the mass market to prioritize handmade things

[mschuster91]

> 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

[numpad0]

AI image generation is just not there yet. Say what you want about Luddites and whatnot, but the quality is just not good - the amount of effort given compensation that (especially Japanese) artists put into anime styled imagery makes too little sense that AI can't compete, even in generation time if time for retakes are accounted for.

[famouswaffles]

>AI image generation is just not there yet.

A Japanese Animator shared this recently. Seedance output over simple 3d models

https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1ue6uf2/japanes...

[numpad0]

That's just texturing over a labor intensive 3D animation that doesn't seem like a production quality one. IIUC, geometrically correct 3D animations are basically worthless. You're already lost if you need perfect 3D renders as the reference.

[vintermann]

My impression is that a lot, if not most, anime was always cheap. Lots of stills, few frames, and CGI as soon as it got remotely good enough (and often before). Like Hanna-Barbera cheap. That was my impression when I used to be moderately "into" it 25-ish years ago, but judging from youtube channels like Mother's Basement, it hasn't gotten better.

It makes sense that they would be the first to use AI for whatever they can get away with.

[ejj28]

I really despise this kind of thinking, this "optimization" that only serves to benefit the people at the top who hoard the fruits of other people's labour. Why is your solution to underpaid/overworked animators to just eliminate them entirely, instead of just treating them fairly?

People DO want to do these things. They're overworked and underpaid, but they still do it, because they're passionate about it. Not just about the end result or the money, but about creating things.

I continually see AI proponents fail to recognize this across all art forms, for example the Suno AI idiot:

"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." [0]

It's ridiculous nonsense, and this widespread eagerness to throw away quality and human talent for convenient, soulless slop has made me increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-music-boss-says-musicians...

[thesuitonym]

If AI is making our anime anyway, why do we need an anime industry? Let's just get rid of it and we'll all generate our own shows to watch. Why should I pay a platform for someone else's slop when I can make my own?

Business leaders and AI chuds seem to be forgetting that if AI can meet the needs of their business, then we no longer need the business.