

Japanese Anime Studios Feel Pressure From Unhappy Artists and Outsourcing  - jakarta
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703819904574551834260925714.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

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patio11
The industry is also very, very good at milking a megahit but hasn't had a new
one in about ten years. The usual pattern is that a successful manga series
gets turned into an anime and after that it is off to the races: toys, movies,
many different video games, spinoffs and all that jazz.

However, my casual judge-by-the-contents-of-the-rental-rack guess is that the
newest megahits are over ten years old at this point. (Before Bleach and
Naruto got big in America they were _big_ in Japan. Big like "qualify as
industries unto themselves" big.) Both of them are actually animated in Korea,
incidentally. (And, oddly enough, both are quite "high tech" in terms of
animation techniques. It is sort of the series' aesthetic.)

Incidentally, Youtube isn't the enemy of Japanese DVD sales. Rentals are.
Japan does distribution really freaking well: there are about three or four
companies with reach as good as Netflixes, plus plenty rental chains stocked
with up-to-the-minute DVD releases. Here's the math: $200 for a 4 DVD boxed
set or $8 to rent them all. Not hard to figure which one wins out. (Or you
could go rent a big screen TV and a comfy chair at an Internet cafe for $2 to
$4 an hour and get the DVDs loaned to you for free.)

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chaosprophet
Yeah they do know how to milk their hits. There are already 9 One Piece movies
and another one releasing next month. To top it off the series has been
running for fourteen years.

That said, getting a hit series is not really an easy thing for authors
(mangakas). They work about 14 hours everyday and have to produce 19 pages of
content every week. The gruelling workload takes a toll on a lot of mangaka's
health, forcing the series into a hiatus, which further reduces their chance
of becoming hits.

Youtube might not be much of a problem within Japan, but it certainly hurts
the overseas profits. Also Japanese studios are incredibly lax when it comes
to enforcing copyrights. They usually let fansubbers and scanlation groups get
away with pirating weekly chapter releases in the hopes that this would
encourage people into buying the volume releases when they are available.

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DarkShikari
_Yeah they do know how to milk their hits. There are already 9 One Piece
movies and another one releasing next month. To top it off the series has been
running for fourteen years._ '

To say nothing of Gundam...

 _That said, getting a hit series is not really an easy thing for authors
(mangakas). They work about 14 hours everyday and have to produce 19 pages of
content every week. The gruelling workload takes a toll on a lot of mangaka's
health, forcing the series into a hiatus, which further reduces their chance
of becoming hits._

And often even when something does become a hit, it creates its own problems:
for example, from what I heard, the author of Death Note planned to end the
story at what eventually became the halfway point. Instead his publishers told
him that it had become so popular that they wanted him to make more of it, and
so he dragged it on for a whole bunch more chapters.

There's also the fact that a huge number--probably the majority--of authors
don't seem to care too much about making huge hits. Just look at the sheer
volume of doujin productions: nobody there ever intends to even make enough
money to pay for their own time, yet there's probably more doujin manga than
professionally published stuff.

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derefr
There are two kinds of anime, and they're very similar to the two kinds of
personal computers we have today. Studio Ghibli produces the kind of anime
that's identifiable to Apple products—it's high-quality, expensive, has its
own style, and is aimed at a very wide audience, sometimes ending up in
American theaters. Additionally, the content (software) produced to go along
with the format (hardware) is developed in-house.

Meanwhile, most other anime producers are like PC manufacturers—they compete
to produce a commodity as cheaply as possible. First, they're adapting manga
that has already been written, illustrated, published, marketed, and
merchandised, so the customer development half of their business doesn't need
doing. They simply churn out adaptations of the books they receive, and people
tune in; it's a pre-made market.

Second, people don't _care_ about the visual quality of anime. It's great when
it's exceptional (I can only think of Ghibli work and FLCL at the moment), but
no one expects it to be. Mostly, anime-watchers tune in to experience a visual
dramatization of a story that couldn't be executed in live-action without a
ridiculous budget. Things in space, giant robots, fantasy creatures that
aren't just actors with bumpy foreheads, etc. They don't expect great visuals,
just the bare minimum needed to understand what's going on, so they can enjoy
the story without having to imagine the narrative themselves (and though they
do still end up having to read the dialogue, this doesn't require any form of
visual imagination.)

Given these two factors—that the studio's only job is to adapt a manga to the
screen, and that they may do this as badly as possible and still not lose any
of their following—it's no surprise that it's a process that has been
outsourced and reduced to manufacturing "more work with longer hours = better"
conditions.

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chipsy
Japan did a significant amount of outsourcing work for American studios as
recently as the 1990's, but that definitely isn't the case now, and I think
that's an important distinction. While a number of things can be blamed, I
would pin the main problem on how anime studios have historically tended to
stay behind the curve in the use of labor-saving technology. (Compare against
American animation, which has fairly enthusiastically taken on 3D, vector
animation, digital matte, etc., as soon as they've been commercialized) It's a
sustainable practice while you're in an up-and-comer economy and the local
labor is cheap or impossible to match anywhere else, but it's much harder to
swallow when China and Korea are putting out equally competent work at bargain
rates. When the outsourcing market left Japan, you are left with the current
situation where the local labor force is squeezed dry building low-revenue
products for the leftover niches. There's some great stuff coming from it,
artistically speaking, but the business won't last as-is.

The future for Japanese animation will probably have to come from the American
playbook - lower scale, more technology, and more diverse revenue streams.

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JCThoughtscream
The lack of vitality in the Japanese animation industry's fairly old news at
this point. What we're seeing now is decidedly not an overnight thing - it's
the end result of about a decade's worth of bad policy-making, starting from
an inability to adapt to online distribution, hovering with emphasis over the
craptastic wages that are driving away decent talent, and ending with the
industry's hypernarrow demographic targeting.

Just because any individual otaku is probably willing to spend untold amount
of money on miscellaneous merchandise doesn't mean it was a good idea to
ignore the overwhelmingly larger demographic of Everybody Else...

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drinian
On the other hand, it has often seemed like anime has been one of the few
professional entertainment industries devoted to trying to make money off the
Long Tail.

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JCThoughtscream
That begs the question of whether or not the studios attempting to do so are
in a /position/ to do so.

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Tiktaalik
This pattern of low quality competitors upping their game and taking over a
large chunk of an industry has occurred again and again and difficulties
associated with that pattern feel a bit inevitable. The best situation for
Japanese producers might be to get smaller and refocus as content creation
over large scale production.

There's other areas to innovate as well. Studio Ghibli, the acclaimed studio
behind Spirited Away, is collaborating with critically acclaimed video game
studio Level 5 on a video game.

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yardie
300 frames a month? Even if they are key-frames that still only comes out to 5
minutes of footage. No wonder it's dieing. Everyone else (not Japanese) is
using animation software to create an entire movie. In this day and age there
is no excuse to still be hand drawing cells. Proper wireframing can get you an
entire scene rough cut in a day. Even less if you have an asset library built
up.

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jcl
It depends on how the drawings are used. You can easily squeeze ten seconds of
footage out of three _finished cels_ , if it's a wide pan over a couple
characters talking in the distance -- which is both efficient and cinematic.
And this type of shot is common in anime for precisely this reason.

Gainax is one of the past masters/worst offenders in this regard, including: a
sequence near the end of Evangelion where they just shot _the back_ of a bunch
of old cels; a off-screen sex scene near the end of Evangelion where a shot of
only the background plate is held for at least a minute; back-to-back clip
shows in Kare Kano, where they show cel counts for each prior show to pad for
time -- one episode had 2300 cels (that's total cels, not just keys).

