The disappearance of Japan's animators

https://economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/06/19/the-strange-disappearance-of-japans-animators

by andsoitis • 1 month ago

192 161 1 month ago

economist.com

https://archive.ph/aPMAr

wavemode• 27 days ago

https://archive.ph/aPMAr

AdmiralAsshat2• 27 days ago

Thanks!

jdw642• 27 days ago

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

RobKohr• 27 days ago

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.

jdw642• 27 days ago

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.

numpad03• 27 days ago

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.

vintermann• 27 days ago

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.

thesuitonym• 27 days ago

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.

ejj28• 27 days ago

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...

limagnolia• 27 days ago

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.

anigbrowl4• 27 days ago

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.

fusslo• 27 days ago

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.

Ekaros2• 27 days ago

First years. It is pretty bad considering these are most likely weekly releases. And just how many works gets axed in less than a year. Mostly for not being very good and thus not being popular enough. It really is a brutal industry with heavy power law distributions. And being famous these are the people who made it. Not those dropped on the side of the road.

Really is something not to do unless you have absolute passion.

toyg3• 27 days ago

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

badpun• 27 days ago

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

jmclnx• 27 days ago

Interesting, the "training of new animators" mirrors what has/is happening in other industries.

When I started programming decades ago, an experienced programmer would review my work and help me out. That started ending in the very late 80s and 90s. By 2000 or so, you were on your own as a new employee. I even mentioned it to a high level manager a while ago, he said we expected people we hire to know what they are doing.

I have heard similar things have occurred in manufacturing too.

KyleTheDev2• 27 days ago

It'll be very interesting reading future studies on how this has negatively impacted entire generations. Hopefully people realize that you need to pay younger people living wages to learn skills, if they want people to have those skills in the future.

michaelrpeskin2• 27 days ago

My (probably unpopular here) opinion is just the opposite. We need more of an apprenticeship model where you're not paid a bunch because you're still learning, and you probably bring negative-to-zero value initially. When a fresh-out-of-college junior engineer brings in SV style money, the expectation should be that they already know what they're doing.

In the trades you start off low pay because you're generally more in the way than helpful, but then you gain the experience and knowledge to be valuable.

Even the resident-doctor relationship is like this. Resident are overworked and poorly paid because they are more distracting than the value they add, then there's the big reward at the end.

The grad-student/professor model is kind of like this too except for all the pyramid scheme stuff that happens there.

I think most technical fields need to go to this model where the newbie commits to learning and trying to be valuable instead of rest-and-vest. And then once they're valuable they get paid more in proportion to the value they bring to the field.

In my small company we had to switch about 5 years ago to only hiring folks with lots of experience (10-15 years). We tried hiring younger fresh-out-of-college engineers, but "market rate" was too high and they required too much attention from senior staff and it made us unsustainably unproductive. We wanted to mentor and teach the next generation, but we couldn't afford it.

21asdffdsa12• 27 days ago

Let in the chronicles be written, that widespread inability to read and write endeth the chronicles.. class of mistake. Let this be a lesson to all readers of chronicles.. the big failure starts three generations before the white paper appears..

jackyinger• 27 days ago

God forbid we invest in the future. Investors need those profits now!

MisterTea• 27 days ago

Remember the joke about asking for 5 years of experience with a 5 month old framework?

This is part of the whole move fast and break things mantra. If you have to train people you aren't moving fast enough. And now they can bolt on AI turbochargers.

InfiniteRand• 27 days ago

I feel like this might be the transition between an industry driven by apprentice-ship like guidance to an industry driven by credentialed training.

arkh• 27 days ago

we expected people we hire to know what they are doing

I feel this is a generational thing. Many baby-boomer parents never took the time to teach their children any skill. They thought they learnt it by osmosis I guess. Their generation outsourced everything they could.

PessimalDecimal• 27 days ago

Do you think this is a global phenomenon or regional maybe just in the US or the Anglosphere?

world2vec2• 27 days ago

Anime has never been more popular but honestly its quality has declined a lot. It's all isekai and supernatural-sexy-schoolgirl-whatever (kinda creepy) these days. Or the same old animes that go on forever.

Every year there's less and less animes that are worth the time to watch IMHO.

TheRealPomax• 27 days ago

Funny, that was already true in 2006. It's the thing people keep saying, and yet anime keeps coming out.

Right now they're stuck in the whole "ten shows from the same budget, each run by their own 'committee' and each competing for cash that runs out well before the show's over, and the poor performance very quickly get less per episode". Great for networks, shit for shows. Even worse for animators who need to get paid a living wage.

world2vec2• 27 days ago

A cursory glance of anime tv shows released in 2006 and there's a lot of good things I'd watch again: Honey & Clover, Kemonozume, Ergo Proxy, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, etc.

In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.

shikshake2• 27 days ago

The same ratio of garbage to quality was available back then, there just wasn’t the same level of exposure to the range of output so the worst ones faded into history.

KerrAvon2• 27 days ago

What? This is a golden age of anime.

You could count the number of anime available in the west and worth watching 25 years ago on one hand, maybe two.

Now? If you can't find something, you're not looking hard enough. Off the top of my head, current anime that do not remotely fit your categories:

- Spy x Family

- Dandadan

- Dungeon Meshi

- Apocalypse Hotel

- Yumi no Tsugai (Daemons of the Shadow Realm)

- Kaiju No. 8

- Marriage Toxin

- Steel Ball Run

- The Summer Hikaru Died

- Akane-Banashi

- Dorohedoro

edit: formatting. edit 2: added Dorohedoro, good call down below

shikshake2• 27 days ago

I did not know they made an anime of The Summer Hikaru Died. The manga was amazing, I need to check out how they adapted it.

aspenmayer2• 27 days ago

Nippon Sangoku and Witch Hat Atelier are worth mentioning, on the strengths of both their animation quality and generally amazing storylines.

nvlled• 27 days ago

Dungeon Meshi is a good well-rounded recommendation even for those who aren't particularly into anime. I'd personally add to that list:

- Clevatess

- Kusuriya no Hitorigoto

- Tongari Boushi no Atelier

- Sousou no Frieren

- Yuusha-kei ni Shosu

- Shoushimin Series

- Chi. Chikyuu no Undou ni Tsuite

With my recommendation criteria being: good (or decent budget) art/animation, good story and characters, and nothing too "weird" in it for the general population.

Off-topic rant for dandadan:

One of the main character Takakura is initially portrayed as being obsessed with aliens and UFOs, to the point it affects his social life. But the morning after their actual encounter with paranormal, the dude literally can't think about anything but pussy. I couldn't get past what a grifting poseur the protagonist was and I dropped the anime after that. Petty reason, but I'll probably change my mind and retry again in the future. Or not.

jjpones• 27 days ago

To add a couple more into this list:

- Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

- Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia (upcoming)

Honestly, a lot of great anime fall into the cracks. Orb almost slipped me by, but that was a fantastic watch and I am eagerly anticipating Jaadugar.

edit: one more I couldn't help but add: Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray. Just let go of what you may feel about having a story centered around horse-girl hybrids, ultimately Cingray is a fantastic female-led shounen sports anime.

idoubtit• 27 days ago

Of course quality is subjective, but my own stats on AniDB show no decline.

I've watch at least one anime produced every year from 1977 to now. For 2000-2025 I've watched 24 to 62 anime of each year. My average vote by year is surprisingly stable at 5 ±0.6.

My top votes also don't show any significative tendency. Out of my 25 favorite anime, 6 were produced in 2020 or later. Notably the film "Kaguya-hime no monogatari", but also seinen series like "Nami yo Kiite Kure", "ACCA" or "Eizouken".

BTW, "Eizouken" (2020) is wonderful, and it's about a young girl wishing to become an animator, and how she creates short animes with her friends. I strongly recommend it!

gwern3• 27 days ago

6 were produced in 2020 or later. Notably the film "Kaguya-hime no monogatari", but also seinen series like "Nami yo Kiite Kure", "ACCA" or "Eizouken".

Huh? Kaguya-hime was in 2013, 7 years before 2020 (after a notoriously protracted development). You really think Isao Takahata and Studio Ghibli were releasing that post-COVID? (Isao wasn't even alive in 2020.)

kps• 27 days ago

Sturgeon's Law: “[…] they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important.”

macleginn• 27 days ago

Given the sheer volume of the output, it is conceivably difficult to maintain the quality of the plots/characters, even if the animation is stable or even improving. As a byproduct of that, more and more ambitious/batshit source texts are being animated, which sometimes works well (Dandadan) and sometimes doesn't (Uzumaki).

scythe• 27 days ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/cmumj/everything_wa...

hiccuphippo4• 27 days ago

Not everything is bleak. The ending sequence for Frieren season 2 was entirely hand drawn with colored pencils[0] and the new Ghost in the Shell (coming out next month) is also hand drawn[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY4Bx2qtkRM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnRcKC4Rgsc

AdmiralAsshat2• 27 days ago

Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.

a-french-anon• 27 days ago

Even if we're still far from the golden age, Dandadan (Science SARU; though I've heard the sheer effort bankrupted them) and the recent Witch Hat Atelier (Bug Films) are quite nice to behold.

Some modern romcoms like Kaguya-sama (A-1 Pictures) and The Dangers in My Heart (Shin-Ei) were nicely done too.

Things are obviously not going in the right direction, but the current accelerated fall in quality the consumer sees is more influenced by general unwillingness to spend and/or take risks from bean counting production committees.

re-thc2• 27 days ago

Frieren is animated by Madhouse, though, which I feel like is one of the last bastions of high-quality Japanese animation.

Not true. Madhouse isn't what it once was. Frieren had lots of freelancers.

Also, Kunihiko Hamada (whom worked on Frieren, is 1 of the lead animators, designers) left, citing disappointment.

itissid• 27 days ago

Noob Question: There is a famous parlor trick with generative networks(I think it was GANs but it might be some kind of diffusion based network.), you start with a canvas and draw a stick figure of what you want and the generative network draws the rest of it.

Do AI platform companies actually pre-train networks to do the same for hand drawn artists?

Related question: If they do train them to do that, are there any that train people for the "reverse": learn how to draw with paper and pencil by showing techniques only i.e only the "what" but not the "how" ?

asa123• 27 days ago

re: parlor trick

Are you referring to:

https://github.com/lllyasviel/controlnet

numpad03• 27 days ago

AI image generators readily take partial images and run in a super-resolution mode(they are always in that mode). They can take a stick figure or a screenshot or anything you want. They prefer to have text description of the image, but that can be generated too if needed.

It seems Western AI platform companies generally don't prefer an architecture with multimodal non-literal inputs to closely follow intents of users, over ones based on pure literal descriptions. It was some Chinese guys that first did works in that direction. There appear to be psychological resistance to the idea of non-literal forms of thoughts among Western entities, as if there's some literal-text superiority theory deep down in people's minds. Others like researchers from Chinese labs probably don't have that.

Artists' responses to generative fill-ins are lukewarm at best, if the obvious responses were put aside. AIs tend to treat artists' intentions as deviation from the mean and tend to steer image into less interesting, more noisy directions. That negates potential productivity gains.

I don't think there's any AI trained to generate ideal strokes from prompts so to teach someone, or datasets that could be used for it, esp. with current climate regarding AI image generation - the bridge between AI and artists of many kinds are burning white hot, nothing is going through there.

LoganDark• 27 days ago

Pix2Pix! https://mitmedialab.github.io/GAN-play/

utopiah5• 27 days ago

Neat, I didn't know for Ghost in the Shell, I'll be watching it in few weeks then! Thanks for sharing.

PS: so weird to watch the trailer while working in XR. I never imagined as a kid I'd be programming in a headset but now it's banal. I even buy 2nd hand HMDs for 100 bucks. Weird times.

bee_rider• 27 days ago

This isn’t banal for me! What’s a good headset for programming these days?

Aunche• 27 days ago

How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though? A lot of the drawing ends up being outsourced to places with cheaper labor like the Philippines.

hiccuphippo4• 27 days ago

At least the Frieren one was drawn by a single Japanese artist https://x.com/aoumemimei/status/2012695958824407124

re-thc2• 27 days ago

How much of this is actually drawn in Japan though?

Often the key frames or "important" parts are done in-house with the "mechanical" or boring parts being outsourced.

autoexec2• 27 days ago

Outsourcing is only good to a point, because how can you keep a local supply of key animators, story board artists, character/BG designers if you don't have a pool of local talent working up the ranks to pull from? It saves money to outsource and pay low wages to freelance workers, but that also means the native talent doing in-betweens and fixing the outsourced work that comes back can burn out or quit because of not being able to afford to eat and house themselves. Even outsourcing is kind of a problem because ultimately it means that for all the money being made in animation very little of it is going to the animators. Nobody is creating the best art when they're treated like a robot on an assembly line and worried about paying their bills.

Japan has to decide if they want to invest in their animation industry or if they'd rather let it die out by killing off the local talent while training animators in other countries to one day replace them.

toyg3• 27 days ago

It feels like GITS made a stylistic choice because they were criticized for going too much the other way in recent productions (lots of crap 3d/CG).

hiccuphippo4• 27 days ago

It's actually a stance against the use of AI in the industry: "We want to express that this is a hand-drawn show made by humans to highlight the humanity in the story"

https://www.cbr.com/ghost-in-the-shell-remake-zero-ai-use/

bsder• 27 days ago

Indeed. It also looks like it hews VERY closely to Shirow's original manga art style.

I think ... a lot of people are going to be disappointed in that. I like it, but some of the characters designs are ... ugly. I believe intentionally so to draw contrast. But there's just no getting around the fact that some of the characters are ugly.

anigbrowl4• 27 days ago

Ending sequencesa re kind of artistic showpieces, but when you get down to it it's 1-2 minutes of special animation for PR purposes. Most of Frieren is about whimsical character moments over very generic backgrounds (also true of the manga); people love it for the bittersweet characters and trope-skewing gags. I love the show but it's not the best example of technique or visual innovation.

Mappa is imho the current heavyweight studio, doing everything from spectacular action setpieces with bold visual experimentation in mainstream stories like Jujutsu Kaitsen to the extremely labor-intensive stylization of Dorohedoro.

nekooooo• 27 days ago

not science saru?

altano• 27 days ago

Ending sequence?

Arco was an entirely hand-drawn movie w/ a 93% Rotten Tomato score released this year. Couldn't even break even. I liked it a lot.

Seems bleak to me.

vl• 27 days ago

So for new Ghost in the Shell is it a good idea to watch previous ones before watching the new one? If so, it what order? Is movie worth watching at all?

krapp• 27 days ago

If you have to watch only one GITS series, watch Stand Alone Complex.

If you mean the American movie, no. It's trash. The 1995 anime, definitely watch.

tracerbulletx• 27 days ago

You should definitely watch SAC and both GitS anime movies, but you don't need to watch them before the new anime.

hiccuphippo4• 27 days ago

The new anime is a more faithful retelling of the manga from the start so you can watch it by itself.

yvdriess• 27 days ago

I can also recommend the manga, the first vol. It's packed with interesting ideas and author footnotes that the 1995 hints at but has no time to elaborate on.

E.g. In the movie the protagonist glances an office worker that looks like her. The manga has her explain that she looks like a cheap generic model to hide the fact she is full of expensive specialized government tech. I always think of that scene when I put an expensive work laptop in a ratty backpack.

c0_0p_2• 27 days ago

Frieren is fantastic and beautifully done, with only a few scenes that look cheap. But I actually strongly dislike the credit sequence you're talking about, and I'm pretty sure it's rotoscoped.

rendaw• 27 days ago

I've thought a lot about how to characterize the difference between 3D and hand-drawn stuff. I think the core of it is:

- With hand drawn animation, you draw what you have in your head, first roughly, then you refine it

- With 3d animation, you first need to model everything, then rig it, then work with the bone system to get the motions you want or else mocap, and then set up rigs and stuff so that the mocap actors can do crazy movements, etc etc. Then maybe undo some of the scaffolding the 3d software does: disconnect bones, fake perspective. You have to fiddle with lighting, textures, etc. Or you don't, and just go with whatever's easy to do in the 3d software.

Which means that spontaneity and emotion, like I think this guy's arms should be all wiggly here, are lost. Yeah, you can hand animate then 3d animate on top of the hand animation, but in an industry that's using 3d to cut costs and not because it looks better, that's not going to happen (in any way that keeps the spontaneity).

3d is awesome in that once you've done a huge amount of up-front prep, the rest is easy to iterate on and tweak, but that's a large tradeoff.

I thought that this is one area where I think AI could be a force of good. Keep the animators doing the rough sketches, and AI comes up with the lines, handles the filling, and maybe adds colors with a guide. I haven't seen this yet.

---

I'm not sure I agree on the mentorship parts. IIUC all the major studios and famous animators weren't taught by someone. All the studios have unique flairs that they came up with just by playing around and copying Disney. And they got there without drawing hundreds of thousands of in-between frames for someone else.

I think that being taught the correct way to animate based on existing productions probably also reduces creativity in the field.

I wonder if the earlier creativity was due to voids though, and now that there's some amount of saturation it's harder to break in, or if somehow the increase in revenue from global interest somehow increases stakes and causes more downward pressure squashing out experimentation.

---

There's a lot I don't get about this article though. It says the demand is way up, but the treatment and pay for animators is terrible... why? I didn't see it addressed. Japan has a long history of "non-monetization" though, like refusing to sell digital music overseas, or regional restrictions on streaming content.

---

Lastly, I think there's still a lot of indie animation that gets glossed over. There are lots of independent animators making animations for music videos, for instance, or releasing small animations. I don't know if that grows into larger productions, but there's a level of creativity you'd never see if you just watch televised anime.

otaconjh• 27 days ago

We know where all the animators are, Mappa has them chained in the basement working on the next JJK season /s

hibikir• 27 days ago

Ultimately animation is built targeting a budget: From the oldest animes with massive animation reuse and very low fps to complicated things that mix 3d and 2d. It's all a multi-decade race to make anime people enjoy for a budget the studio will pay. Almost every animation project done today (barring, say, the failure of Blue Lock S2, or Uzumaki past ep1) is has more animation per episode than most series in the 90s. Something like Witch Hat Atelier looks competitive with Ghibli movies, but it comes in 12 episode seasons: So far more animation total!

It's precisely the competition, and the quest for more quality for the buck, that leads to more foreign animation, more AI, or more 3d models. If people were animating like the old days, with hand-drawn cels photographed in complex rigs, we'd not get the same actual amount of animation made, and it'd be worse, just because the cost per series would be so high very little animation would be funded, and it'd be just for smash hits with big worldwide audience potential, not, say, series about rakugo. We optimize for output, and it often meands outsourcing and higher level tooling, which will include AI in one form or another.

We are in tech here, we have to understand there's big advantages to this for consumers.

yomismoaqui• 27 days ago

Just today I saw this on Twitter a good example of how AI should be used for animation.

https://x.com/i/trending/2069856897738387754

punkbit2• 27 days ago

This is actually impressive. If it can output each frame as layers, even more.

punkbit2• 27 days ago

Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.

perching_aix• 27 days ago

I'm sure some people believe that genAI outputs look the same as manmade ones. But for most, I think it's pretty clear that they just find them passable enough / not meaningfully different instead (or maybe even interesting in their own way). That is not the same thing: it's not that they don't notice, it's that they do notice but don't mind it. They're not being fooled, as there is no trick from their prespective. The differences were simply never a concern for them to begin with. There isn't even anything wrong with that per se [0].

I can also appreciate how a significant chunk of such images would make someone wince though, but I find it more than a bit confused to then bring up "proper craftsmanship" as the contrast. There's an incredible amount of extremely mediocre illustrations, anime, and other related work, that were made without any genAI tooling. High effort is reserved for the probable hits. Anime is especially teeming with extremely cookie cutter productions, and heavily overused tropes in saturated genres. I don't think the absolute chokehold that the high school romcom and isekai fantasy genres have on recent seasons needs much introduction. You can often just take one glance at a promotion visual and already identify both the genre and the quality right away. Cue the big 3DCG enemy on episode 1 (or 2).

It's also hard to reconcile this with the fundamental fact that the audience of these works is the mass market. Mass market targeting things are inherently bound by mass market sensibilities. Willingly not adopting a breakthrough technology - provided it is actually that - is about as far from proper craftsmanship in such context as it can be. So is being a one trick pony and sticking to an older fad. Making something good while locked away in an ivory tower is one thing. Making something good while simultaneously riding out the wave of actual real world circumstances is another [1]. I respect the latter a whole lot more than the former. Especially since the latter tends to devolve into self-abuse contests, to round off the self serving tendencies they inherently carried anyway. Code golf is a positive example for this. High art, maybe not so much.

I really don't see any reason to go on ideological adventures like this anyhow. You can just not like it, find it cringe, and leave it at that. It does not need some big philosophical undercurrent to suck. It can just look like garbage, be used lazily, and suck that way. And others can simply just disagree with those labels applying.

[0] A friend recently showed me their expensive sunglasses collection. They are indisputably expensive indeed. They are also the same cheap-feeling finnicky garbage as every other pair of sunglasses I've ever encountered. One can appreciate the expertise of someone who can recognize them as expensive, sure. But I think it says a whole lot more that the average person cannot. It's a sign of deep, long running cultural recursion, not unlike how when an LLM is fed LLM text, it degenerates.

[1] Could the average run of the mill show maybe look better and be more animated using genAI than they currently are? I definitely think they might just.

socalgal2• 27 days ago

your comment makes me think of how photography was treated by painters. I think similar things will be true for generative AI. It will mostly be trash, just like most photograph is forgettable. But, a few people will find ways to use it to make amazing things, the way amazing photographers have elevated photography.

jarjoura• 27 days ago

My only problem with generative art is

1: right now, it's basically 90% beautiful hyper-realistic woman in some scene.

That is SO incredibly boring. These models are able to generate all kinds of never before seen mixed together content. Yet, everyone just wants to generate photos of things you could have already searched for.

2: creative people should be the biggest and loudest voices celebrating it but the vision researchers building the tools have only been interested in solving the math side of it and haven't bothered to ask creatives what they even wanted. It's fine in private R&D, at the hypothesis stage, but then these corporate heads went and shipped as finished products and charge us serious money for it. So, creatives rightly feel uneasy about the models that legitimately "stole" their content without permission, while also minting new millionaires at these companies by selling it back to them.

Once companies license the content and artists can make royalties, and the tools to interface with the models become sophisticated so that you're not one-shot prompting into existence a random thing, more creative people will come back. (i.e. ComfyUI)

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Plus, these models need actual fully staffed product teams behind them to solve and own the ethical issues around things like character identity locking that can be used to deceive. Or being too easy to say "in the style of" that could almost perfectly replicate another artist's entire voice. Then, there is the nudity issue. I don't want generative models to have morals, especially when it's art. Art is meant to be provocative and boundary pushing. I realize that's an entire deep-hole of shit in there waiting to get through, but that's why we need people spending their work day thinking about it more than just blocking anything that shows too much skin.

frmersdog2• 27 days ago

Hey, hi, yoohoo whistles. Everyone gather 'round and reread this part:

  Lacking proper training and a viable salary, many young animators don’t feel they can keep going. The Japan Research Institute estimated that a quarter of them quit the industry within four years, and two-thirds in eight years. This retention problem has often been viewed as a form of natural selection. “I think this way of thinking is misguided,” said Sudo Tadashi, the author of two books about the anime industry. “Truly brilliant” animators are needed for roles like director and character designer, but without enough “adequately good” animators—particularly in-betweeners—the industry wouldn’t be able to function. “I don’t think a field where only top-level talent could stay on is a good place,” Sudo said. The question, then, is how to create an environment that helps more people become “adequately good”.

You might think that this article is just about Japanese animators, but it's also about the state of the job economy and the careers of several generations of workers in the developed world, globally. The obsession with per-worker productivity - of only ever hiring the 10xer - is how you get here.

The grunt work still has to be done, of course. As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea). This is not a new phenomenon; I don't think the article mentioned it, but a large part of the growth of the expertise of Japanese animators in the 20th century was the work that they got that was outsourced from the US. Go ahead and look through the staff/production lists of your favorite childhood cartoons - particularly holiday specials - from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. You'll be surprised what you find (or not).

bilbo0s• 27 days ago

As ever, if you want to know where much of the expertise has gone, look to China (and South Korea)

Good news!

You don't need to worry about that anymore! I can guarantee you, as the article implies, money from big tech is being funneled to people perfecting models for in-betweeners as we speak.

I think we may be entering an era where we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level. Because if you think the present where the "1%" refers to the group of people to whom the lion's share of resources in society accrue is bad; imagine a future where the "1%" refers to a group that are the only people any given government and steward class need to keep everything running.

coldtea3• 27 days ago

we really have to start thinking about how to organize work at a fundamental level

Who is this "we"? As if society at large gets a say? Do people owning land and houses ask the homeless of how to organize home ownership?

pdimitar4• 27 days ago

A lot of "us" thought quite thoroughly and, you might say, even correctly, about "how to organize work at a fundamental level".

News flash: the truly influential people that hold most of the capital on the planet don't want those ways of organizing work at a fundamental level. They want serfs and -- if possible -- slaves.

Get to work enacting a change. Most of us are busy surviving and feeding families. You know where the "1%"-ers are. Let's see some results -- on the news.

I am seriously super tired of seeing this "we" trope. As if there's a true democratic way of changing things out there. When was the last time the worker class has been truly listened to? Point me at some real history.

MichaelZuo• 27 days ago

Why do you think globalization is even possible to reverse via human thought?

If you accept global competition, then expecting there to be hundreds of millions of job positions with meaningful protection from competition seems literally futile.

Even tens of millions would be a huge stretch. So probably not even a full 1% of 8+ billion people could attain that.

dartharva• 27 days ago

Unironically, ever since generative art tech arrived I have been anticipating full automation of in-betweening. I am rather (pleasantly) surprised it hasn't already been done.

DanielHB3• 27 days ago

I worked with CNC machining shops in Sweden and the people working there made the exact same points. CNC is not exactly an art form, but programming the machines definitely has some craftsmanship aspects to it. Even considering that after a part is programmed it can then be mass produced.

- Very hard to get young people in because entry level pays very poorly AND requires non-trivial amounts of training.

- Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well

- Overall not great work conditions compared to an office job

- Retiring experienced older workforce with no one to replace them

- Having a shop in China machine the parts for you can be quite acceptable, especially in higher volumes

However I disagree with your argument of "obsession with [...] only ever hiring the 10xer". It is not so much that, but rather that if you hire average people with average skills or people that require training *you go out of business* because the shop next door won't.

Basically it drains the expertise completely dry until is just completely moves to another country having a demographic boom. And this is happening to software engineering right now. People who complain about immigration don't seem to realize that non-developed countries are seeing massive population growth reductions too.

Eventually the world is going to run out of countries having demographic booms, then society will have a massive lack of people to maintain existing infrastructure and corporations. The only upside is that wealth inequality should drastically reduce in this scenario (unless some governments manage to push caste systems back into fashion).

ItsYan• 27 days ago

It is not so much that, but rather that if you hire average people with average skills or people that require training you go out of business because the shop next door won't.

If only workers would form some kind of a community, which would take monthly contributions and that would then be used to upskill. It would unite most, if not all people in the same industry.

bsenftner4• 27 days ago

Capitalism's core aspect is exploitation, of course this is the result. Capitalism, that "nothing can beat this economic system" winner is a winner because it is immoral, folks. It is based on exploiting those with no alternative. Of course this decimation of competing participants is part of its core operation. Capitalism is a controlled conflict. It is slow violence.

roenxi• 27 days ago

- Razor-thin margins so shops can't afford to pay well

If the margins are so razor thin that people the shops can't afford to pay well, what is the point of having the shops? Have the people go do something that pays well. There seem to be alternatives if people don't feel pressured to enter the industry in the first place.

If Sweden has picked a policy mix where it can't profitably run an industry then it'll either have to give up some material comfort to do it uneconomically or give up the industry. You don't make it sound like there is a hard conversation being had around intentionally lowering living standards to support machining shops. So let them go.

Eventually the world is going to run out of countries having demographic booms, then society will have a massive lack of people to maintain existing infrastructure and corporations.

Under such circumstances, margins will have to rise to the point where machine shops will be able to hire some snot-nosed apprentices. Economics is pretty brutal about that sort of thing.

strken• 26 days ago

There are a bunch of upsides here. Industrialisation increases standard of living compared to an agrarian economy. A service economy, where services mean things like industrial engineering and product marketing, increases standard of living even further.

I get that tool and die is going to be in demand again one day, but that's not an overall downside. For that to happen, every country which could be outsourced to will be too wealthy and have a service economy, and they'll have to use their wealth to hire the last remaining tool and die makers as instructors. Compared to the upsides of nobody being a subsistence farmer or sweatshop worker anymore, and of most people living in advanced economies, that downside is small.

nsvd2• 25 days ago

If this is happening in software engineering it would imply that Americans are moving to other, higher paid work which doesn't seem to be the case.

motbus3• 26 days ago

Investing funds don't want to know about 10 years in the future. Next quarter is fine and damn with the rest

stuaxo• 26 days ago

Yep, the current systems incentives are not aligned with it's continued existence.

casey2• 26 days ago

Why would Japanese studios outsource when Japanese artists are paid less than Chinese ones?

Narushia• 27 days ago

The archive.ph link gives me a looping CAPTCHA…

hyfgfh• 27 days ago

Teachers, nurses, game developers ...

Companies get away with paying less because they can exploit the "passion" or intrinsic rewards that the jobs give

Ekaros2• 27 days ago

Teachers and nurses get paid poorly because in general voters do no want to be taxed. And these areas have low efficiency gains. Pretty similar ratio of workers to those taken care have stayed around for long time.

The disappearance of Japan's animators

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