centrally-unplanned:

Hot damn does this channel rock - finally someone willing to get into the real details of the production process, tool choices, org structures, etc over just being, a bird’s eye view. I have, through other *much* less accessible sources, learned a lot of of this information over the years, but it still has tons of great info that I am picking up from its videos.

The ‘intro’ video linked here is the most big picture, looking into how the individual staff members form a production pipeline and how their roles sit together, and it inspired some big-picture thoughts about how the anime industry over time is sort of a microcosm for the wider transformation in workforce structure that has happened over the years, and all the benefits (like efficiency) and issues (like inequality) that resulted from that. 

To recap for those who don’t know: Anime productions obviously have a ton of roles, but the core of any “shot” in a show are the key frame animators and the in-betweeners. The KFA’s start off a shot by drawing just a few of the most ‘important’ frames, that show off poses, positioning, effects, etc, which they sink a lot of time into for just a few frames. These are then passed on to in-betweeners, who draw the ‘rest’ of the frames (they actually re-draw the key frame via tracing as well, ty video!) that fill the space in-between the key frames, bridging those frames together to form a continuous animated shot. They spend much less time per frame doing this, which they can do since they are just tracing/altering the key frames. 

As you can probably guess the KFA’s have the ‘good’ job and the in-betweeners have the grunt-work ‘bad’ job. And you might not be appreciating how bad it is, but from a financial standpoint it is, uh, really bad. The average industry salary for an in-betweener in Japan full time is ~$10k a year. For comparison, the minimum wage full-time in Japan is ~$17.5K. They get away with it being way, way less than minimum wage by the usual trick of structuring it as contract work, which of course means it also includes absolutely no benefits. If you want to deep dive into how terrible these roles are, you can have at it.

So why do it? As the video points out, in-betweening can be essentially a mentorship. You can learn a ton from the process of seeing amazing key frames, interpreting them, and getting feedback on corrections, production speed, etc. And it is essentially mentorship because, in the early days of animation in Japan (so 1960′s-1970′s), it was *explicitly* a mentorship. Almost every animator would start as an in-betweener, work that way for 3-5 years, then be promoted to, well okay first to 2nd key frame animator, or in-between checkers, or maybe branch out to layouts, but *eventually* to key frame animator, and so on up the chain. It was essentially an apprenticeship, and that is how all companies worked in the 1950′s! Every division director of a company started out as a salesman, or desk analyst, or something, and promotions happened internally, and based on seniority. The low wages at the bottom were *justified* by the promise of future promotion.

But economies changed, and the anime industry did too. There are a million reasons why they changed, but for talent-based industries like anime, where the quality of a worker is in fact quite easy to observe, as the demand for anime skyrocketed the idea of trapping obviously-talented animators as in-betweeners for years to “pay their dues” made no sense. They left, joined new studios or founded their own, and by the 1990′s that system was totally falling apart. In-betweeners were no longer guaranteed promotions, and for many animators it would be the only job they would have in the industry for years before quitting entirely. Technology helped accelerate this - in the early days when animation was all done by hand, the in-betweeners and key animators sat in the same room, comparing notes and building connections, and letting younger animators learn from old. Now that they are all doing their work digitally, often they just get a file dump, and don’t even talk to each other (tons of org work has gone into building consistent ways of communicating, via notation on the drawings, expectations for what the in-betweeners need to do, so no meetings or human conversation is required. Efficiency! Also, alienation!).

And of course, as communication technology improved, wages stagnated, and demand increased, globalization came to the rescue. I don’t have solid figures, but I have definitely seen estimates that put the majority of in-betweening for Japanese animation being done overseas in Korea or China, where that 10k wage can go a lot farther (the town of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, China, actually has an “Industrial Design” park almost solely devoted to doing outsourced Japanese animation work). This outsourcing is probably a net good thing for those workers, and for anime, don’t get me wrong! But as you can imagine, approximately zero of those Chinese or Korean animators get promoted into Japanese animation studios, while Japanese native in-betweeners are left competing with Chinese wages to afford a Japanese cost-of-living. All of these trends accelerate the winner-takes-all dynamic for the industry - just like every other industry in developed countries, neat!

But of course, its not like ‘outsourcing’ is new to anime - it was just done differently back in the 60′s and 70′s. Kyoto Animation is one of the most famous anime studios, and in particular is famous for having an uncommon number of female animation directors and leads. Certainly a big part of that is due to the fact that it started out as an outsourcing house for cel-painting for studios like Pierrot composed of otherwise-unemployed housewives picking up a side job! Female artists, just like female (and minority) workers in other industries, were the actual cheap labor backbone that justified the more ‘equitable’ salaries of the official workers for companies in the Good Ol’ Days. The inequity just shifted spatially, to new demographics, but has always been there. 

Yet there is something to be said for the fact that, of that early days Kyoto Amination clearing house approach, those women were almost all married to men in the animation (or other artistic) industries, and so those wages got pooled. They worked gruelling hours for less pay, but their *household* income was notably higher, as the men would universally have higher wages. Its how working for such wages got justified after all! If you are an in-betweener in Japan today, there is no such pooling, outside of by chance - yet the wage structure remains unmoved.

I think these days the plight of the in-betweener is increasingly well known, but to understand why its so I think the way the anime industry chased the trends in other industries helps not only understand it, but also understand the solution space, or in this case the lack thereof - what industries have solved this problem after all?