The Disappearance of Japan's Animators(economist.com) |
The Disappearance of Japan's Animators(economist.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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" ?
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.
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
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Every year there's less and less animes that are worth the time to watch IMHO.
It's very interesting to watch and I highly recommend it. But it's also a GREAT advertisement for avoiding the industry.
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.
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.
It makes sense that they would be the first to use AI for whatever they can get away with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
In 2026 the only thing that has captivated me, so far, was the Chainsaw Man movie and Dorohedoro S2.
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.
Kidding aside, did you pick those 2006 releases at the time they were being released or are you picking them up from a list after years of refinement and discovery? It's completely possible that 2026 will be as fruitful from a 2046 perspective.
Trigun sequel is coming out this year.
2026 titles have caught on that trend of a really long specific title though.
“The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life”
I think anime is a big enough category that every year there’s always at least a few good ones but it’s hard to get good signal to noise. But the whole tiny girl thing is 100% a trend that’s stuck around.
however, where you say: "My [...] opinion is just the opposite [...] where you're not paid a bunch ", are you saying the opposite of a living wage? how would you expect someone to, well, live during their apprenticeship? someone starving and worried about getting evicted or similar is not in a great head space to learn effectively.
You also kinda hit the nail on the head w/ your second point. I think we're expecting a lot of people now to either pay tons of money for higher education, or survive through years of unlivable wagers, to eventually get to a higher paying (I.E, livable) position. In some cases, like doctors in Residency, it's reasonable (average of 65-70k/year?) and enough for them to survive until they're fully fledged. In other cases, like any form of artisan, a lot of blue collar work, it's minimum or near minimum wage and a looming threat of financial ruin.
I think a big part of this is our move to monopolistic/gargantuan corporations, and employment no longer (for good reason) being a primary source of housing. Apprentices used to be able to survive with less payment, because they were given spare rooms, fed by the family of the business owner, and so on. Instead, they now need to be given larger financial rewards so they can procure those things themselves, which can be harder on a business owner.
I look back to my time in grad school. My wife and I were lucky that we were able to get fellowships so we were able to focus directly on school and didn't have to do another job or teach. But it was _tight_! I remember keeping track of every cent in a spreadsheet and we generally were at around $100 extra to save every month (which would then be eaten up by a random car repair or something). We never went into debt, but we really paid attention to our spending. No fancy going out, no travel, no avocado toast.
I think right now people put too much "fun" in the definition of living wage. So yes, I wouldn't want someone to be worried about making rent and eating while being apprentice, but it's also not going to be a glamorous instagram lifestyle.
In 2000-2005 dollars we were making a combined $30,000 a year as grad students. I don't know what that means now, but that's probably the actual value we provided to our advisors (paper writing, conference posters, etc).
A Japanese Animator shared this recently. Seedance output over simple 3d models
https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1ue6uf2/japanes...