Outsourcing: A disturbing report on Japan`s Anime Industry!
There is a disturbing report about Japan`s Animation Industry that appeared on Youtube. The report describes the situation of japanese animators and how the anime studios hire other companies outside of Japan to reduce costs.
According to the report, the number of people in Japan who are engaged in the creation of anime is dropping. Most studios outsource the actual drawing and animation portions of their projects to other Asian countries, a practice that could hurt future development of the industry. Some believe that individuals must spend decades doing animation grunt work before working as directors or story planners. They fear that outsourcing all that manual labor reduces the amount of anime-related jobs in Japan and it could lead to a shortage of Japanese people capable of creating anime masterpieces.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government released a special series of anime textbooks last month. The textbooks cover the planning, production, and business sides of the industry. The books also include an instructional DVD about how to draw the movement of people and animals. It is hoped that the books will encourage younger Japanese to join the anime industry
Source: Japan Probe
Unfortunately this situation, also known as “Outsourcing” could hurt the quality of the anime productions and probably will reduce the anime related jobs and could cause a shortage of capable people for the job.
HanHo Studio in Seoul, one of the first animation studios in Korea.
Photo courtesy of HanHo Company Ltd.
An animator at AKOM studio
The situation however could benefit other countries that are in the “anime” industry as well like Korea and China. In the middle term, the term “anime” could be applied not only to Japan but also to this countries. It is undeniable that Japan are the pioneers of the industry but in a competitive world and the financial crisis, the face of anime could change as we know it now.
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Interesting news piece. While it’s a shame that there will be less and less animation actually being produced by Japanese people, I don’t think anime will loose too much of its essence as long as 1) its target audience is still Japanese people and 2) the original story, artwork, and character concepts are created by Japanese people even if most of the actual animation is produced in other countries.
Who knows, this could even be a good thing. Anime has been showing a disturbing tendency toward the cliched recently, maybe a greater variety of people with different backgrounds and cultures will give it the kickstart it needs (or maybe they’ll be even more prone to copy what other, Japanese, anime creators have done in the past).
Cel animation, worldwide, is farmed out-of-country as readily as tshirt and sneaker assembly. Guy Delisle has written a couple of good graphic novels that describe his activities as a supervisor of French animation projects in Guangdong China & Pyongyang North Korea (evidently he also did serious time in Mauritius but hasn’t yet written a comic about it) You should check them out – they’re pretty good.
What I’d love to see is a new crop of studios in Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Mauritius, wherever, picking up on the industry talent overflow and starting their own homegrown narratives – something for me to watch and love in 2019!
Hmm. Very intreresting report you have there.
Seems the more you look at it, the more you realise that these changing economic times really has made such impact on countries whose talented skills and resources that were so great in demand overseas which made them as ‘powerhouse’, now no longer able to withold that status once was. Japan’s doing exactly the same things as what USA is doing when they’ve imported more than 80% of goods and services from China/India, and “Made in USA” labels are an utter rarity. Thanks to the attractive appeal of oursourcing, for many modern (and surviving) businesses.
It would be interesting to know how voice acting would join the crowd of outsourcing, knowing it won’t be Nihongo?