How Much Money Do Anime Animators Make

The nighttime side of Japan's anime manufacture

Anime brings in more than $19 billion a year. Its artists are earning barely enough to survive.

By Jul 2, 2019, 8:30am EDT

Pikachu's thunderbolt struck America in 1998 and inverse the lives of a generation.

The US anime craze started at the turn of the century with Sailor Moon's middle-school magical girls out to salvage faraway planets; One Slice's pirates, cyborgs, and fish people seeking a legendary treasure; and Pokémon'southward Ash Ketchum on a noble quest to "catch 'em all."

These classic shows and many others led the charge; betwixt 2002 and 2017, the Japanese animation industry doubled in size to more than $19 billion annually. One of the almost influential and renowned anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, finally debuted on Netflix this month, marker the terminate of years of anticipation and a new peak in anime'southward global attain.

But anime'due south outward success conceals a disturbing underlying economic reality: Many of the animators behind the onscreen magic are broke and face working conditions that tin pb to exhaustion and even suicide.

The tension between a ruthless industry construction and anime's artistic idealism forces animators to endure exploitation for the sake of art, with no solution in sight.

Anime's slave labor problem

Anime is nearly entirely drawn by hand. It takes skill to create hand-drawn animation and feel to do it rapidly.

Shingo Adachi, an animator and character designer for Sword Art Online, a popular anime TV series, said the talent shortage is a serious ongoing problem — with nearly 200 animated Tv set serial alone made in Japan each year, there aren't enough skilled animators to go around. Instead, studios rely on a large pool of substantially unpaid freelancers who are passionate about anime.

At the entry level are "in-betwixt animators," who are usually freelancers. They're the ones who brand all the individual drawings after the meridian-level directors come up with the storyboards and the middle-tier "cardinal animators" draw the important frames in each scene.

In-betwixt animators earn around 200 yen per drawing — less than $2. That wouldn't be so bad if each artist could crank out 200 drawings a day, simply a single drawing can accept more than than an hour. That's not to mention anime's meticulous attention to details that are generally ignored by animation in the W, like food, compages, and landscape, which can take four or five times longer than average to describe.

"Even if you motion up the ladder and get a cardinal-frame animator, you lot won't earn much," Adachi said. "And even if your title is a huge hit, like Set on on Titan, you won't make whatever of it. … Information technology'south a structural problem in the anime manufacture. In that location's no dream [task every bit an animator]."

Working weather are grim. Animators oftentimes fall asleep at their desks. Henry Thurlow, an American animator living and working in Japan, told BuzzFeed News he has been hospitalized multiple times due to illness brought on by exhaustion.

One studio, Madhouse, was recently accused of violating labor code: Employees were working about 400 hours per month and went 37 consecutive days without a single 24-hour interval off. A male person animator's 2014 suicide was classified equally a work-related incident after investigators found he had worked more than 600 hours in the calendar month leading upward to his death.

Part of the reason studios use freelancers is so they don't need to worry about the labor code. Since freelancers are independent contractors, companies tin enforce grueling deadlines while saving money by not providing benefits.

"The problem with anime is that it just takes manner too long to brand," Zakoani, an animator at Studio Yuraki and Douga Kobo, said. "It's extremely meticulous. One cut — ane scene — would have three to four animators working on it. I make the crude drawings, and then ii other people would bank check information technology, a more than senior animator and the director. Then it gets sent back to me and I clean information technology up. And then it gets sent to another person, the in-betweener, and they brand the last drawings."

According to the Japanese Animation Creators Association, an animator in Japan earns on boilerplate ¥1.1 million (~$ten,000) per twelvemonth in their 20s, ¥ii.1 million (~$xix,000) in their 30s, and a livable but still meager ¥3.5 million (~$31,000) in their 40s and 50s. The poverty line is Nihon is ¥2.2 million.

Animators make ends meet whatever way they can. Terumi Nishii, a freelance animator and game designer, earns virtually of her income from video game blitheness because she has to take care of her parents. On an animator's salary, she would take little chance of feeding herself.

"When I was immature, I honestly suffered," said C.M., an animator and character designer who didn't wish to exist named. "Luckily, my family is from Tokyo, then I could live with my parents and somehow become by. As an in-between animator, I was making ¥lxx,000 yen (~$650) a month."

Anime's structural iniquities stem back to Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and the "god of manga." Tezuka was responsible for an endless catalog of innovations and precedents in manga, Japanese comics, and anime, onscreen animation. In the early 1960s, with networks unwilling to take the risk on an animated serial, Tezuka massively undersold his testify to become it on air.

"Basically, Tezuka and his visitor were going to take a loss for the bodily show," said Michael Crandol, an assistant professor of Japanese studies at Leiden Academy. "They planned to make up for the loss with Astro Male child toys and figures and merchandise, branded candy. … Just because that particular scenario worked for Tezuka and the broadcasters, it became the status quo."

An Astro Boy exhibit at Shanghai IAPM shopping mall on July 29, 2015, in Shanghai, China.

Tezuka'south visitor made up the deficit and the show was a success, but he unknowingly set a dangerous precedent: making it incommunicable for those who followed in his footsteps to earn a living wage. Diane Wei Lewis points out in a contempo study that women, who ofttimes worked on animation from home, were particularly vulnerable to exploitation and paid fifty-fifty less.

Present, when product committees set the budget for shows, there is a long-established precedent to keep costs low. The acquirement is divided up among the idiot box networks, manga publishers, and toy companies. "The parent companies make coin from the merchandising tie-ins," Crandol said, "but the budget for the rank-and-file animators is split up."

"These prices are so ridiculous because they're still based on what Tezuka came upwardly with," said Thurlow. "And dorsum so, the drawings were very simple … you had a circumvolve head and dot eyes, and possibly y'all tin can draw an in-between in 10 minutes. I could earn some coin at that pace … but Japanese anime, [now] one drawing is so detailed. Yous've worked for an hour for ii bucks."

Thurlow added that there is an expectation that you quit when you get married. "Considering if you're married, you need to spend some time with your spouse. You lot can't piece of work all the time and earn nothing."

The cost of fine art

The artistic results do not disappoint. The 2016 anime motion-picture show Your Proper name , a charming torso-swap romance that became anime's biggest box role success, features a itemize of gorgeously rendered landscapes worthy of an art gallery.

The depictions of the food alone are worthy of a "Top Ten Foods in Tokyo" listicle: oily ramen with pork and boiled egg; fluffy pancakes drizzled with syrup and generously topped with pineapple and peach; a handmade bento box full of neatly rolled sweet Japanese omelette, sausages, ripe cherry tomatoes, and pickled plum.

A screenshot from the 2016 anime film Your Name shows beautifully rendered fluffy blueberry pancakes dripping with butter and syrup. — A screenshot from the 2016 anime film *Your Proper name* shows beautifully rendered fluffy blueberry pancakes dripping with butter and syrup.

Crandol pointed out that you can identify every background in Your Name as an actual building or place in Tokyo.

Artistry is one appeal of anime. Ian Condry identifies several others in his book The Soul of Anime: adult themes, graphic content, innovative genreless fusion such as Samurai Champloo'south samurai-hip-hop remix, and anime's democratic spirit, where fans participate in making art through fan subtitles, fan art, and fanfiction.

Historically, merchandising created more revenue than TV or movies, but as the popularity of anime has skyrocketed overseas, anime itself makes up a much larger portion of the revenue. Overseas video alone accounted for about half of global revenue in 2017. Yet the stingy budgets and unlivable wages remain.

When Western companies like Netflix enter the market place, they become to pay the dirt-cheap, long-established Japanese prices. Tv set stations, merchandise companies, and strange streaming services walk away with the profits, leaving not merely individual animators struggling merely entire studios scraping by on shoestring budgets.

The solution is not as elementary as animators demanding college salaries. A 2016 Teikoku Databank report revealed that revenue is downwards 40 percent over ten years for 230 mainstay Japanese animation studios. "In lodge to achieve farther development of the animation industry, there is an urgent demand to better the economic base of animators and radically reform the profit structure of the unabridged industry," the report stated.

As the founder of a small studio, D'art Shtajio, Thurlow explained that mandating higher salaries without a greater modify in industry construction would cause his and nigh other studios to go broke due to budgetary constraints. The industry would consolidate into "Big Anime," a world where a few mega-studios produce Hollywood-style hits, with mass marketing and generic content tailored to the lowest mutual denominator.

With low-level animators pushed out of work, the creative, passionate spirit of anime would rot away. Afterwards all, there is no reason to go an animator other than because y'all love it.

"It'southward a passion," Zakoani said. "Considering there's non any returns [from] working. It'southward only because I really enjoy doing information technology. I just feel like I need to practice information technology. Because when you see your show existence broadcast, and you know you lot worked on it, it'due south the greatest feeling ever."

Thurlow dropped everything to come to Japan to draw the shows he loved. The experience proved a far cry from his life as an American animator, where he had worked on shows that lacked the aforementioned complexity in art, story, and themes: Dora the Explorer and Beavis and Barrel-Head if he was lucky. "Artists are busting their donkey for the dream," he said.

Nishii spoke out on Twitter with a firm recommendation:

No matter how much yous similar anime, it is not advisable to come to Japan and participate in anime work. Because the animation industry is usually overworked
— NISHII_terumi (@Nishiiterumi1) Apr 22, 2019

Adachi agreed. "Honestly, I would non recommend it … it'south a pyramid structure, where many at the bottom work to back up a few at the top. I don't see a bright future."

The debate over the manufacture'south economics rages on, often on Twitter. A partial solution could exist for international studios to buck the established cultural norm and provide anime studios the same budgets as Western studios. Another model could exist allowing animators to retain the rights to their drawings and earn royalties.

One organization, New Anime Making System Project, raises money to provide a safety net and reduce burnout for up-and-coming animators. The project has provided affordable housing for animators who have gone on to straight parts of Naruto, Assail on Titan, and other summit-of-the-line anime.

Jun Sugawara, the founder of the project, said he started the projection equally a graphic designer who wanted to back up fellow artists. "It takes genius to create beautiful paw-fatigued animation, and animators' skills are not valued," he said. The organization is expanding with the "Anime Grand Prix," a contest for crowdfunded brusque anime films and music videos commissioned on a living wage.

Animators are bearing a most intolerable burden for the sake of beautifully hand-fatigued idiot box. For the sake of fluffy pancakes, lush sunset landscapes, and adventures across time, space, genre, and civilisation. For everything you watch and love, animators pay the toll.

Withal they depict on.

A storyboard from director Shinji Higuchi's film Attack on Titan is pictured in Toho Studios on July 11, 2014, in Tokyo, Japan. — A storyboard from director Shinji Higuchi'due south film *Set on on Titan* is pictured in Toho Studios on July eleven, 2014, in Tokyo.

C.K. spent a few years growing up in England due to his begetter's job. With no English to speak of, he spent his days drawing manga, flipping the pages in his notebook betwixt his forefinger and thumb, watching the drawings come alive.

"I could never forget that feeling," he said. "When you lot breathing a yet character on a folio, you tin can run into them move, laugh, cry, get angry … that's the charm of blitheness. When I see my hand-fatigued work shared and seen not just in my country merely around the earth, I feel happiness."

Eric Margolis is a freelance author and translator from Japanese based in New York. Y'all tin can follow his work on Twitter @EricMargolis1 . And check out the animators who participated in this story and support their work: Shingo Adachi , Henry Thurlow , Terumi Nishii , and Zakoani .