In other words, they’re the kind of compromises that animators have made for years so they can finish work without completely burning out. Asakusa eventually puts aside idealism and works on disguising the reuse of frames of animation, lack of detail and static or repeating backgrounds, as well as speed lines to simulate movement, strategies not typically deployed by Yuasa, but so commonly used by his contemporaries. With a shrinking timeline, the compromises become greater and the tension between creative impulse and necessity becomes greater. Less than five seconds of footage, or four cuts, takes the group 20 days. (Places that use use salaried staff, like Kyoto Animation, the studio behind Violet Evergarden, are few and far between.)ĭespite spending the back half of the episode finding compromises between quality and efficiency, they still find themselves behind schedule. Cheap anime production is now the norm, meaning that despite the amount of time and effort required to create these shows, artists are often underpaid freelancers with no safety net. The production costs of his show Astro Boy were undersold in order to land it with a network, and set a dangerous precedent that the industry never shook. The low pay rates date all the way back to when Osamu Tezuka, the “godfather of anime”, was breaking ground in the young medium. This is a glimpse of the labor that anime requires, the steep asks and amount of work that artists produce for as little as 200 yen ($2) per drawing. At one point, Yuasa highlights Mizusaki’s ink-stained hands covered in cuts and bandages. Even with reduced, manageable workloads, we still see the physical toll of what it takes to even accomplish three minutes of animation. This episode and its follow-up, “Hold That Machete Tight,” recreate the kind of high-pressure environment that has become the norm for professional animators, right down to a morbid joke where Kanamori finds Asakusa sleeping under a table in order to emulate the habits of her overworked role models. With just 55 days to work, they already have to cut their animation down from five to three minutes, as the latter would require 3,600 drawings and sleepless nights for two months. Mizusaki protests that she wants to take the time to make something good, but the unfortunate reality is that the anime industry is one burdened by high demand and little time. In the series’ third episode “Let’s Accomplish Something!”, the girls have to produce an animated short to prove the worth of their newly established “Studio Eizouken” to the student council, on a very tight deadline. The show follows a group of high school girls who make their own anime: the erratic lifelong enthusiast Asakusa, the rich young model and aspiring animator Mizusaki, and the more practical, acid-tongued Kanamori are positioned as analogues for the director, animator, and producer. Masaaki Yuasa and Science Saru’s latest anime Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, which is streaming now on Crunchyroll, captures the joy of animation as well as an occupational struggle from the perspective of the animators. Some studies reveal productions with an average of 230 working hours a month. But while those numbers are up, the industry is still relatively unhealthy, with reportedly low wages, a shortage of artists, and long hours. Between streaming-service simulcasts, digital distribution, and a more open, international market, the medium is earning more money every year.
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