ANIME AS A DOMINATED PYRAMID: On Socioeconomical Dynamics Within the Industry
The anime industry pits workers one against the other through the mechanism of a free, liberal market. This competition conditions multiple company policies, like investing in a specific technology such as motion-capture for Digital Frontier, catering to a certain demographic like outsourcing for Tonari Animation, or even trying to attract qualified manpower from overseas — what MAPPA does by signing a contract with Benjamin Faure, or Toei Animation with Vincent Chansard that the animator publicly revealed to be more than €4'000 in 2023 (whereas, according to a 2015 JAniCA survey, ¥235,000 ((a little under €1'500)) was your average monthly income for key animators, with the yen being at a slightly higher value than today in 2015). In such a context, production companies such as your stereotypical anime studio have to decide on a proper retribution for workers to be incentivized to work through the labor-intensive process of Japanese animation, but this retribution varies from studio to studio. After all, Western animation is known to pay better or even to have a saner work-life balance in comparison to the Japanese animation industry, with things like unions or strikes being closer to the mores of Western people (the birth of socialism was fundamentally European).
“There are some of the popular studios whose basic monthly salary per animator has been disclosed to the public on several occasions” AnimeGalaxy, March 2022
Inasmuch as the average monthly income is the norm for a standardized job position, which in itself is a telltale sign of specialization in animation industries, this average income is the result of three conflicting forces driven by interest: the company, having a budget to fill a given position according to felt needs; the worker, wanting the best income for the least amount of work — or other needs, like acquiring hands-on experience or the prestige of working on a certain project… — ; and the market, itself an entity emerging from the historical and geographical circumstances that saw the Japanese animation industry take place as it became. But we need to insufflate more nuance to this analysis than just to mention how offer and demand interact in a market, if we want but to even barely scratch the surface of a realistic overview of what the Japanese animation industry may look like, in theory perhaps, but in such a way as to help define living animators and other staff members experiencing it collectively.
Having mentioned the source that gave the impulse to this entire analysis, we may as well cast more light into it. The 2015 JAniCA survey on average ages, monthly and yearly incomes by job positions, is a very important document. Its source is the Japanese Animation Creators Association, a “non-profit organization dedicated to improving working conditions for workers in the anime industry”, formed in 2007 by over 500 animators. The JAniCA can for instance be credited for launching the Young Animator Training Project, having “received 214.5 million yen (about US$2.27 million) from the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs” and leading to the production of Death Billiards and Little Witch Academia. The funds from the government were motivated by the way the Young Animator Training Project promoted a different production model that departed from outsourcing the production abroad, instead focusing on teaching hand-drawn animation to a new generation of animators.
However, while the source is a reputable and industry-approved, government-backed non-profit entity, there are at least two or three things we could criticize about the document. The most important given the structure of its data may be the choice to only use an average aggregation for every entry, rather than giving the possibility to see the mean. Indeed, by informing about percentiles, the mean gives more insight as to the social repartition of incomes for a given job position, or mean age for a position. The second thing is that there is no gender division across the data. And this is extremely crucial for social justice, as the gender divide is very tangible, for instance in the way female anime directors are much less recognized compared to their male counterparts. And can we say the job positions are truly standardized? Whatever is supposed to mean miscellaneous tasks, it is but the entropy of this table. But anyone tasked with creating a model over a complex reality may encounter the problem of reality being as troublesome to organize as it is, so let’s not blame it too much. Also, where are screenwriters?
This table is far from being objective in its structure itself, by the choice to valorize some data, or how it’s organized. Indeed, incomes — which are not strictly similar to salaries in the way that the anime industry has a lot of free-lancing going on (for instance, some free-lancing key animators can be paid per cut, and so how skill levels vary impact how wages vary, also meaning that animators may not be able to support themselves enough to dedicate themselves fully to animation and to progress as fast as they could in their career) — sort the job positions from most valued to least valued. And we can clearly see that, except in the average age at a given position, the average age of a job position and its income seem to tell the story of a progression in the hierarchical structure of the industry. So this article’s title dealing with domination was both about age and income. Therefore not only economics, but socioeconomics.
If we had gender numbers, I suspect we would see quite a few color designers being females, at least in the upper average part of the age dataset. But the only source I have to support this reading is from Rayna Denison’s Studio Ghibli: An Industrial History, where the gist I remember is basically that women were stuck at mid-level positions and more represented in the coloring department of the pipeline (and again, this is from an industrial history, so there might be jetlag in this bit of insight, and it’d even be worthwhile to have it be debunked). A comparison was also drawn with Disney as far as labor division was done in the animation industry. To quote another source, maybe clarifying a bit: “This was made clear in an early Disney employment brochure as well as in the letter a female would likely receive if she were inquiring about a job beyond that of a secretary: “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men… The only work open to women consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the tracings on the reverse side with paint according to directions.””
I can think of a few female outliers to the statistics we have at hand. Naoko Yamada first directed a TV series on K-ON! in 2009, at the age of 24, being 18 years younger than the average TV series director in the anime industry in 2015. Kanna Hirayama first became character designer, chief animation director and animation director on Selection Project in 2021, at age 26 when the minimum average age for all those job positions in 2015 would have been 38. Yet again, it is very likely that the bulk of the anime industry is not entirely depicted by this survey from JAniCA. And Kanna Hirayama and Naoko Yamada may be the exceptions that confirm the rule.
If incomes quantify the domination of the anime industry, what the job positions actually entail qualify this domination more precisely on the workplace. I was thinking of animation directors for this, as when they have to correct younger beginners it might become the place for some tension in the workplace, perhaps because of some emotional immaturity in younger individuals too? Or some producers having specific ideas on company policies. Also, entry-level positions such as in-betweener or nigen (that an animation director once told me not to exist if I recall clearly, but that an article by Ben Ettinger’s Anipages supposedly described as being “A new role […] recently invented as a buffer between the key animator and the animation director: second key animation”), being less valued in terms of income, are also intervening between more creative positions, like key animation or animation direction. Whereas the character designer, coming up with ways for characters to act in spacetime along to the narratives onscreen, has a much more impactful creative role. The remuneration, being 4 times more than an in-betweener, is conceivably correlated to the added value in, say, branding revenue: if shows act as advertisement in a media mix business model, then character designers are very important for brand recognition itself (which to me should naturally result in royalties!), a core concept for any successful company — think of Pikachu…
Surprisingly perhaps, 3DCG as a job position sees an averagely younger part of the workforce rise in terms of remuneration. The fact this part of the anime industry is younger may be directly tied to the recent historical developments that pioneered computer graphics in the West and Japan alike. Hollywood’s earlier perception of 3D as a worthy venue for movies was far lower than you can expect it to be today… Though there’s clearly something — and it’s neither nice nor professional — to be said about how movie directors nowadays in the West spit on computer graphics when it carries a ridiculous part of the work for most productions… Not to mention how the productivity, or added-value, would deserve the VFX staff to be protected by unions. To see 3D animation jobs dominating 2D animation follows a global trend, and would seem to align with a symbolic domination over hand-drawn animation were one not to be aware of the particular context Japanese animation lies in with regard to conserving this traditional art on the planet.
The average yearly income for a series director would be, according to 2015 and an imperfect dataset, 6.49 million JPY. Almost 6 times more than an in-betweener, a position in which one can spend years until moving up the ladder to become a key animator. This is the highest discrepancy we can see through this table, however we also do not have access to data concerning production committees, nor can we differentiate the power dynamics by different workers from the job position aggregates between different production committees. The production committee entity, if you are aware of how the funding of anime is structured, is a key factor in determining a studio’s budget on a given production. So perhaps the discrepancies can get even higher than 6 times between the absolute lowest job position and absolute highest job position in the anime industry — as soon as we step into the capitalist abyss, the capitalist abyss stares back at us… Another concern can be that the JAniCA is dedicated to better the anime industry’s working conditions, and that the people standing the most to gain from that would be people within the lower percentiles of income for a given job position, therefore that the data might be skewed and less representative of the industry as a whole.
This absolute highest discrepancy between job positions we can imagine, or by default this relatively highest discrepancy as the table proposes to let us see, may be one of the points on which to act to create, or imagine, a more egalitarian anime production model. There have been multiple attempts at creating different production models, and I suspect they look at different indicators than pure incomes, though. Such as in-house versus free-lance positions, that we cannot get a glimpse at here, or housing conditions, as we know the Animator Dormitory to be looking at in a more holistic way of doing things. And we do not know as of yet if artificial intelligence, a growing concern amongst the entertainment and other industries worldwide, will greatly impact this discrepancy.
“Studios using internal data sets to train their AI programs shouldn’t be a problem from a rights owner perspective” AnimeNewsNetwork, 2023
Indeed, WIT and Netflix were known earlier this year to have experimented with AI for background production, partly using an artist’s layout — if this solution becomes democratized for studios, we can expect the salaries for background artists to further plumet. Tonari Animation’s CEO also pronounced himself in favor of AI in the anime production processes, going as far as to being pragmatically quoted to say for a notorious AnimeNewsNetwork interview: “In the other hand, studios using internal data sets to train their AI programs shouldn’t be a problem from a rights owner perspective. Martin said that Toei Animation is in the best position to exploit this trend, being the largest anime studio with access to a private server.” At the same time, I believe it’s interesting that so much thought has been given to this possibility.
To conclude this analysis, let’s look at what we went over. We first described in broad strokes the competitive context of the anime industry, including outsourcing labor overseas, and the place the Japanese Animation Creators Association roughly occupied as a non-profit organization with government backing, preoccupied with the cultural legacy of Japanese animation. This gave us some of the keys we needed to further read between the lines of the 2015 JAniCA survey that attributed an average age, monthly and yearly incomes per a given, standardized job position within the anime industry. However, we also indicated some of the critical failures as to what the survey structurally failed to include, such as gender representation in job positions, as well as the mean for every dataset aggregate.
Not to mention the blind spot of miscellaneous tasks and the occlusion of screenwriting, both being able to explain one another however. We also noticed how the structural choice of sorting job positions from highest to lowest average income, roughly corresponding to a decrease in the age of a given worker, could give the key as to some socioeconomical realities of the Japanese animation industry: namely, that the richest are the elder, with all it can include of intergenerational domination in the workplace. We also went over how exceptional careers like that of Naoko Yamada and Kanna Hirayama are far from the norm, and this probably even if the gender division of job positions per age was data that were available for analysis, and also the proof that some job positions might benefit from letting younger people take a shot at them — a complaint I’ve once encountered in an interview. In the end, perhaps the dataset of the 2015 JAniCA report on average incomes per job positions is fundamentally skewed, as the goal of the non-profit organization is indeed to make a positive change for the Japanese animation industry, and it might therefore attract those standing the most to gain from it.
But it’s enough of a dataset to notice the highest discrepancy in incomes being close to directors being paid 6 times the incomes of in-betweeners, that the market could explain with productivity increase, but that people seeking more egalitarian production models could seek to reduce. Something we noticed was also that income does not equate wage, especially with the popularity of free-lancing in the anime industry, something people might choose for a better life-work balance or personal choices. Animators are famously paid a certain rate per cuts they complete within a month, and looking at it that way, animators that can’t compete with their elder in productivity may need to sacrifice time in other jobs to support their livelihoods, therefore further not progressing and not being able to grow in their careers. Precarious housing conditions within the industry’s level-entry positions is a concern particularly highlighted by the Animator Dormitory, so perhaps a more unbiased view at socioeconomical domination within the anime industry should take input from housing conditions per job positions. And another concern might be artificial intelligence, already developed in studios like Toei and Wit, that could further make some job positions’ average income plumet or even render the position obsolete, like cel painters in the digital era… We should try to analyze this data with regard to earlier or more recent surveys or equivalent sources to see how evolved the socioeconomical realities of the industry in time, with more historical perspective so as to track — and possibly correct — the phenomena impacting negatively the anime industry’s working conditions.
