How Jobs in the Animation Industry are Changing
Animation has become a more common component of live-action production in the past few decades. A recent article I did on changes in live-action film production found this to be one of the most significant trends since 2000. What about animation itself though? Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s animation went from being predominantly done with pencil and ink to being done with computers. How have animation production credits changed over time?
To answer this question I took the 15 films with the top budgets on IMDB from each year and used IMDB’s API to get the full credits from the following departments: Animation, Art, Editorial, Special Effects, and Visual Effects. Here is what I found.
Click on the link below any of the following images to get an interactive graph.
For this and the following graphs I focus on the most common job titles. Jobs in general see a decline in the 1950s and a surge that peaks in the 1990s. Each year has the same number of movies, so these are differences in the number of people employed per movie.
Just as traditional animation roles were peaking in the 90s, new digital production methods emerged that lead to a great deal of change. In spite of all of this change the animator is still the top credit to this day. It has been removed from the following graphs to allow a more detailed view of the other jobs.
Some Traditional Animation Jobs Surged in the 90s but Were Devastated After
Several traditional key-frame animation jobs saw a peak in the 1990s. Positions related to inbetweening grew tenfold between 1988 and 1998. These were unfortunately the exact jobs that would be replaced in the 2000s by new digital tools. Inbetweening jobs shrank to less than a fifth of their peak by 2016. The effects of the digital turn were much more pronounced here than they were in the live-action study I conducted.
Some Jobs That Boomed in the 90s Continue to Grow
Many jobs related to management and creative development managed to continue growing through the 2000s. Of these the greatest success story is storyboarding related jobs. This may be a product of the product development mindset promoted by Pixar, a subject I have discussed elsewhere.
Technical Roles That Help Automate Other Jobs Have Been on the Rise
Along with creative development and management, technical jobs related to software development and data infrastructure rose during the 2000s and have become common since.
Some Digital Animation Jobs Have Been Victims of Automation
All of this clever management and automation has meant that some labour-intensive digital animation jobs have seen a decline. Compositor was an extremely popular position in the early period of computer graphics, but saw sharp decline after 2011.
The Popularity of Stereoscopic 3D Work Was Short Lived
Jobs relating to stereoscopic 3D rose dramatically in the mid to late 2000s, as theaters were fitted with hardware and consumer electronics companies pushed new 3D TVs. These jobs all fell just as dramatically as the trend fizzled. Curiously I did not observe the same decline in the live-action dataset.
Visual Effects Work Has Gown Significantly Since 2000
Positions like “effects animator” and “special effects” have been in use since the earliest days of studios animation. Work like drawing the splashes of water in Disney films was considered a kind of animation special effect. These titles grew at first in the 1990s. While the title of effects animator continued to be used thereafter, titles relating to special effects began to decrease in the 2000s, as the term “visual effects” became more common. In live-action the terms special and visual effects refer to different practices, but the difference in animation is more arbitrary. So we are seeing a shift in nomenclature here, but also the rise in popularity of simulation-based animation techniques now popular for animating things like splashing water.
Animated Films Have Grown in Complexity Since the 80s
If you total all of the jobs that appear in each year of this dataset, it becomes very clear that starting in the late 1980s a lot more people were being employed per film. Counting how many distinct roles there were each year shows that there was also a greater diversity of types of positions. The difference between the 1960s and 2010s is staggering, although there seems to be a downward trend forming in recent years.
Conclusion
There are two key historical trends evident on all of these graphs. First is the rise of large-scale animated features in the 90’s corresponding with the “Disney Renaissance” period, when Disney claimed the top 11 grossing films of the decade. The second is the shift to digital technology that followed, which saw certain groups of jobs decline, others thrive, and others stay about the same. Compared to my study of live action production titles, animation has shown more specific jobs suffering worse in the era of digital production. Some traditional jobs have endured though. The most common job title, animator, has never been eclipsed by something new, even with the rise of digital technology. Though the nature of this job and other positions that have endured the digital turn have changed considerably.
As with the other studies I have done, these data do not tell us anything about the quality of employment. Wages, union membership, and job security may well be down, despite the general increase in the number of jobs.
Data Sources and Methods
This project used a list of 45,000 movies from movielens.org with the animated films sorted out using their genre tags. Rather than showing what percentage of movies had a credit for a particular job, I wanted to count the absolute number of credits for specific jobs. In order to avoid creating an imbalance between years with more and less movie titles, I limited the number of movies per year to 15. I chose the top 15 budgets for each year, which means these data do not reflect the diversity of small scale animation productions.
Using this list of movies, I used Davide Alberani’s IMDBPy to pull production credits from IMDB’s API. As with the other production studies I have done, I needed to limit my request to 2–3000 a day to avoid getting cut off by IMDB’s server.
I removed extra information in the credits that appeared in parenthesis or behind a colon, which usually referred to a specific sequence the worker was credit for, or their alternate name. One of the weaknesses of counting job credits is that the same job is often called different things. Pruning the data in this way helped with this, but I also grouped together related jobs in the graph (which you can see in the key of the interactive graphs).
This article is part of a series on the special effects, visual effects, and animation industries. It is based on research supported by:
Le Fonds de Recherche Québécois sur la Société et la Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship
The University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Film & Media
Photo by Jeff Pierre
