Three of the 10 feature films in the running for top prize at the world’s most important animation festival in Annecy in France – which ends on Saturday – are from Japan. The country is the only real challenger to Hollywood’s dominance of the labour-intensive genre.
Yoshiaki Nishimura, a former Miyazaki stalwart who produced the Oscar-nominated The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, said the industry was struggling to “face up to a lack of animators, bad working conditions and perhaps a lack of creativity”.
Ayumu Watanabe – whose beautiful The Children of the Sea was shown out of competition at the festival – worried about visual “standardisation” and lack of originality, not helped by the fact that “fewer and fewer animators can draw well by hand”.
Japan will just no longer be the center of world animation. Maybe in five years, Taiwan will be such a center.
The costumes, character design and extreme violence without consequences that you still see in cartoons are holdovers from black-face minstrelsy.
'It's like building a cathedral, in which only a few seconds of animation are completed each week.
Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
Even though you may see characters of color represented on screen, you can’t see the faces of the people hired to do the voices. Historically, white people did all the voices including those horrible imitations of what Asians, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans were supposed to sound like.
It's computer animation. It's a new industry. It has limitations: It doesn't do skin, hair and clothing real well. ``Take away skin, hair and clothing and you have crabs and insects.
After seven years of consecutive growth, the anime industry set a new sales record in 2017 of ¥2.15 trillion ($19.8 billion), driven largely by demand from overseas. Exports of anime series and films have tripled since 2014 -- aided in part by sales to streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon -- and so far show no signs of slowing.
The strengths of Japan's animation industry boil down to the overlap between manga and anime, according to Ian Condry, the author of "Anime: Soul of Japan." "Creators used comics as a testing ground for their stories and characters. That's often been the secret of anime's success," said Condry in a phone interview.
In the early 1980s, it was largely American and European children from military and expat business families based in Japan who circulated boot-legged videotapes of anime to their peers back home, according to Mizuko Ito, the editor of the "Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World."
After Japan's once-miraculous economy went bust in the 1990s, the nation sought to rebrand itself from a global business superpower to an exporter of a unique artistic culture. In 1997, Japan's Agency of Cultural Affairs started supporting exhibitions on manga, anime, video games and media art.
“Most institutions,” explains Leila Bourdoukan, former executive manager at Cinema do Brasil, “the culture secretaries, Brazil’s minister of culture and the state governments, have specific supports for animation. Animation is a labor-intensive activity which provides work for young people.”
The temptations and pitfalls are to go too far -- to exaggerate too much and just put things on the screen because you can put them in. To me, the most important thing is the characterization: to know them, to understand them and appreciate them. The effects are just to allow you to depict the characters as WELL and vividly as possible.
We were completely aware of how different X-Men:TAS was regarding women. First, the series existed because Fox Kids Network president Margaret Loesch willed it into being. Second, everyone on the creative side had been working in the TV animation business for years, and we were tired of putting up with its many stupid, constraining rules, one of which was that in “boys’ adventure” series, the audience is almost all boys and they won’t watch female heroes.
I think [adult studios] are afraid of CG coming into the market because it will affect them, and they aren't able to do it themselves because they do not have the creativity or the skills," says Darron. "If they do hire someone, they're not willing to put up the budget or give it the financial backing required.
Their first feature, Sex Agent - 0069, took almost a year to complete. But these days, the brothers say they can make a feature in about four months – the same time it takes a studio to put together a live-action DVD. "We've been doing environments for many years, and we can create any environment someone wants in a couple of days," Tahl says, matter-of-factly. "The more we practice doing the animation, the faster we get."
According to the Japanese Animation Creators Association, an animator in Japan earns on average ¥1.1 million (~$10,000) per year in their 20s, ¥2.1 million (~$19,000) in their 30s, and a livable but still meager ¥3.5 million (~$31,000) in their 40s and 50s. The poverty line is Japan is ¥2.2 million.
I worry if we continue to animate in the same way with multiple movies coming out year after year from studios that there will be a “sameness” to it all. I worry audiences won’t find them fresh. We embraced the snappier style of animation to what I did on the last Ice Age movie.
You have to understand that many of the scenes we're building just couldn't be done without the use of digital rendering.
I think animation has a tendency to make you a little arrogant. You create everything in a world, think you have answers for everything, etc. So, I think it’s the ultimate challenge for animation directors – jumping to live-action where you don’t have that control.
While the South African animation community is large compared to other countries in Africa, it is still small from a global perspective. There are about 20 established animation and vfx studios in the country, according to estimates, mostly small (two to three people) or medium in size. A few larger studios, with staffs of 30 to 35, dominate the commercial, vfx and long-form character animation sectors, but smaller studios can be profitable by specializing in commercials or motion graphics.
Egypt also hosts a significant animation production business, with more than 50 animation studios, according to Mohamed Ghazala, an animator, animation historian and faculty member at Minia University in Egypt, one of the relatively few institutions in Africa that offer animation programs. His films include Carnival (2001), Crazy Works (2002) and HM HM (2005). Ghazala also is director of ASIFA Egypt, which was established in Cairo in October 2008 as the first ASIFA chapter in Africa.
Any story can be told in animation…I’m hoping someone will try to tell a story that’s brand new…not one that’s similar to every other story we’ve seen.
Work hard. That’s the thing that most people who love games and animation may not realize about what they’re seeing. It requires an ugly amount of work. You have to dedicate your life to it, but I believe almost anyone can learn how to make games and animate at a competent level. I don’t believe in following your dreams and going into too much fairy dust about the arts. Sure, it’s fun, but there are many times it’s not fun and you still have to do it.
We had to be able to animate them so that they felt like flesh and blood, but most importantly you had to believe that they had souls behind their eyes.
The trouble with animation today is that we’ve forgotten the basics. Every animator at Pixar can still draw. Good animation is driven by the craft not by the tools.
The film industry is one of the important cultural and creative industries in Uzbekistan, including animated films. Animated films are recognized as a complex industry playing a critical educational role. Numerous sociological studies claim that modern cartoons and animated films are capable not only of influencing the child’s behaviour, but also influence the formation of his/her worldview.
Anything can be done live-action if you have unlimited time and unlimited money. But it wouldn't have looked like the book and it wouldn't have kept the same emotion as the wonderful paintings that Chris illustrated. So I don't think it would have been as true to the book if it was done live-action.