Anime Industry: Outsourcing, Piracy Abound

This same title could have easily been used last year, and the year before that. But as if the rampaging anime piracy and Japan's demographic shift in the past several years wasn't bad enough for the anime industry, the economic crisis is now pushing the business even faster downhill, forcing anime producers to outsource most of the "grunt work" outside Japan - effectively dooming much of the country's struggling animators. And these aren't even half the problems plaguing the industry.


Business model made of win: "Click now and get 2 at the price of 1"
Any way you look at it, the situation is grim, and the jobs are shrinking rapidly. Yet, ironically, the number of anime titles are still growing by the year, and so is the global fan base. But as life (and alcohol abuse) has taught us, more is not always better. So maybe, just maybe, reducing the number of shows in favor of quality is one of the steps that need to be taken?

At least somebody out there seems to think so. Yasuo Yamaguchi, executive director of AJA (Association of Japanese Animations) "predicts that in the end, quality, not quantity, will come to be emphasized" - according to a recent Japan Times article analyzing this issue. Granted, Yamaguchi goes on to praise traditional hand-drawn animation, which I personally don't favor over digitized hawtness.

Other major lingering problems (albeit less known to us fans), as highlighted in a January 2009 report by the Japan Fair Trade Commission, are the lack of copyrights attributed to production agencies, and the shady (re)commissioning of production work..

"One [of the major concerns] is the lack of copyrights attributed to production agencies - copyrights are divvied up among sponsors, a system widely criticized for robbing the actual creators of any secondary-use benefits, not to mention motivation.

Another is the popular practice of commissioning and recommissioning production work to smaller agencies that often leads to shady transactions."

I won't even go into the ethics of fansubbing and piracy, or the official streaming strategies being tested around the webs. That's an age-old debate that's been talked about quite enough. Right now, it's the outsourcing of animation work that sounds like the biggest, most overlooked problem.

An estimated 90% of in-between animation is currently being outsourced overseas (mostly to China and the Philippines), which means there's a huge gap forming between the senior animators, and the youngsters who can no longer find a "grunt" job - badly paid, yes, but also badly needed for learning the tricks of the trade. And even the few grunts remaining have to make ends meet with diminutive paychecks. Will enough of them survive in the anime business to keep the pictures rolling?

Place your bets in the new poll, and check back in 10 years for the answer.