The Costs of Remote Production in Japanese Animation

Since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and the subsequent anime streaming boom that followed, Japanese animation production pipelines rapidly shifted to remote and digital workflows as a countermeasure to a severe talent shortage domestically amid increased production demand.

It was precisely at this time, that myself and many others in the "web-gen" anime space came up and started their careers. It was the first time in the history of Japanese animation that there was such a large influx of self-taught animators funneling in to the front lines of Japanese key animation.

Prior to this, the solution for the lack of resources was to develop outsourcing companies in South East Asia, Korea, and China, to handle surges in production demand, but we had reached a point back then where even the overseas outsourcing companies were struggling to keep up.

The shift to hiring remote freelancers around the world was a great solution at the time, but it came with some severe consequences, that we are contending with today.

The first wave of "web-gen" animators that came in around the time of the pandemic, were people who were already chronically online, and were studying Japanese animation with the intention in most cases to eventually move to Japan to study and work in the anime industry.

The only real pathway at that time was to go to 専門学校 (Tech School), Learn Japanese, and find a job as a 動画マン (Douga man). But those of us that were ready to make the move around the time of the pandemic, ended up not being able to travel to Japan to start our careers, since the border of Japan was closed largely from 2020-2022.

Luckily there were many young tech-savvy and social media fluent 制作進行 (Production managers) at that time that went to twitter and used it as a way to discover new contacts and animators they could try out on projects. At the time that I got my offer for the first anime I participated in, I was working as an indie animator working on a YouTube series, and I was contacted randomly by a 制作進行 at studio Pierrot asking me to participate in Black Clover.

Since 2020, reaching out to animators on twitter has now become common practice. A large amount of the key animation talent pool in the anime industry is made up of people who are joining directly as Key Animators as their first time job, rather than joining studios in house to learn Douga first.

In the past directors needed to confirm all the animators that joined productions, but due to severe schedule crunch, we lost the time for directors to confirm animators, and now many inexperienced new-hire 制作進行 (Production Coordinators) are in charge of assessing portfolios and giving people the chance to start a career in animation.

The Problem with this Model
Because a large amount of animators haven't had proper douga training, there has been a great burden put on the industry's enshutsu and sakkan, who are in charge of correcting and revising the animation to maintain continuity, quality, and consistency.

If this problem isn't addressed, we're going to see a talent exodus of the industry's most experienced directors and sakkan. (Personally i think this is already happening)

If we require directors and sakkan to burn themselves out in order to make productions, we're going to end up with gradually declining quality in Japanese animation, the elimination of mentor-apprenticeship talent development, and a industry full of people that don't know that their work is causing problems. If this continues, there will be a contraction of the industry, less confident investors, and shuttering studios as too many low quality productions make it to air and shrink the market.

The Solutions
For Animators:
There is a lot of resources online for animators to learn the Japanese animation system, so animators should try to seek out these resources in order to properly understand how to not cause problems for productions. If you're wanting to learn any search terms I highly recommend starting with my blog post about How Anime is Made. Even though there are many resources in English nowadays, I recommend that people use the Japanese search terms and use their browsers to translate to English in order to expand the available resources.

Remote Animators who have enough experience (3+ years) should also try to move to Tokyo and get a full time contract at a studio where they can close any knowledge gaps they may have and fully integrate into the Japanese animation system. There are studios that have support for non-japanese speakers, so nowadays its an option for global animators.

For Directors:
Directors need to also become aware of the fact that productions may be comprised of a lot of freelance animators who never got a traditional animation education in studios in Japan. An important point too is that this isn't limited to remote foreigners, there's a lot of web-gen Japanese animators as well that also joined the industry this way.

For Producers:
We also need to get back to directors confirming the entire list of Key Animators, and Sakkan that participate in production, and Animation Producers really need to include a testing period or a confirmation period for staffing productions in the schedule. If we don't schedule for this there will be no way to properly screen animators for productions.

Final Thoughts
I hear in my job a lot of complaints about foreign animators, but the problems that foreign animators have also exist domestically. The issue isn't just skill level it's also experience in Japanese animation.

Unfortunately we're in a situation where since we're rushing all of the productions, many animators are sustaining careers without ever getting feedback or retakes from directors.

Since I've started stepping into directing, I've decided that I'm going to try to teach the animators I'm directing as much as possible, and I hope other directors can do the same. Even though most animators are freelance, if we can collectively teach the freelancers in the industry through our work, we'll be able to gradually increase the competency of the industry and hopefully make more productions proceed smoothly.

Taking an educational approach to directing is probably a good way to not get so upset about the problematic cuts that people are submitting. We shouldn't just redo everything for everyone, it prevents learning. We have to accept that this is where the industry is now, and we can only reliably make productions that are at the mean of the skillsets of the people on the front lines. Let's all just take the stance that everyone in this industry is earnestly doing their best and try to pass on our experience and know how as much as possible.