Animation

"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."

"Do you watch The Simpsons? Did you see the episode about Poochie the Dog? There's every network executive in there. You have creative people sitting in a meeting, and then you got some network executive come in. The executive will say, "Let's have the character be a little more with-it, a little more hip, a little more today, a little more contemporary, a little like "Hey dude, hey wow!'" [These are] executives at other networks, like the Big Three networks, and to a smaller degree, Fox. This is the thing that plagued animation writing when I started, which was the early '80s. You had all this shit on TV -- it was like Smurfs, He-Man, She-Ra. I actually worked on some of those [shows], and it was just all these life-draining, soul-numbing meetings with these executives who come in, and they just say, "We want this character more fun, more appealing to girls, more this, more that." In their way of thinking, animation is supposed to be something that's not interesting or fun to look at, or God forbid, you should laugh at. They want it to be comforting for kids, so a kid will watch, smile, and stare happily like a little drone, in between Fruit Roll-Up commercials. That's basically what they look for, for shows like that."

"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."

"If you were to concoct a plan for entertainment-industry success in the digital age, Condry notes, it would probably not involve the painstaking development of hand-drawn cartoons. “It’s incredibly difficult, and not very lucrative” for the artists, says Condry, who visited dozens of anime studios, workshops and artists while researching the book over the last eight years. “It’s one of the most labor-intensive forms of media there is.” Entertainment companies do not necessarily make huge profits off anime, which was an issue motivating Condry’s study; as he puts it, “How can things that don’t make money go global?” The answer is that anime producers create many series and watch closely for what catches on — and then, once the characters in a series become a “platform” for audience participation, may cash in through toys, games and other forms of entertainment. “What distinguishes anime,” Condry says, “is the degree of openness the copyright holders have to give the fans a chance to re-work the characters” and other elements of the original cartoons. He adds: “The ‘Gundam’ producers, when shown work created by fans, just said, ‘That might be the way it is.’”"

"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."

"With animation because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules. But what's great about all these different [cartoon] shows that are on now is they all have their own rules and they stick to them. And in my opinion the ones that don't make it, the ones that fall by the wayside, are the ones that aren't aware of that idea, that you have to have your own rules and boundaries. If anything is possible then I think the audience doesn't care."

"Animated porn has a long, international history—from the erotic woodblock prints of Japan’s Heian period to some of the earliest animated erotic cartoons of the Roaring Twenties (because of course once the moving picture came along, porn came with it). So if hentai and anime communities still thrive online and there are sites dedicated to Disney-inspired porn, it seems a shame that more people don’t talk about what makes this type of erotica so great. Clinical psychologist David Ley, PhD, author of Ethical Porn for Dicks, says that “animated erotica has been underground for a long time, largely because it’s often misunderstood.” Not only are cartoons something we regularly associate with childhood, but the style of a lot of pornographic cartoons is such that some characters featured may appear to be under the age of consent. “Though I might question how exactly you determine the age of a fictional animated character,” Ley added in an email to Glamour."

"To some people, even acknowledging these desires is a kind of taboo act, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t totally healthy and appropriate ways to do so. Writer and therapist Dr. Meg-John Barker says that if we want to explore those types of fantasies, “It’s important to find ways of experiencing them which aren’t unethical or non-consensual.” You can satisfy desires of all sorts because—one more time!—people and scenarios in animated porn are not real. You are not actually looking at a guy being fucked by a unicorn because not only is that not a real guy, but unicorns don’t even exist! (Sadly.) A friend of mine once told me that she’d never been triggered by a cartoon, and it got me thinking. Could animated erotica be a way to offer arousing stimuli to someone who is negatively affected by most live-action porn? Dr. Ley thinks so. “I’ve had several patients with trauma histories where this was their erotica of choice,” he says. “It’s a good example of the diversity of human sexuality, and the ways we each adapt our sexuality to fit our needs and personalities.” OK, and sometimes it might just be about seeing our favorite childhood characters having sex. Which is totally fine! “For a lot of people,” says LCSW and Certified Sex Therapist Melissa Novak, “their first memories are of being turned on by Beauty and the Beast or Snow White, and with animated porn you actually get to [as an adult] play out those childhood fantasies that you didn’t understand.”"

"In Shrek, we had to animate an ogre, a gigantic dragon, a talking donkey, a very human like princess, a gingerbread man, a puppet and so on... In ANTZ, most of the characters were ants. The big challenge was to jump from different characters and still be able to make them all perform together. Sometimes it could be hard when you're animating a human character and then the next day you might have to work on a dragon. For each character, it took us few months of testing and practice until we felt totally comfortable with the character. The fun part was when we all felt like we knew the characters and we could look at an animation test and said "That's not Shrek. Shrek would never do that." or "Yes, that's definitely Shrek.""

"I also think the very fundamental elements like drawing and sketching are still very important. One thing that I found very helpful is to appreciate things around me more often. You can be in a bus looking around, you see this child talking to her mother. If you think about animating a character to move like that child, you will realize life is amazing. You have all these natural, spontaneous character movements in front of you everyday. To capture that is a lot of hard work when you animate. Remember that plastic bag in American Beauty? We sometimes look at people around us and studied the movements and charateristics. Please try, you'll realize it's amazing."

"After graduation, Tezuka became a full-time cartoonist and hit the big time with Astro Boy, about a robot boy who is rescued by a sympathetic doctor. In 1963, Astro Boy became the first homegrown animated cartoon to air in Japan, giving birth to the billion-dollar anime industry. Tezuka had created one of Japan’s most enduring post–World War II cultural exports. But in the late 1960s people started to complain that cartoons were rotting kids’ brains and teachers began enforcing a “no comics” rule in the classroom. Tezuka’s cutesy animated television shows, so novel in the 1950s, became laughable during the 1960s. Tezuka responded by creating some of the most outrageously racy, controversial, morbid adult-oriented comics, ever."

"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."

"Animation in itself is an art form, and that's the point I think always needs clarification. True animation exists without any background, or any color, or any sound, or anything else; it exists in your hand. And you can take it and flip it. [...] What makes animation is the fact that you have a series of drawings that move. You don't even have to have a camera, you see; animation exists without it. If you want to broaden your audience, or make it more colorful or add music, then you put it under a camera one frame at a time, and then you run it at the same speed as you flip it, and then you have animation. If it depends basically upon soundtrack, or basically upon music, or color, graphic design, or anything else to sustain itself, then it is not unique to animation."

"̇ It’s wonderful. It takes a long time, but you have all of this luxury of choice, which you don’t have in live action. You can design your own movie stars. Especially if you’re anal like I am, for someone who is a control freak, animation is torture and heaven at the same time. I worked as production designer on Epic as well, so I got to carve weapons out of nutshells and toothpicks. It’s like getting to make the coolest toy soldiers ever. And they’re paying me."

"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. The country pivoted from mass-marketing high-technology offerings to spreading the word on everything from Hello Kitty to sushi. In 1997, Japan's Agency of Cultural Affairs started supporting exhibitions on manga, anime, video games and media art."

"What one might consider as limiting (working at only Walt Disney Animation Studios) has actually been incredibly expanding for me. Because of its stature, Disney has attracted so many of the best artists in animation within its walls ever since I’ve been here. The animation world is actually a rather small family and so many animators I know at other studios have come from Disney or are going to come here. There is a constant influence from outside of our studio walls. Disney itself is ever evolving and continually re-inventing itself. The studio of today is nothing like it was in the 70’s and nothing like it will be 10 years from now."

"Disney did not have a monopoly on using animated folklore films for marketing purposes. During the heyday of Soviet animation in the 1970s and 1980s, cartoons that seemed to follow folktales were altered slightly to convey messages in keeping with Soviet ideology. They not only criticized capitalism, but also depicted women as sexless and self-sacrificing,and urged cooperation,neighborliness, and nonviolence. National minorities within the Soviet Union were portrayed as backward and in need of the guidance of Russia,the leading Soviet republic. Ukrainians, for example, were shown as cute and quaint, living in a bucolic land. Colorful clothing and tasty foods were attributed to them, as well as the ability to sing and dance. However, they were also seen as a people who keep costs low believed in spirits and did not understand modern life. The fall of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence have not changed the situation, at east when it comes to animation produced in Russia. Folklore films still show Ukrainians as bucolic and musical. Women still sacrifice for the sake of others. Any animation critical of Russia, even if based on folklore, quickly disappears from the market."

"The 1970s and 1980s saw the heyday of Soviet animation. Wonderful cartoons were produced, which were of the highest quality, and many won international awards. IuriiNorshtein's Shazka skazok (Tae of Tales 1979), for example, won awards in Germany, France, and Canada shortly after its release. As MacFadyen has shown (2007:183), the film was called "the greatest animated film of all time" at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and an international committee in Japan declared it the second greatest film" with another Norshtein creation, Ezhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog 1975) coming in first. Both of the acclaimed Norhstein films declare a relationship to folklore. Hedgehog in the Fog does so in its opening credits, where it states that it is based on a folktale, and Tale of Tales does so in its title."

"Two decades ago, there was hardly a Brazilian animation industry to speak of. Ten years back, a small handful of stalwart directors were struggling to gain international notoriety and impact TV, festivals and box offices domestically and abroad with low budgets and a lot of hard work. Today, Brazilian animation is thriving on all fronts, and in some cases, is even outpacing live-action in budget and ambition. In 1951, Brazil’s first-ever animated feature, “Amazon Symphony,” was released; since that time 43 other toon features have joined its ranks. One feature every year-and-a-half is hardly anything to write home about, but according to Marta Machado of Brazilian animation house Otto Desenhos, 19 of those pictures have come in the last five years, and another 25 features are currently in production."

"“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.""

"Shingo Adachi, an animator and character designer for Sword Art Online, a popular anime TV series, said the talent shortage is a serious ongoing problem — with nearly 200 animated TV series alone made in Japan each year, there aren’t enough skilled animators to go around. Instead, studios rely on a large pool of essentially unpaid freelancers who are passionate about anime. At the entry level are “in-between animators,” who are usually freelancers. They’re the ones who make all the individual drawings after the top-level directors come up with the storyboards and the middle-tier “key animators” draw the important frames in each scene. In-between animators earn around 200 yen per drawing — less than $2. That wouldn’t be so bad if each artist could crank out 200 drawings a day, but a single drawing can take more than an hour. That’s not to mention anime’s meticulous attention to details that are by and large ignored by animation in the West, like food, architecture, and landscape, which can take four or five times longer than average to draw."

"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."

"Anime’s structural iniquities stem back to Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and the “god of manga.” Tezuka was responsible for an endless catalog of innovations and precedents in manga, Japanese comics, and anime, onscreen animation. In the early 1960s, with networks unwilling to take the risk on an animated series, Tezuka massively undersold his show to get it on air. “Basically, Tezuka and his company were going to take a loss for the actual show,” said Michael Crandol, an assistant professor of Japanese studies at Leiden University. “They planned to make up for the loss with Astro Boy toys and figures and merchandise, branded candy. … But because that particular scenario worked for Tezuka and the broadcasters, it became the status quo.” Tezuka’s company made up the deficit and the show was a success, but he unknowingly set a dangerous precedent: making it impossible for those who followed in his footsteps to earn a living wage. Diane Wei Lewis points out in a recent study that women, who often worked on animation from home, were especially vulnerable to exploitation and paid even less. Nowadays, when production committees set the budget for shows, there is a long-established precedent to. The revenue is divided up among the television networks, manga publishers, and toy companies. “The parent companies make money from the merchandising tie-ins,” Crandol said, “but the budget for the rank-and-file animators is separate.” “These prices are so ridiculous because they’re still based on what Tezuka came up with,” said Thurlow. “And back then, the drawings were very simple … you had a circle head and dot eyes, and maybe you can draw an in-between in 10 minutes. I could earn some money at that pace … but Japanese anime, [now] one drawing is so detailed. You’ve worked for an hour for two bucks.”"

"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."

"It's no secret that the majority of animators and writers prefer to work on shows aimed at an older audience. Abby Terkuhle, president of MTV Animation and creative director of MTV, was North America's first pioneer in the area of adult animation. His network continues to produce and showcase the kind of programming that has made this genre feasible both domestically and abroad. On the topic of creative process, Abby points out that, "For us, producing adult animation is in some ways akin to the creative process experienced in music. It gives our writers and animators an opportunity to experiment with their art and to come up with new techniques and formats. Going back to the early days, it started with something as simple as splashing paint on the MTV logo.""

"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."

"Outside of South Africa and Egypt, animation production is limited mostly to a few small studios and independent animators in countries such as Mauritius and Kenya, working primarily in 2D animation, along with some Flash and Maya work. Much of their output consists of a small number of short films and commercials, with very little long-form entertainment content. "We do a lot of work for Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, because there are very limited animation resources available in these countries," says Forrest."

"In modern-day France, a long-term interest in Japan has mingled with the strong culture of bande dessinée, or French and Belgian comics. “The current popularity of manga [there] is generally traced to the proliferation of anime on French TV in the mid-1970s and 1980s,” according to Gueydan-Turek. This was largely limited to blockbuster manga and encouraged “a simplified and distorted view of Japanese culture”, where aspects like kawaii (the culture of cuteness) and certain violent aesthetics prevailed “over the artistic and literary nuance of more multilayered graphic works such as Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen”. One manga series beloved in France has been the cat-centric Chi’s Sweet Home. However, Gueydan-Turek points to the la nouvelle manga movement as a less mainstream alternative, which brings together Japanese mangaka (manga authors) and Franco-Belgian bande dessinée artists in a hybridised approach to the multiple cultures."

"If manga has acted as a vehicle for continued international links in France, and as an alternative to the French cultural presence in Algeria, it’s provided a counter to perceived American values in Russia, where Sailor Moon has become hugely popular. Manga spread in the post-Soviet era, allowing certain educated youth to seek refuge from both the constraints of communism and the money-seeking excesses of capitalism. It was a key part of the geeky new otaku subculture (Japanese men who love manga, anime and computers) that provided a ‘protective niche’ for Russian young people."

"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."

"Animated drawings were introduced to film a full decade after George Méliès had demonstrated in 1896 that objects could be set in motion through single-frame exposures. J. Stuart Blackton's 1906 animated chalk experiment Humorous Phases of Funny Faces was followed by the imaginative works of Winsor McCay, who made between four thousand and ten thousand separate line drawings for each of his three one-reel films released between 1911 and 1914. Only in the half-dozen years after 1914, with the technical simplifications (and patent wars) involving tracing, printing, and celluloid sheets, did animated cartoons become a thriving commercial enterprise."

"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."

"The process of outsourcing animation began in the 1970s, when the three major American networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—aired Saturday morning cartoons like Scooby-Doo] and Fat Albert. These shows were hugely popular, and American production studios struggled to meet the demand for more episodes. “They had no other choice but to outsource production,” says Nelson Shin, the founder of Seoul’s AKOM Production, which has animated The Simpsons for more than 25 years. Korean artists proved themselves to be technically astute and fast, and by the 1990s, Animation World Magazine estimated that 30 percent of the world’s animation production was done in Korea. Today, the Korean animation industry is a complex web of around 120 studios, creating work for Fox, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, and the Cartoon Network. “Not many people know about the close relationship between Korean and American animation production,” says Shin. The only tell, he says, comes if you pay close attention to a show’s credits."

"Kuwahara showed them how drawing on-screen would allow in-betweeners to create consistent line quality every time. He showed them how going fully digital would ease the revision process, making it so that anyone—in Korea or the U.S.—could open a file and make adjustments. He demonstrated how the eyebrow problem could be fixed in mere seconds. Still, in meeting after meeting, Kuwahara got the same response: Korean studio owners couldn’t justify the expense, given that most clients weren’t asking for the change. “How do you move a big show like The Simpsons into a different production pipeline?” Kuwahara says. “When you’ve done so many episodes a particular way, it’s tough to adjust all the moving parts.” Korean studios have faced technological change before. Animators here—like their American animation predecessors—once drew on translucent cells, which were then painted by hand. In the 1990s, Korean studios moved to doing “ink and paint” digitally—they started scanning line drawings and coloring them via software. Today, changing a color in a scene means a few clicks rather than redrawing everything. “When people were on paint, it was like, ‘Why should we stop painting?’’’ says Kuwahara. “Now, no one can conceptualize having to go back on paint.”"