ANIMATION DISCUSSION TOPIC
Animation Nation Bulletin Board : Cheap and Foreign Labor What some European animators are saying; short grabs taken from this discussion thread:
1. Something most of us are already familiar with: Some producers see ‘animation’ as a mechanical process rather than as a ‘craft’ or ‘art’.
Years ago, when working in Germany, I got a letter from their tax office saying I was to cough up additional Business Tax (“Gewerbesteuer”) because animators did not count as artists. This was accompanied by an evaluation of our craft (not art) that was degrading and insulting. It wasn’t the tax that got me, but that evaluation. I wrote a defense, which was used in court by the studio, and we won the case. Today we face a similar situation, again in our relations with the German tax system. To make a long story short, you are an artist if you make a storyboard, because you are being creative; if you are animating, you are a drawing machine that follows given instructions. And the studio, for which I worked this time, will not challenge this assessment. They are, by the way, now sending their animation to Taiwan. - Tahsin
I have the feeling that “animation companies” are run the way shoe or clothing companies are ran. You design the stuff, market the stuff, and place an order to the cheapest company possible, preferably in some “country in way of development” (who said americans could not use sarcasm?), and get your stuff assembled. No sweat, you don’t have to mingle with the “wrists” because they’re miles away, and you can serve yourself a huge bonus on the money you’ve saved by not having employed people.As for being creative, well….they made money, didn’t they? - Mr. U
2. The issue of finding good “clean-up” and “inbetweening” talent… OR… the issue of where/how to learn to be a good clean-up artist and inbetweener these days?
What I’m seeing now and it is something that is a direct result of cost cutting is that we dont have inbetweeners or assistants anymore, they work gets shipped off to Estonia or Korea. In london the drop off of the experienced clean up guys was tremendous after warners in London closed its doors. Because there was no work. the artists went into different fields, so that today experienced clean up artists are incredably hard to find.
We need to foster artists from the very beginning of the animation process and not throw them into the deep end and expect them to become factory machines. Something has to change. - littlebigman
I also would like to raise something which strikes me in European studios. Nowadays, or so it seems, you get a feature off the ground, slap a team together, finish the film and then bye-bye, gig’s over, on to the next if any. Only a few studios I worked in had a team they tried to keep together, and they were small commercial studios. -Mr U
3. Traditional Animation – now an overly deparmentalized process? This is why we love the Flash animation production model. One person can do it all: from animation to clean-up, inbetweening, color and composite. This is the fastest, most cost-effective and most creatively satisfying way to work, for an all-rounder animation artist.
All of what you have said comes from the now impossible-to-ignore fact that the producers and managers not only do not care, but do not understand the nature of the art. It should have been obvious to us when they first split the assistants and inbetweeners from the animators and sent them to another floor, then to another building, then, eventually, to another country, all the while insisting to us animators that we should leave them as much work as possible (so we can churn out more). They never seem to catch on that I need to do so much of the work myself; otherwise, my scenes just wouldn’t look the way they do.
In the very few cases where I had the good luck of having an assistant within arms reach, drawings went back and forth during the animation process, which was very organic and very helpful for the person assisting as well, in that he/she participated in the process and learned from it as well, but that was a rare privilege. Those running the shop don’t go for organic processes, they want something clear and easy that they can control…
Animation is a whole and cannot be split up so easily; the animator can use help, naturally, but this help should be in the form of a working parnership, not the departmentalization of a process that should have been a whole. -Tahsin
4. In response to the point made below… We are all aware anyway that largescale animation production has been a GLOBALIZED process for sometime now. And it’s crazy to want to hold a project to some sort of ‘national identity’. Our WB show was created by Australians (who aren’t even really Australians), run by Americans, animated by Canadian, Taiwanese and Korean studios. ‘The Magic Pudding’, as aussie a story and production as this is, was animated in the Phillipines.
The maddening thing is that animation is regarded as piecework, where one country/company will often want to take all the credit for the show’s success. While another country labours away for peanuts on what is perceived as a ‘mechanical process’.
I guess most of these “companies” (to call them studios would be far fetched, wouldn’it?) exist only because of the quotas of domestic programs that have to be broadcasted on each country’s TV stations. Basically, their very raison d’etre is to syphon government grants and satisfy these quotas. Can we REALLY call these shows “domestic”, even though we all know they are mostly either Korean or Chinese? Not that I’m blaming the Chinese or the Koreans for working, what really ticks me is that we have the nerve to call these programs “domestic”. I mean, if I watch an episode of “Friends” dubbed in french, can I call it a french show? -Mr U
5. LOCAL or GLOBAL stories?
And big animation companies try too hard to give their audiences what they think they want to see – by getting too ‘formula’ with the storytelling (you can always tell a Disney film about a non-American culture; or ask yourself- how many Australian cartoons DON’T feature a marsupial character?) and consequently diluting the project of any cultural authenticity and uniqueness.
instead of using the East Asian artists as cheap labor to tell a Western story, alien to them, investing in a production wherein these artists would work on a project that is part of their own culture! -Tahsin
Not sure I agree with this black-and-white way of tailoring a story to suit someone’s ‘culture’. It depends on how interested you are in that culture to start with, doesn’t it? And what your angle is…
A great discussion thread. Lots of interesting points made. Read everything here in context.
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