Forum - View topicNEWS: Teikoku Databank: Record 30% of Anime Studios Were in the Red in 2018
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Aca Vuksa
Posts: 643 Location: Nis, Serbia |
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Japan anime industry is facing a labor shortage because Japan's demographic crisis occurs.
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RegSuzaku
Posts: 273 Location: Ikebukuro |
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I remember a while ago, like a year or two ago, Answerman columns on the animation-studios side of the industry always said they were all completely booked for years at a time.
Between the bookings and the cash squeeze that's been constantly observed, I wonder if that's why a lot of productions seem to be shifting towards stage plays? I got the sense that TV anime not only lose money on being broadcast, but they actually pay to be broadcast (renting the timeslot and putting in their own advertising, as opposed to making money from advertising from others). And then they hope to make the money back on bluray sales. With stage plays, on the other hand, the audience pays pretty high prices for tickets, and on top of that, the sort of merch sold at the stage plays - usually sets of photos of the cast - seems to be pretty cheap to make, and they sell tons of them. And then they sell blurays and paid streams (~¥2000) on top of that. If it comes to it at some point in the future, if they want new material, they can always rerun an old stage play, and it's a whole new thing even if they don't change the script much. I can only think of two examples (the second Black Butler musical, almost 10 years ago now, but more recently, StarMyu's Caribbean Groove, which I think they expanded quite a bit for the second run) but it can happen more in the future. Again, though... I hope the international fandom worlds pick up on this shift sooner rather than later, so that a big gulf doesn't form between the sides of fandom... |
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Super_M
Posts: 201 |
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I hope that anime companies invest more into adaptations older works like Devilman, Dororo, Banana Fish, 'JoJo'.
I wonder how anime change with declining discs sales and rising streaming. Maybe less cute girls and more battle shonen. Becouse for example I think Kimetsu is way more popular than Dumbbell. But at the other hand harem isekai are very popular even if many people trash them. |
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Rika Hue
 Posts: 147 |
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So even though physical disc sales have been decreasing and some 'revenue' comes from streaming now, the streaming revenue isn't doing much for anime studios themselves. Which ever company is at the top of the production committee gets the most money, I suppose, and there are rarely any anime studios in the production committee (except for Kyoani, Bones, Wit, Production I.G., etc).
So, what this means is that, the company at the top of the committee gets the most money, but even if they have a lot of money, if they cannot sustain the studios they use to make their products, in the end there won't be any studios left to do their work. This is a road I see current anime being on - the amount of output is not sustainable. If nothing changes and studios continue to close down left and right and if less and less people join the industry, then Japan's anime studios are on the road to extinction. And when all new anime does get outsourced to other Asian countries, it will no longer have that 'Japanese touch' (whatever that actually means). Anime is not only Japan's anymore, and maybe in the near future, 'Japan's anime' will be a thing of the past. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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Exactly. Unless the studio is also on the production committee--which, as you said, is rare--they are simply a contractor. They're fundamentally no different from a contractor you might hire to put a new floor in your kitchen: they are hired to do a specific job according to a contract that both parties negotiated. The studio gets paid a fixed amount of money. It's the production committee and its members who make (or lose) money based on streaming revenue, disc sales, merch, and so on. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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Too bad the studios don't see any of the millions from related merchandise, music or events. The entire production committee system needs to be overhauled for any real change to take place.
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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Like I posted above, animation studios are simply contractors. They create animation to a customer's specification. You or I could hire a studio to make whatever we wanted, assuming we had the money to pay them. The studio itself could make original anime if they wanted to--and that does happen from time to time--but in situations like that the studio itself bears all the financial risk. If they decide to make a show and it flops then they just lost an awful lot of money. The production committee system allows the financial risk to be divided among a group rather than shouldered by just one person or entity, but it's not like there is some law which mandates that such a system MUST be used. It just so happens that it's used most of the time because it shares risk and makes it easier to raise the funds needed to create a show. But, if someone or a company (etc.) is willing to spend the money without sharing risk there's nothing stopping them from hiring a studio themselves. |
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RegSuzaku
Posts: 273 Location: Ikebukuro |
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I've heard that for ~90% of things, they do lose money. I've heard that things like Your Name and One Piece are the only anime that anyone actually makes money off of. I've always heard - mostly from this very site - that when companies sign onto a production committee, and put forth some percent of that fixed, insufficient amount that they agree to pay the studios, the production committees do not expect to make that money back directly. They do it for other reasons - basically, all the various forms of advertising that a media production can provide. From a music label getting their artist's song as the opening (and selling CDs and booking appearances from the exposure they get from that), to snack companies getting the rights to use characters from the anime on their products, merchandise companies, etc... the production committee members go into it understanding that they're going to lose money, in exchange for indirect benefits. (I've also... never... gotten an answer... even though I've asked this plenty of times... articles kept giving a fixed standard amount that they say "anime" costs per episode, but is that just what's paid to the animation studios, or does that include the musicians, voice actors, writers, etc.?) I also know that voice actors don't make a lot off of directly recording anime (or games), the ones that make the big money make it from concert appearances related to the anime/games that they act (and sing) in. So like... basically you have so much anime being made only because enough people are willing to either a) just suffer through not getting paid at all, or b) do anime for very little money (or at a loss) and find ways to make money through other methods. Which isn't sustainable. And most of the stuff being made nowadays isn't really worth sustaining it for. Voice actors nowadays are basically just like idols, but that doesn't necessarily work for visual artists/animators. I know that a lot of visual artists I see in the West who do make a living off of their work do it not just through things like Patreon or selling merch, but also through Skillshare, which apparently pays a lot of money because it pays "teachers" per view. But... I wonder how much money Skillshare has, or if they're like a lot of other startups, in the red, paying independent providers more than they can afford to do, and charging consumers less than they can afford to do, in order to hook those people in, and in hopes that someday it'll even out, once they get overhead costs out of the way and settle into a pattern, or whatever it is they're hoping for... But yeah, the current boom in content everywhere does owe a lot to people just working for free, both those that understand and make their money elsewhere, and those who just suffer... Except maybe Netflix? I dunno. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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Yes, that's my understanding too. Also, I should have been a bit more clear in my earlier post. When I mentioned that a production committee might make money that is nearly always by indirect means just like you mentioned.
It is my understanding that that the figures that Justin (answerman) threw around were the total. The production committee pays the animation studio, then the animation studio uses some of that money to hire the voice actors, animation subcontractors, the sound people, etc. I think the only exceptions would be obviously independent costs, like if a new anime uses a popular pop song for its OP. |
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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Too Much Anime.
That's my call. I WANT to spend more money. but I find it is easier to snuggle under my kotatsu with Yamato rewatches rather than get caught in the rat race of new shows I can't follow. |
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Mizuki-Takashima
 Posts: 215 |
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So basically: the increased volume in show-production is how they've been able to make more money in recent times, but pumping out this many shows just isn't sustainable, right?
Studios open and close all the time, so I'm not worried about anime going 'extinct' or anything, but I do think that there ought to be more Unions in the industry to protect their animators and anime creators is general. Making sure animators and creative minds are paid a living wage and have some kind of financial safety net to fall on between jobs would mean that we have fewer creators running themselves ragged and more passion being put back into whatever they decide to animate 
At least, that's what I think. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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It depends on who you mean by "they". The article says that many of the animation studios are in the red. That sounds bad, of course, but the article also provided no context for us to compare to. It would be nice to know, for example, how many companies in general are in the red. Saying that "30% are in the red" sounds bad at first, but honestly we don't know if that's better or worse than other competing industries. Furthermore, keep in mind that the data also covers the corporate entities of the animation studios only. Nothing was sad about the status of the wages being paid by the animation studios, or how much salary their owners are making--it's possible for the company to be in the red while all its employees are well paid. The article also didn't address how much money was being made by other entities in the anime industry like production committees and associated industries like toys, disc sales, movie tickets, streaming rights, etc. This article only gives one tiny drop of data out of a literal ocean; there's no way to draw conclusions about the state of the industry as a whole from what we've read here. |
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