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INTEREST: Veteran Anime Unit Director Says He Wants to Rectify Industry Abuse

it's a pretty weird industry in how anyone around the block long enough will know how fucked up work ethics are, and yet anime still regularly churns out the best cartoons in the medium in terms of quality.

If you abuse the shit out of your employees, shouldn't it be the other way around? Of course, bad anime representing work abuse do come out, but the rate in which the good stuff comes out is also notable

"In 2017, he disclosed that his monthly income was 100,000 yen (about US$900 at the time) for each anime that he works on"

why even go into anime, you could make more just working at Mickey D's and working your way up in less than a year. Sad and neither requires going to a college or technical school.

Same reason so many people in Hollywood are broke. Passion is profitable, but not for the passionate.

Shay Guy wrote:

Same reason so many people in Hollywood are broke. Passion is profitable, but not for the passionate.

Except that American culture is notoriously vindictive, especially if money is involved. If you fail in a movie or your movie is bad, your career is busted, even if it's only one movie.

How use It even possible to work without a contract? In many countries it's against all the basic laws and rights of workers...

Whitestrider wrote:

How use It even possible to work without a contract? In many countries it's against all the basic laws and rights of workers...

Depending of the country a verbal agreement it's enough, no idea of Japanese laws in the matter.

There is a billioner called Marcus Lemonis, most of his contracts are just handshakes.

Since the most common payroll system is fee-for-service, animators’ working hours depend on the volume of work. Therefore, only small production companies apply the fixed-time system (Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training 2005). As mentioned, for instance, when a sheet of in-between animation costs only 200 yen, animators have to draw a large number of in-between animations in order to make a living. The JAniCA survey found that as a result of this, in-between animators work longer hours than any other occupation in the industry. On average, in-between animators work for 10 hours and 30 minutes per day; this is longer than the average working day over the whole of Japanese employment. Furthermore, in-between animators take approximately only four days off per month. A surprising fact is that 70% of animators are not interested in working under contract. Only 7.8% replied ‘I always have a contract’ and 12.6% ‘I sometimes have a contract’. Reasons given for not wanting to have contracts were:

‘If I work on a contract, it means we are forced to work endlessly despite a fixed salary. As a result, even if I suffer from ill health, the contract document keeps me working until the due date’.

‘The actual circumstance of animation production has a schedule with a lot of sudden changes. Therefore, if I make a contract with the production company, I cannot control the volume of overtime work. I think if I did not work with an animation production company, then I would have a contract’.

‘As it is a matter of trust, I do not think it is necessary for me to put it into a document’.

‘If I work on a contract, it means we are forced to work endlessly despite a fixed salary. As a result, even if I suffer from ill health, the contract document keeps me working until the due date’.

Verbal agreements were fine...maybe 500 years ago! People learned not to trust other people a lot of time ago. You don't even need a formap contract, just some written words, with signatures, of course!

Whitestrider wrote:

Verbal agreements were fine...maybe 500 years ago! People learned not to trust other people a lot of time ago. You don't even need a formap contract, just some written words, with signatures, of course!

Verbal agreements and (specially) handshakes are as legal as a written contract, as I said before, Lemonis laterally makes agreements worth millions of dollars with just a handshake.

My father also makes docents of agreements on his business with just a conversation each year.

Its up to personal preference if somebody prefers the extra security of a contract or the speed and flexibility of a conversation and certainly not ilegal nor against rights.