Animation is created by an incredibly large number of people. It is actually completed by all of the people working together and carrying out their assigned jobs.
One of the jobs is the finish inspector. I’ll give you a brief description of what that job entails. First there is colour design. This involved deciding on colors – such a Brown C9 for a character’s brown hair – from among over three hundred hues of color and then writing in red ballpoint pen on all the frames. This is done so that anyone can color in.
The coloring work is all outsourced, so the descriptions must be accurate and clear. Doing this for each frame is the work of the color designer. When the colored cells come back, they are checked for mistakes in coloring and for dirt and scratches. This is the work of the finish inspector. And looking through all these cells is an enormous task. The finish inspector is the chief of tracing and coloring.
My talk today is about a woman who is a finish inspector. I won’t giver he name, but she is a very wonderful women. In fact, I am a fan of hers (as a sidenote. I’ve never seen Miyazaki say that about anyone else).
I first met her during preparations for Heidi (1974 series). We all worked at the same studio. I say studio…it was a prefab building in a parking lot. We first went there in the heat of summer when the air conditioner happened to be broken, so it was about 104f (40C) inside. And in winter, no matter how strong the heater, it was freezing cold due to the gaps in the walls. It was truly a horrific place.
The studio had only recently been set up and Heidi was our first series. We first found her (the finish inspector) asleep under a blanket. Her eyes were bloodshot. I could tell right off that she had stayed up all night and only gotten to sleep earlier that morning.
She was working on a project that used six to seven thousand cels each week, which meant that she had to make color designations for that many pages. She was the only one doing color design and clean-up supervising. On the last day of the final check she telephones here and there to call in many women to work on clean-up animation.
That was the kind of work she was doing each day. Whenever I entered the room in the morning she would jump up from the couch where she had been sleeping. She would only sleep for two hours a day.
Thinking this was outrageous, I approached the studio head but his response was “There’s no one else that I can trust do this work.”
…This meant that the studio was working on two television series at once. And yet she was the only one doing clean up supervision. She was doing the color designation and farming out the colour for two television series at once.
…She stayed at the company, eating box lunches, instant noodles, and sweets delivered to the office. The only time she went home to her apartment was to do her laundry and come back with a change of clothes…Even while thinking that we should let her have more free time, I found myself asking her to do more and more work because she was someone I could utterly depend on.
…Just as before, she was working all night, sleeping for two hours and always at work the next day. Frankly this was in violation of the Labor Standards Law…and it wasn’t good for her health either. But still, she continued to work.
Part of me feels that no one should work that hard. But part of me wants to have the energy and dedication she has for her work.
…The finish inspector eventually did collapse and was taken to the hospital by ambulance…since being released from the hospital she has continued her work as a finish inspector.
