I must confess, I haven't mustered the energy to sit down and create a proper post on the subject of anime in months. For that, I must apologise because there's been plenty of high quality content worthy of analysis and discussion. Still, this all changed when I started to read about the history of anime and the story I discovered seemed so important to the foundation of the modern anime industry that I felt compelled to write about it. Please bear with me because this post is unfortunately far too long.
I've read a lot of discussion in the last few months about the actual business of producing anime, fuelled in part by
Shirobako. The main topics of concern seem to be the working conditions of the anime industry (harsh) and what kind of pay workers receive for their efforts (meagre). The sad reality is that one of the reasons the anime industry can exist at all is because the workers don't get paid that well. But how did such a strange industry develop? It's always been a puzzle for me but after reading
Anime A History I feel like I can shed some light on how and why TV anime came to exist in it's current form. To tackle this puzzle we have to turn to the birth of traditional TV anime. We're going to go back to
Astro Boy.
As many of you are probably aware, many people consider that the first true anime was
Astro Boy in 1963. While this isn't quite right,
Astro Boy was certainly the birth of the modern TV anime production. By modern TV anime I largely mean a work of limited animation that airs on TV weekly. At the time, this was truly a revolutionary idea, in fact it was even considered impossible. When the idea was originally floated to make the
Astro Boy manga into an animated series Toei's veteran animator Yamamoto Sanae considered it an absurd idea, impossible even with the manpower of the entire animation industry. This is why
Astro Boy first aired as a live action series. Tezuka, however, would not let go of his dream to make anime. Eventually, with his own studio, he'd get his wish.
Tezuka's own assistant calculated how impossible it would be to create
Astro Boy. Assuming a weekly output of thirty minutes of Toei-quality animation (Please note: Toei works used to have great animation), they'd need 3,000 employees and a budget of between 60 and 70 million yen. The entire population of animators in Japan would only account for 20 percent of the necessary labour and once completed the show would be too expensive for any TV channel to afford. So, as you might have guessed, the idea of doing 'Toei Quality Animation' was thrown to the wayside and Tezuka and his staff focused on how to do animation quickly and cheaply. Their solution, limited animation, is with us to this day and it's one of the defining features of the entire industry.
I think you're familiar with most of the basics of limited animation but just to remind you here are some key elements:
- Shooting on threes e.g. aiming to use only eight images per second of film rather than the available 24.
- Stop images e.g. using a single frame for sequences where animation is not required such as establishing shots and reaction shots.
- Pull cells e.g. Pulling a background image behind a foreground image to create the impression movement. Think about a character in Dragon Ball Z 'flying' but in reality you know that it's just a single frame being moved a cross a background.
- Repetition e.g. repeating a loop of animation for various purposes.
And so forth, I'm sure we're all familiar with these techniques. While they weren't all created by Tezuka and his studio, Mushi-Pro, but they certainly used them extremely frequently and for good reason. Anime was, and is, expensive to produce.
Now you've got an idea of the lengths Tezuka would have to go to in order to keep the costs of
Astro Boy as low as humanly possible. Now, what do you imagine an episode of
Astro Boy would cost to produce, even with all those cost-cutting techniques deployed? I'll let you think about that when I reveal how much Tezuka was offered per episode of
Astro Boy by Mannen-sha, the company who could purchase the time-slot:
300,00 yen per episode
That's barely 10,000 yen per minute of animation, a truly impossible figure. A live action children's show in 1962 cost 600,000 yen and Mannen-sha assumed anime would cost half as much. Eventually, Tezuka negotiated a price of 550,000 yen per episode a fee which Tezuka settled upon in order to undercut the price of live-action children's shows and to be so impossibly low that no animated rivals could compete.
So just how crazy was that 550,000 yen per episode settled upon by Tezuka? Well, a single episode of
Astro Boy would end up costing 2.5 million yet to produce. You don't really need to reach for your calculator to realise that this is a pretty awful deal for Tezuka. To make matters worse, it seems that Mannen-sha was prepared to offer 1.2 million yen per episode but Tezuka shocked them all by offering his own, lower figure of 550,000 yen to undercut potential animation rivals and live action TV for children. Some debate remains about whether Tezuka was aware of the 1.2 million yen figure.
Now, this insanely low price really set a precedent for TV animation that seems to have shaped the industry as we now know it. The results of this decision had the effects you might expect: staff working extremely long hours for the same pay, mass outsourcing of work and it was eventually the seed that ended up killing Tezuka's company because it simply wasn't economically feasible to produce anime under such constraints. To cap it all off, despite Tezuka's low pricing, he still attracted rivals in the world of TV animation.
To give you a flavour of what working on Astro Boy was like I'm just going to quote verbatim from
Anime A History (emphasis mine):
Tezuka also faced a permanent issue of understaffing. He was able to stem some of the labour issues by outsourcing much of the work to other studios. This did not so much solve the problem as turn it into someone else's, as smaller start-ups such as P Pro and Onishi Pro took on piecework in layouts, inbetweening or backgrounds. However, these studios in turn often overestimated their capabilities, and found themselves shunting work on to third or fourth parties. Ishiguro Noboru, for example, who avoided working for Tezuka only to find himself working on Astro Boy anyway as a subcontractor at Onishi Pro, reported a rash promise to turn an episode around in thirty days, despite a labour requirement of six person-months, causing Onishi Pro to outsource the work too. Before long, animators referred to the show as "Up All Night Atom".
Nor did the outsourcing solve the central issue of the dearth of available animators. Instead, the 'outsourcing' often involved overtime by staff members who already had day jobs in the industry. Many animators would return to their apartments each evening, only to continue working as freelancers on storyboards, key art or layouts for other companies - Ishiguro Noboru claimed to have spent the latter half of the 1960's living a life of such an 'animator arbeit', and that it not only gave the misleading impression that the anime business was coping with the workload, but also pressured some animators into cutting corners on their day jobs in order to cope with their moonlighting.
The pessimist perspective on such brinkmanship is a story of inevitable decline, with Tezuka's undervaluation of his own property instigating a vicious circle of declining returns and budgetary cuts...As more serials competed for attention, Tezuka's market share was eroded, and he was obliged to fund the production of one show's deficit with the advance money from the next.
Reading these accounts make it almost sound like any troubled modern studio which I suppose shouldn't be surprising considering that it was Tezuka who created this deeply flawed model in the first place. It's pretty clear that all the problems which seem endemic to the anime industry are so common because they were there from the beginning.
Anyway, I hope that's given you a fresh perspective on the anime business and, as ever, I strongly encourage you to purchase
Anime a History if you have any interest in learning more and I got all of my content from this post from it's pages. It is, without a doubt, the finest book I have ever had the pleasure of reading concerning anime and I can only imagine it will be an invaluable resource for years to come.
