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While the popularity of anime is soaring, almost all (if not all) of the profits go to production committees instead of the studios themselves. Anime studios get a fixed budget at the beginning of production, and do not generally get cuts of distribution, syndication, or merchandise, nor do they keep any IP. Meanwhile, more and more anime are being made, but the number of key animators stays roughly constant (though tweening is typically outsourced to South Korea, as it has been since the 1970s).

The anime industry has been slow to adopt time-saving technology: while coloring is now done digitally, most animators still draw on paper rather than using vector drawing programs (and this means that tweeners must be hired, instead of doing what western productions like Archer do and allow software to perform tweening) — something that probably relates at least in part to the status of key animators as independent contractors who often work from home & supply their own equipment. Animators often work on many shows at once, and they are paid by the cut (i.e., by a set number of frames), redrawing for free in the case of a mistake.

The fixed number of animators & growing number of shows means each show is competing for a smaller slice of the pie, & animators get squeezed thin from all sides. CG is being used to some degree (more and more), but it doesn’t have the same kind of efficiency gains as vector animation because there’s no skill transfer between drawing on paper and building 3d models — instead, CG is used to replace 2d animation in situations where 2d animation would be substantially more complicated (crowds, or effects scenes with many independent moving parts, or swooping or spinning camera movements).

On top of this, anime production committees are trend-driven and hype-driven and primarily see anime as a medium for advertising franchises in other media (usually manga or light novels, but sometimes VNs or mobile games). There are a lot of shows that basically shouldn’t exist because they’re soulless six-hour ads for trash (that’s not even available to foreigners).

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