I’ve chosen this topic because I have started to see an increase in a lot of videos and news. This piqued my interest to research and find out more about this topic. Once I had learned what was happening to the animation industry in Japan. I figured it would be an important topic to discuss.

This is mainly caused by the increased quality in anime which has forced a lot of animators to work overnight and into the next day without any sleep because of constant redrawing frames and scenes. A studio in particular which has been outed for this same thing is Studio Mappa which is a highly regarded and popular anime studio for many of its popular releases such as Attack On Titan, Jujitsu Kaisen and Chainsaw man. 

The recurring issue that has been mentioned above is that Mappa continuously overworks employees and makes them stay overnight till the sun rises to fix drawings and not even properly training animators before assigning them to do the task. According to one worker called Teruyuki Omine who was an episode director for Attack on titan when it was still on air tweeted that he was not able to go home for three days straight. 

"The worst thing is when all the staff work hard to complete a schedule that would normally be impossible to meet in time, and the people above them look at the results and think, 'I can't say anything,' and fail to make improvements. I guess the cycle started when I completed one movie in four months..."

"I didn't think so much about the previous work, but it makes me really uncomfortable to hear people praise the company's name for the good things about the current work. Those who should be praised are the director who moved around to gather outside contractors and people, and each department within the company, including production and filming, who persevered."

Jujutsu Kaisen Animator Meltdown Proves a Fundamental Problem With Anime's Biggest Studio (screenrant.com)

This was further backed up when Mappa started producing the second season of Jujitsu Kaisen. In the middle of the season, it came to light that Mappa made animators sign a NDA contract about the production of the season and many employees did in fact confirm that Mappa was still forcing an unreasonable workload for an unreasonable amount of pay.

This then brought a meltdown for several different animators for Mappa during the production of the 14th episode in which several animators went to X to complain about the working conditions with some even calling to disband altogether. However in Mappa’s defence, before this Mappa attempted to provide a non toxic environment by creating a building called Studio Annex. Studio Annex was supposed to cultivate a positive environment for animators to work. This included warm, wooden desks, an open-space lounge, a shop and a cafe located on the site also. Even though this came off as something along the lines of damage control, It was obvious Mappa was indeed trying to become a better company. 

I had asked some friends what they had thought about this issue that I had presented to them and here is what they said. One person said “How many people are there ro even know about the Japanese animation industries paying absolute pocket change to its animators? Very, very few people even watch anime to begin with. Let alone care about the animation studios, on top of underpaid workers. Because this issue isn’t well known, I feel like we should bring more attention to animators as a whole, as people do go to school and major in a whole art subject into making animation from just insane deadlines and various art styles you need to master, there's insane detail and hard work and time that go into making animation from just drawings.”

Another said “I am unsure why Japanese animators are overworked and underpaid, afterall, I have yet to experience the work culture and offices first hand. However, from what I had heard from several reliable sources, the Japanese workforce has a strong sense of work culture which promotes more work, while vacations, paid leave and other such days are deeply frowned upon by co-workers and bosses. Another reason could be the high demand japanese animation has in not only Japan, but also abroad in america, europe and other eastern asian countries. Because of this high demand, higher ups schedule more jobs for shorter times. This results in overworked animators, since they often go into crunch due to so many projects. As for why they are underpaid, currently the Japanese yen is not very valuable but also, the job of an animator had the same pay turnout as it had years ago, whilst the yen was more valuable and products cheaper. Furthermore, there are far more animators today than long ago, companies pay less per person to have more people animating.”

In terms of my final argument. I do believe that as much as animation companies need to meet deadlines, it is highly important that the working conditions are not unfair as your employees are still people with lives and families and forcing them to work in poor conditions constantly is very bad for their health and their mental state. 

In conclusion, I believe that companies should be held responsible for their employees health and safety, just because they work for you does not mean you own them. I had asked for feedback on my conclusion. My mum said that to a degree that they agree with the conclusion but that as a company and an employee both sides expect the other to do something for them to function so if one side isn’t providing that, it causes an issue. Another thing they said was that culturally in the western world how working conditions are for the rest of the world and Japan may be different so it is not fair to say that a company is being unfair when culturally that's how businesses function.

In my opinion. This does not put off my desire to be an animator, however it does help shed light on how strict and how bad environments can be for animators at certain companies. Therefore it causes me to make sure to double check if I was to work for an animation company, how they treat their employees and if the workflow is fairly handed out and not in an unfair manner.