Conditions in Overseas Studios

As I've said before, I think that the focus on outsourcing is too often on the country that is outsourcing the work - thereby losing jobs. I'm as guilty of this as anybody else - I've really only alluded to the perspectives of the scores of animation artists working overseas.

Today, I revisited a Cartoon Brew post that helped inspire me to write this blog. It's called Guest Commentary: The Life of an Indian Visual Effects Artist, It's a great look at the human impact of the studio cost-cutting that gives rise to offshore outsourcing.

The guest writer, a former Indian animator named Bhaumik Meta, describes a number of shady practices at Indian studios. There are incredibly expensive educations, studio-mandated deposits that are only returned if the employee works two years, long periods of no pay, and - across the board - six-month contracts after which studios can unceremoniously fire employees in the midst of production.

Meta ultimately concludes: "It would be nice to raise this issue and let everyone know the condition that Indian artists have to endure. They are sacrificing their lives for their passion, but they are exploited by people who have no interest in art and whose only motivation is earning as much as possible by spending as little as they can."

It would be shortsighted to vilify the artists who are products of money-hungry institutions. US studios want to keep their budgets as low as possible, and Indian studios want to net profits while maintaining a steady stream of work. The artists are just executing low-cost labor. The work being produced isn't far removed from us - it's the fantastical imagery in the high-budget blockbusters we pay to see.

The comment section on Meta's piece is also pretty staggering.

"Two of my friends are artists in the philippines. And they died because of over work from all those 'bottomless' deadlines. They got sick from over fatigue which caused their immune systems to be non existent when pneumonia struck. I support you in your cause. I hope that someday things will change for everyone in the industry of vfx across the globe."

The conditions are aren't just unpleasant, they're killing workers. So why don't Indian animators speak out? And why doesn't the institution change?

A self-described "Indian animator" writes: 

"In my personal and professional experience, it is mainly, we, Indian artists (working level not managerial level) who don't take any action against these so called businessmen and employers. We just keep quite and let it all slide away. Not that I'm blaming, but, at our level, what else can we exactly do? It's just easier to forget the pain and move on. Fighting against it creates only problems, it doesn't bring food on the table."

You can see the conundrum that Indian artists are in. Studios in the US and overseas need to change their practices. If the production of visual effects can only be sustained by supplementing overseas work, then US companies must nurture the industries that they create, instead of looking for the cheapest option at the moment. If not, the Indian visual effects community could face the possibility of becoming a ghost town. Indian companies have a more difficult task. They must create work that is uniquely their own - that can reach an audience and sustain themselves. The road ahead isn't easy for either party, but for the sake of the artists, it's necessary.

The Animation Guild Blog - Profile Post

The Animation Guild Blog isn’t a flashy blog. It rocks a pretty simple blogspot template. The quality of its writing, though, immediately drew me in. The main writer, Steve Hulett, has been the business representative for the guild since 1989 and, before that, was an animation screenwriter who worked on a variety of Disney projects in the late-1970s and 1980s. He wrote a great series on Cartoon Brew last year called "A Mouse in Transition," in which he chronicled his time at Disney and the changes that occurred during that time before the so-called “Disney Renaissance". On The Animation Guild Blog, Hulett has written multiple posts per day since 2006 about pretty much everything related to the field of animation—including news, press releases, and guild member posts—but he often gravitates towards commonplace, everyday injustices in the animation industry. These range from forgotten figures in the history of animation to the topic of outsourcing to wage fixing. He always writes carefully and with stinging intelligence.

Take, for example, the recent post “Racial Stereotypes Circa 1939.” Hulett begins by highlighting a statement by an Animation Guild member on a racially insensitive character in Netflix show Puss in Boots. The member describes that, in the episode, Puss wards off unwanted flirtation from a mermaid named FeeJee, who has cornrows, dark skin, and big lips. Here’s an image of FeeJee:

(Photo courtesy of: http://blackgirlnerds.com/pretty-mermaids-racist-narratives-entertainment-children/)

Feejee is obviously a crude caricature of a black woman. However, Hulett does not use the opportunity to build himself a soapbox and preach. His critique is short and pointed. He points out the idiocy of the imagery, rather than aggressively attacking the writers and artists who put the image on the screen:

“So I haven't seen the episode, though I've looked at the stills from the half-hour at the link. And maybe the writer is overly sensitive and maybe I'm wrong here, but this depiction of a black mermaid in the show seems a wee bit over the top to me.

“Based on the visuals, I'm surprised that they didn't try to work Hattie McDaniel into the episode. Or Butterfly McQueen. Then the stereotyping would have been symmetrical and complete.”

Hulett, unlike Amidi, does not rant. He’s even careful to qualify his criticism. Then, he simply points out that the racist imagery is surprisingly similar to racism from another era of cartoons. It’s a quick and intelligent jab.

The blog also includes great details and stories from Hulett’s personal life. In his article "Filmation's Last Days - Part 1," he talks about how in the late-1980s, he was laid off from Disney and had a brief stint as a school teacher in LA:

The thirteen-year-old girl pounded up the stairs, sliding to a stop beside me. I turned and glared at her.

“What?”

My voice had a serrated edge that could have ripped fur off an eight-week-old puppy. She and I had not been getting along. She now blinked at me. Swallowed.

“Never mind,” she said. With that, Drew Barrymore went back down the stairs, head down.

Hulett’s writing is creative, personal, and never boring. He assumes a voice that actually is serrated, but not in a way that pointedly catches the viewer’s attention, rather than rips the fur off of beagles. His subsequent chronicle of Filmation is long and filled with strange details and forgotten names, but it’s a testament to his writing that it never feels self-indulgent or plodding. It’s always fast-moving and entertaining.

The blog was made as an outlet for guild members and industry insiders to discuss the animation industry. It appears to have a pretty small readership and most of its blogroll is to other guild sites and guild members. It definitely functions on a technical, insider level. But it’s more than that. While it could have been a technical and joyless record of industry happenings, Steve Hulett has made it a relevant and vibrant place for important conversations. It discusses corporate greed, painful stereotypes, and - perhaps most powerfully—great stories. It’s clearly a labor of love by a talented and knowledgeable writer.

Cartoon Brew - Voice Post

I read a lot of animation blogs, but the one that I visit the most is Cartoon Brew. It's a great source of news, and it's widely read around the animation industry in multiple countries. Its lead writer, Amid Amidi, goes in-depth on a lot of wide-ranging subjects under the animation umbrella, and it's always a fun read. Occasionally, he uses the blog to report on wage fixing scandals or canceled television shows. On more than one occasion, he’s used the blog to break news on the collapses of visual effects companies. Other times, he rants—and his fiery rage is always fun.

One of my favorite articles is called Why Kids Today Think Disney was a Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist. I especially appreciate it because accusations of Walt Disney's racism are rampant. Everybody seems to know that, just as Walt's frozen corpse is kept within the Disneyland castle, a frigid, racist core belies the Mouse House.

I grew up with that urban myth in my head (the racist one—cannot confirm or deny the frozen body one). I distinctly remember my mom telling me about Walt Disney's hatred of Jews and African Americans when I was a kid. It wasn't until I took a History of Animation college class that I saw that Walt Disney was swept up in a lot of things—anti-labor union and communist sentiments, to name two - but it would be hard to call him a racist.*

Amidi points to Family Guy for perpetuating the rumor. He attaches a clip and writes:

"Combine the endemic laziness of animation writers with an every-child-left-behind educational system that has created a legion of TV viewers who can’t recognize that they’re being duped by old hearsay instead of being revealed new truths, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster."

I think the volatility of the sentence is a little unnecessary in defending the legacy of a man as revered and well-known as Walt Disney. Is calling Disney a racist a “disaster”? Probably not. Still, it's undeniably a great and loaded rejoinder to Family Guy's unoriginal joke. The Family Guy joke is curt, but Amidi's response is a sprawling attack that takes on both the writing of the joke and the audience that finds it funny. It's obviously hyperbolic, but it accurately portrays what Amidi perceives to be uninformed idiocy.**

Or take this quote from the article Nickelodeon Continues Its Never-Ending Search for Entertaining Cartoons, in which Amidi talks about Nickelodeon's vigilant search for another Spongebob-sized success through their pitch program:

"Nick is looking for ideas that are 'original, humor-based and character-driven.' So, if you’ve been developing an unoriginal and unfunny idea about a background prop, don’t even think about submitting it."

Again, the quote may be overly-sardonic, but it points out how lost Nick execs are in pinpointing what is successful about their shows. He follows up Nick's pitch idea description with its antithesis to show how broad it really is. On an unrelated note, I need a second to rethink my pitch about a mop who notarizes documents to support his ailing son.

Lastly, I’ll point to “DreamWorks Execs Have An Incredible Reason For Why Their Films Are Unpopular,” whose title is self-explanatory. Amidi writes:

“Everyone and their mother has a theory [about why Dreamworks films are underperforming], but the most outlandish one might belong to DreamWorks executives, who told an investment firm recently that people have been avoiding their films because they are too adult.

“...DreamWorks explained... that sometime between 2012 and 2014, kids stopped watching animated films as much as they used to, and now only very small children watch animated films. This sudden shift in moviegoing audiences from young to very young obviously hurt DreamWorks, which specializes in high-brow fare for discerning filmgoers.”

I think a lot of the fun of this post rests in how much Amidi clearly relishes the opportunity to lambast Dreamworks’ assertion that it is too mature for any audience. Although he concedes that many don’t know for sure why the company has floundered, he immediately sets a caustic tone by describing these bystanders as “everyone and their mother”. He then calls Dreamworks’ theory an “outlandish” explanation and hyperbolically describes that the executives pinned their failure on films that were “too adult”. In reality, their claim was that they were making films for older children. Amidi ends with perhaps the most sarcastic sentence ever written. By doing so, he lets the irony of Dreamworks’ deduction ring out. The link to a slapstick promotional clip from Home is just icing on the cake.

Cartoon Brew is much more than the snark-fest that I’ve probably painted it to be. It’s a great and rare animation-specific blog that goes in-depth on a lot of different topics and can satisfy pretty much anyone—regardless of their interest in animation.

*There were cartoons with racially insensitive imagery and subject matter created within his company - perhaps most notably Uncle Remus from Song of the South (1946) and the original design of Mickey Mouse, who resembled a minstrel show performer. However, neither were entirely Walt’s invention and characters with pseudo-blackface were manifold in the 1910s and 1920s - from Otto Mesmer’s Felix the Cat to Krazy Kat. The latter was created by the mixed-race George Herriman and is now viewed to be somewhat racially forward-thinking. Many of these apparently-blackface-donning characters, including Felix, Mickey, and Krazy Kat, were not the by-product of turn-of-the-century stereotypes as much as a 1920s fascination with black culture and jazz.

**As a side-note, the first comment on the post is by eighty-year-old African-American Disney artist Floyd Norman, who has on numerous occasions defended Disney’s relationship towards African-Americans.

Gravity Falls and Outsourcing

Gravity Falls is a Disney-produced tv show that just ended its run last month. It's a pretty ambitiously cinematic tv show in terms of its writing and its visual style.

I study animation, so I watch a lot of cartoons in my free time. I stumbled across Gravity Falls and was pretty blown away by the some pieces of animation in the show - especially in its opening credits. Other pieces of the animation were more typical of a tv show though. Apparently, the ever-watchful Tumblr-verse picked up on that too.

One user wrote:  "If it were animated entirely in house, it would take significantly longer due to animation in the US having a higher quality (compare the opening of the show to the show's actual animation to see what i mean), as well as the animators would all e spending their time animating the inbetweens and being unable to work on other things. With it being outsourced, they have more time to multitask. Outsourcing the animation saves both money and time."

Before we unpack that, here are the opening titles.

That's some damn impressive, feature-quality animation. Compare that to some typical animation from the show:

Everything is drawn on-model, and it's comedically-timed, but it's a little bit more bare-bones. The characters move from pose to pose. You don't get the sense that they're alive in the same way. There's no squash and stretch in the character's movement, and there isn't the same detailed overlapping and secondary action in the characters clothes and hair.

To be fair, the opening titles weren't just done in the US; some of the animation production (most likely the in-betweens and ink and paint) was done at Rough Draft Studios in South Korea. Also, the animation of the opening titles gif I attached was done by James Baxter, an ex-Disney animator who's easily one of the best animators alive. It would be hard for anybody to compete with him.

I stumbled across a quote on James Baxter's tumblr though, which is pretty interesting. In a post on Gravity Falls, he wrote: "Gravity Falls follows the default workflow of having the story and layout handled in the US and outsourcing the actual animation to Asia. The reasons for doing it that way are economic, but I’m not sure that’s an idea that has been re-examined lately. I feel that it doesn’t have to be done that way. Like I said, things are changing really fast so there’s every reason to be hopeful."

The claim that "it would take significantly longer due to animation in the US having a higher quality" is wrong. Animation in the US is not inherently bette than animation produced overseas. Neither is the claim that outsourcing animation saves the "time" of the animators. Animation is generally specialized. There are exceptions, but animators generally animate. Outsourcing animation doesn't free up animators to do other things, like layouts or storyboards - it just means that few or no animators are hired in the US.

It's one thing to move a character graphically and its another to make a character feel alive. I think the reason that James Baxter feels that animation doesn't have to be outsourced is that there is a huge pool of traditionally-trained animators in the US who really act and breathe life into their drawings. There is no lack of talent. Creative control is also a benefit. However, there is a lack of money. Even when it's outsourced, it's an expensive endeavor to produce animation for television.

Still, things are changing. We're in the midst of a television renaissance where companies like HBO and Netflix will sometimes spend multiple million dollars on a tv series. If there was a time to make an ambitious animated series and utilize American animation talent, it would be now.

The Fall of the Theatrical Short

If you've ever watched a block of Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry shorts on a Saturday morning while eating Cheerios, welcome to the club. If somebody made a pie chart of how I spent my childhood, I'm pretty sure I'd see that watching cartoons eclipsed sleeping. There's a lot to love about old cartoons, most of which were originally shown theatrically before movies. From violence to cool visuals to violence, these shorts had it all. However, if you squinted past your spoonful of cheerios, you might have noticed that not every cartoon was the same. The style and humor of these shorts, which were shown back-to-back, could be wildly different.

Take, for example, "The Bowling Alley Cat" from 1942, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (one of my favorite cartoons):

And "Switcin' Kitten" from 1961, directed by Gene Deitch:

The elaborate character animation and design of "The Bowling Alley Cat" is gone in "Switchin' Kitten" (whose name might also be the weakest rhyme I've ever heard). The sensibility of the humor is also strangely different. The reason? The cartoons were not only produced for radically different budgets - they were produced on different continents. "The Bowling Alley Cat" was produced in Culver City, California, and "Switchin' Kitten" was produced entirely in then-Czechoslovakia.

 The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Cartoon Studio was created in 1937 to get in on some of the money that Walt Disney Animation and Warner Bros. Cartoons had been earning for years. It housed some of the most talented artists and directors of its day, including William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, and Tex Avery. In 1940, it ended Disney's nearly decade-long Oscar streak and earned twenty oscar nominations and 8 wins of its own.

Theatrical shorts were lavishly produced in the 1930s and 1940s. This was, in part, due to a practice known as "block booking." Movies were sold in blocks or packages (comprised of a film, a B-film, and live action and animated shorts) and were played largely in theaters owned by the big-five movie companies. Independent movie theater owners were often forced to buy inferior films with the film they sought to buy or were edged out entirely by studio-owned theater chains. Eventually, in 1948, the Supreme Court decreed that the Big 5 movie studios were in defiance of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The studios were forced to sell their theater chains and end the process of block booking.

This was a definite win for independent movie theaters, but the side effect was that it devalued the package of film shown with the feature, including the animated short. Cartoon studios were forced to work for much smaller budgets, and were partially sustained by selling packages of old shorts to television. In the words of Walt Disney, "There was no money in the short subject. You sold them in bunches, like bananas."

MGM closed its cartoon studio in 1957 when it saw that it received the same amount of money for old cartoons as for new cartoons. However, in the 1960s, MGM realized that there was still some money to be had, they contracted Gene Deitch, a former UPA artist who was living in Czechoslovakia with his new Czech wife. His crew was not well-trained, and their cartoons are full of errors.

Another side effect of MGM's closing was that its two lead directors, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, left to form a new television cartoon studio called Hanna-Barbera, which - as we've seen -was an early adopter of animation outsourcing.

It's a bummer that the artistic and stylistic experimentation of the theatrical animated short died died by the mid-1960s. However, fortunately, the form did not die. As Hollywood cartoon studios fell, independent animators rose. Jan Svankmeyer, Jules Engel, and John and Faith Hubley all produced independent animated films to great acclaim outside of the studio system. Now, the presence of new animation technology has made short production attainable for almost anyone who has the desire.

The Animation Guild Strikes!

For the most part, the animation industry isn't sexy - there aren't many wild personalities, there are rarely outrageous affairs, and - to my knowledge - no animator has had a televised murder investigation. The business of drawing cartoons is not prone to scandal or protest. Don't expect a Shonda Rhimes drama on animation anytime soon. However, there are plenty of stories of tense relationships between studios and employees. There was a strike at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1941 - caused by the lack of unionization and a vast hierarchy in pay (with ink and paint girls at the bottom). In the end, Disney became a unionized shop, but the studio laid off nearly half of its 1200 employees, and Walt famously never forgave the artists who went on strike - he saw it as a huge betrayal. The first strike by the Animation Guild happened in 1979, and it was due in large part to the increased practice of studio "offshoring" in tv. It was a big enough problem that another strike was held only 3 years later for the same reason.

Animator, storyboard artist, director, and USC professor Tom Sito has written extensively on the unionization of the animation industry and its strikes. In his book Crossing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson, he chronicles these two strikes. I'll give you a brief overview.

In the 1970s, well after Rocky and Bullwinkle was outsourced to Mexico, major television animation producers began setting up studios throughout Australia and Asia. Hanna-Barbera, for example, maintained a staff of roughly 2000 employees in Los Angeles alone, but it also subcontracted to a number of other studios in the US and set up studios in Sydney, Tapei, Spain, Mexico, and South America. In 1978, the new Animation Guild president and business agent, Bud Hester and Moe Gollub respectively, instituted a "runaway production clause", which said: "No Producer shall subcontract work on any production outside the county of Los Angeles unless sufficient employees with the qualifications required to produce a program or series are available." The animation studios that were asked to sign this clause refused to sign it, and on August 7, 1979, the Guild went on strike.
It was great timing for the strikers. The new tv season was just about to start, and it caught the studios off guard. They quickly signed the clause and ended the strike, but just as quickly incurred fees by breaking the clause. Not to be duped again, they set up an inventory of cartoons at their foreign studios in preparation for the next contract negotiation in 1982. When 1982 came along, the studios called for the immediate removal of the runaway clause and waited to sign the new contracts until July, so that employees could be depleted of money that would allow them to strike for a long period. The Guild went on strike anyway.

Unlike the strike of 1979, they weren't able to halt production. The studios continued production on cartoons unimpeded, and the animators, who weren't provided with a strike fund, slowly watched their money dissipate. There were a lot of "scabs," and the guild eventually agreed to conditions that allowed the studio to continue their practices. A lot of animators and ink and paint artists were let off and forced to look for other work.

Outsourcing in television animation is hardly controversial anymore. The state of the visual effects industry is what's making insiders nervous. Many have suggested that the solution to the modern visual effects outsourcing issue would best be resolved by unionizing. Sadly, a union can't solve everything - studios, especially ones that produce television content, are always interested in the bottom line.

Money needs to be spent as freely in animation as in live action, and workers need to be invaluable to production. The reason that visual development, storyboarding, and layout aren't outsourced is that they are seen as creative jobs that have a significant effect on the outcome of the film. Or the animation industry can always try to up its sex appeal. People seem to like that.

Disney's Ink and Paint Department: A Case Study

As I've mentioned before, a major reason that animation, inbetweening, and ink and paint are done by artists in overseas studios is that studios create a division between “creative” and “non-creative” work. Work is planned out in advance by “creative” American artists and assembled by paint-by-numbers “non-creatives” in Asian countries. This is obviously a misnomer—overseas animators constantly turn out cool, innovative stuff.

But the hierarchy of creative and “non-creative” work is eerily reminiscent of another time in animation—in Disney’s golden age.

"Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is entirely performed by young men."

Disney himself was not actually against women having "creative" jobs. Eventually the 1940s, there were actually dozens of women who held "creative" positions, including Mary Blair, whose artwork was hugely influential in Cinderella, Peter Pan, and the Disneyland ride "It's a Small World". Still, the bulk of women (in the hundreds) were sent to the ink and paint department (which still stands today on the Disney lot). Walt Disney called these young women "the girls," and they worked insane hours for very, very low pay. The starting pay in the late 1930s was $16 a week, which was almost twenty times less than a top animator. Especially in the production of Snow White, many female artists worked eighty hour weeks.

While the work of inking and painting cartoons did not require female employees to make unique or original decisions, it's way too reductive to call it just "tracing the characters" and "filling in the tracings." Take, for example, this ink and paint drawing from Sleeping Beauty (courtesy of The DejaView).

This drawing actually blows my mind. Not only did the ink and paint department have to ink each line in a different color and use twenty-eight different shades of paint in this frame, but they also had to maintain a level of consistency in the linework so that actions didn't lose their timing and consistency. They had to be good draftsmen and precise workers. If you need further proof, take a closer look at the "Once Upon a Dream" sequence from Sleeping Beauty.

Each line meticulously inked and painted in a way that gave the lines varying thickness, strengthened the vibrant visual design of the film, and made the work of the male animators more visually appealing. 

Sadly, after Sleeping Beauty's disappointing return at the box office in 1959, the Walt Disney Animation Studio shrank from over five hundred employees to seventy-five. The ink and paint department was especially gutted. While some painters remained, most inkers were replaced by xerography. Beginning in 101 Dalmatians, rough animation was directly copied onto acetate cels, cutting out clean-up artists and inkers.

Disney determined that the company was bloated--the only crew members who remained were deemed essential. "Creatives" took precedence. This happens all too often in animation production - and we're seeing it now as animation and vfx companies are being driven out of business by companies who will do it for less money. While the work of inking, painting, and animating from a well-developed plan may not be as "creative" as storyboarding or developing the look of a film, you can't deny that there was a considerable amount of thoughtfulness, skill, and ingenuity in each of those jobs. While it's impossible to stop the film industry to stop from being a business with a bottom line, it does suggest that the skilled artists who fill these roles need to make themselves indispensable.  By being versatile and infusing their jobs with as much creativity as possible, they can stand a chance of surviving the whims and sputters of an unstable industry.


For more info, please check out:

https://d23.com/walt-disney-legend/grace-bailey/
http://www.waltdisney.org/blog/look-closer-women-disney-ink-and-paint-department
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/fact-checking-meryl-streeps-disney-bashing-speech-94380.html
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2014/07/ink-and-paint.html
Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Print.

Thoughts on the Reasons for Outsourcing

"Offshoring" and "outsourcing" aren't dirty words that we need to be afraid of. The driving reason that American animation and visual effects work is shipped overseas is a lower cost and an accelerated production timeline. A side effect of this has been the creation of entire industries in places they never existed before (India, the Philippines, and South Korea, to name a few). If you overlook the unemployed American animators, this even sounds like a win-win for studios at home and abroad. The American market gets filled more animation than it could produce by itself at a far lower price, and overseas animation studios thrive with American work and are provided with the facility to create their own productions. It should work. But then you read statements like this one about the Philippines animation industry:

"The entrance of new players like India and China who work much more cheaply, combined with the Philippines too high wages, has caught the Philippines industry in a squeeze. In addition to this, there is a deep divide between these two cases of the animation industry. The Philippines studios are essentially doing less creative work, and will not likely soon have the opportunity to participate in the conceptualization stage of creative production for global markets" (Tschang and Goldstein).

In addition to the fact that they are being pitted against each other financially, overseas studios have a hard time making even small productions for their home countries. The market that could potentially support their original work is decidedly uninterested.

A contributing factor to the predicament of offshore outsourcing is America's xenophobia - or at least misunderstanding of different cultures.

Writing on the reasons that gave rise to offshore outsourcing, animation historian (and USC professor) Tom Sito wrote: "The animation of other nations was too culturally specific to appeal beyond their own borders or too experimental for the kind of mass audience Hollywood was after... The foreign shorts were good for international festivals and advertising local products, but they would to do for American audiences" (Sito 250).

Not much has changed. This year, there are two foreign-language animated films nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film Oscar: Boy and the World and When Marnie Was There. Haven't heard of them? That's the problem. Both films received critical acclaim but tiny US releases. The other foreign-produced film up for an Oscar is Shaun the Sheep Movie from Aardman in England. While the film received a wide release in the US, it was one of the worst openings for an animated film in recent history (Amidi).

There is some hope though. With Pokemon, Naruto, and the films of Hayao Miyazaki (to name just a few), Japanese anime has permeated mainstream American culture to some extent, primarily with subsections of young adults and children. Still, even the amount of animated films from Japan that receive wide releases in America is miniscule. Anime tv shows are often relegated to late night time slots or niche networks/providers.

It's strange to me that America's appetite for its own entertainment is boundless, but it has seemingly no interest in even the best productions of other cultures. The problems of underpayment and lack of creative control faced by outsourcing firms would no doubt be improved if American producers and audiences were interested in the unique stories that different cultures have to offer.

Works Cited

Amidi, Amid. "'Shaun the Sheep Movie' Opening Is Baaaaa-d." Cartoon Brew. N.p., 09 Aug. 2015. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.

Tschang, Feichin, Ted, and Andrea Goldstein. “Production and Political Economy in the Animation Industry: Why Insourcing and Outsourcing Occur.” DRUID Summer Conference, Elsinore, Denmark, 14-16 June 2004 (2004): 1–21. Print.

The Visual Effects Industry

In 2015, the six movies that took in the most money worldwide were Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Furious 7, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Minions, and Spectre. Each movie was an entry into an existing franchise and—with the exception of Minions—each movie cost at least $150 million to produce and required extensive visual effects work.

As studios become growingly reliant on “tentpole” films and extended universes with enormous visual spectacle, the visual effects industry has taken on an incredibly important role in Hollywood. And yet headlines like this one keep popping up:

Rhythm and Hues was an independent visual effects studio with a staff of over five hundred people. And their problem wasn’t that they had a lack of high-profile clients or were producing sub-par work. One of their last projects was The Life of Pi, for which they did virtually all of the visual effects work. It was a film that was almost entirely digital. It was primarily shot in front of a green screen, and a main character (the tiger, Richard Parker) was a computer-generated visual effect.

Rhythm and Hues actually won the best visual effects oscar several weeks after it announced its own bankruptcy. The acceptance speech is cringeworthy.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to play the Jaws theme for that musical interstitial, but it’s pretty damn fitting because the movie industry killed Rhythm and Hues. They also killed a number of other independent visual effects firms.

It’s a weird situation because the movie industry also supplied Rhythm and Hues with a stream of work every year. The problem was forced competition from other firms both inside and, more woundingly, outside of the United States. Sometime in the last two decades, the studios invented a system whereby they took advantage of the huge number of visual effects firms (about 500) and let the studios underbid each other for work. This was especially tough for US companies who were competing with firms in countries with lower wages and far more government subsidies for film work. As a result, even Rhythm and Hues—a huge visual effects firm—made an incredibly slim profit margin. When they received a comparatively smaller number of films after Life of Pi, they were crippled by debt and had to close their operations in the US.

There have been a lot of propositions about how to help fix this situation, including prompting the government to create subsidies for visual effects. Still, this is difficult. The visual effects industry’s only representation is the Visual Effects Society. There is no union, and in fact, unionization could harm independent visual effects firms in the short term. Additionally, government subsidies could not dissuade studios from looking for work in countries with far lower wages, like India and China (Curtin and Vanderhoef).

There are still major visual effects companies in the United States that are going strong, like ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks. It’s important to note though that ILM is owned by Disney and Imageworks is owned by Sony. They can afford fluctuations in income. For companies like Rhythm and Hues, vying for studio money can actually weaken and break them.

For more info, please look at: 

Curtin, Michael, and John Vanderhoef. “A Vanishing Piece of the Pi The Globalization of Visual Effects Labor.”      Television & New Media 16.3 (2015): 219–239. tvn.sagepub.com.libproxy2.usc.edu. Web.

An Early History of Animation Outsourcing

While India has recently become a hot spot for a lot of low-cost animation production, US production first moved to India almost 60 years ago. Disney staffer Clair Weeks—who was born in India to missionaries before animating on Snow White and a batch of other early Disney classics—created a studio in his home-country in 1956 as part of the “American Technical Co-Operation Mission”. It lasted only 18-months and was certainly an isolated incident in the history of Indian animation, but the studio managed to produce some beautiful artwork and a short called The Banyan Deer (1957).

There were other attempts to create animation studios overseas, but the high cost and delay of shipping made most out-of-house animation productions unfeasible. The first effective—and I use that word lightly—outsourced production was Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. 

I’ll back up a second.  

In the 1950s television landscape, there was generally only one producer. Jay Ward’s partners—much to his chagrin—got General Miss to fund his show by promising a budget for a half-hour cartoon that was pretty much the going rate of a thirty-second commercial. It was clear to all of the producers that a budget so small wouldn’t even support limited American animation. They first agreed to ship production to Japan, but when it was clear that the studio that they had made a deal with did not exist, they turned to a small Mexican commercial studio called Val-Mar Productions. According to animation scholar and USC professor Tom Sito, production was divided “into two divisions: the perceived creative areas such as direction, storyboarding, animation, and art direction—‘labeled above the line’—and the more labor-intensive areas not perceived as creative tasks—assisting, inking, painting, backgrounds, checking, and camera—below the line” (Sito). Jay Ward was never happy with the sloppy production that the Mexican team did for him, but thanks to intensified training and education, the crew slowly improved (Scott).

Personally, I think that the show’s strong, stylized design and clever writing allowed for extremely limited animation and bizarre camera work. Below, you can take a look at a batch of animation from the show and compare it with Hanna Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound, the gold standard late-1950s animated television production.

Jay Ward’s frustration with the shoddy animation done in Mexico is recounted in a lot of animation books, but the story of the Mexican animators is less well-known. According to a former Val-Mar employee, the Mexican animators never received screen credit for their work. When they protested, the American producers inserted American names like “John Doe, Jane Doe, and a bunch of brothers.” Afterwards, Val-Mar changed its name to Gamma Productions and produced several other tv shows for General Mills. Then, the studio unceremoniously closed its doors and its animators were immediately laid off (Bendazzi)

In the animation industry, there’s an odd propensity to label aspects of production as “non-creative” but complain when the quality of the “non-creative” work is not artistically up to par. In the building of the pyramids, there were certainly architects who designed and supervised and slaves who laid the stone. However, in animation production, just about every worker artistically contributes to what is on screen. To be clear: animation outsourcing isn’t bad. It’s made a lot of seemingly un-fundable productions possible. Still, it raises concerns about the consensus’s view of animation as an art form and of the blind eye studios often turn to the conditions in outsourced studios.

For more info, take a look at:

http://animationresources.org/history-clair-weeks-pioneer-of-indian-animation-2/

Works Cited

Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Animation: A World History. Vol. 2. N.p.: Focal, 2015. Print.

Scott, Keith. The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. Print.

Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 2006. Print.

Annotation

Tschang, Feichin Ted, and Andrea Goldstein. "The Outsourcing of “Creative” Work and the Limits of Capability: The Case of the Philippines’ Animation Industry." IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage. 57.1 (2010): 132-43. ProQuest. Web. 20 Jan. 2016.

Feichin Ted Tschang and Andrea Goldstein’s journal article explains that the animation industry in the Philippines is a “nonsoftware" and “creative industry”. The purpose of the article is to understand reasons for creative outsourcing and similarities with nonsoftware outsourcing. Outsourcing in the Philippines began in the early 1980s and experienced a boom, decline, and resurgence. The article profiles four studios. Two have a small staff and cycle most of their talent in on a temporary basis, whereas the latter two take great pride in their talented, permanent staffs.

Studios have to differentiate and sell themselves on the caliber of their work rather than their “organizational” prowess, work is dependent on the high-valued pre-production of providers, and foreign investment is all-important. Therefore, the Philippine animation industry is prone to instability and risks disappearing.

This piece excellently and specifically describes the inner-workings of different Filipino studios and the history of animation in the Philippines. In doing so, it avoids making any broad claims about outsourcing and is, in fact, sympathetic to Filipino workers in the animation field. It draws helpful distinctions between software and creative outsourcing—both of which are driven by cost, but which create two very different products.

This would be a very useful source in a research paper. It’s filled with case studies and quotes from company heads that give light to the thoughts and concerns of studios whose mere existence is not often acknowledged. Additionally, it provides carefully-considered terms with which to discuss the multi-faceted topic of outsourcing.

The Problem

In the 2006 The Simpsons episode “Kiss Kiss, Bangalore,” geriatric billionaire Mr. Burns shuts down his Springfield nuclear power plant and outsources the work to India. Homer moves to India to train the employees and lazily takes advantage of the hardworking people there, until—of course—his family exposes him, and he returns to Springfield. It smartly satirizes the first world practice of outsourcing labor, and it’s a lot of well-written, hypocritical fun.

Did I say hypocritical?

That’s because the majority of the production of a Simpson’s episode is outsourced. It's a fact that the show has referenced and satirized many times but has never changed. While writing, voice recording, music, as well as character, background, and prop design are done at Film Roman in Los Angeles; the bulk of the animation, clean-up, coloring, layout, and compositing are done at Rough Draft Studios in South Korea. Design work on a typical half-hour animated show takes a team of roughly fifty artists about 2 weeks to complete in the US, but it can take a crew of over one hundred nine months to finish the work in a foreign studio.

The practice has existed for nearly as long as television animation has existed. In 1959, Jay Ward Productions began to outsource the work on The Adventures of Rocky Bullwinkle and Peabody and Sherman to a small studio in Mexico. The purpose—to lower expensive overhead costs and thereby make the relatively edgy and risky show more attractive to advertisers. This, however, was a largely disastrous process. Because the inexperienced animators were rushed and given a shoestring budget, characters were constantly off-model and details and colors changed at the tip of a hat. Even by the low standards that Hanna-Barbera had set with Huckleberry Hound a year earlier, this was a sloppy production.

Here's a piece of Huckleberry Hound animation.

Outsourcing in animation did not become popularized until the 1980s, when the production of new shows at Disney Television Animation, Hanna-Barbera, and Warner Brothers Television Animation began to ship the bulk of animation responsibilities to Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Even compared to the limited animation that was commonly seen on tv in the 1970s and 80s, this was a considerably cheaper option, and it led to a boom in the production of television animation which hasn’t subsided yet. Revenues increased and television animation was given a fuller look (more frames were produced per second of animation). It was a win-win for American and Asian studios, and everybody waded around in bathtubs filled with newly-minted money.

Not quite.

While television shows were able to achieve more frames per second than before, they began to be animated by less experienced animators who were often paid by the amount of work that they turned in, rather than the hours that they worked. The animated performances, in many cases, suffered. This may not seem like a big deal, and it may in fact be imperceptible to many eyes. However, an animated performance is just that—a performance. I suspect that most people would feel differently if high-paid actors or directors were outsourced for cheaper alternatives in other countries. What if Robert Downey Jr. was replaced with his cheaper Nepali equivalent in the next Iron Man? I think we would feel that we had lost a sense of quality and ownership in our entertainment. And we have.

The spirit of cost-cutting did not stop in the 1980s. Many studios have abandoned production in GDP high-earners like South Korea and Japan for cheaper alternatives—namely studios in India. These studios have been known to fire and underpay employees in the name of efficiency. Often, they outsource their outsourced work to cheaper alternatives.

Furthermore, outsourcing has spread from television animation to feature animation and even the digital effects community. In 2013, Rhythm & Hues—one of the largest digital effects companies in the United States—closed and laid off over two hundred employees because it was unable to compete with foreign alternatives, whom film companies have turned to in an attempt to lower costs.

The purpose of this blog is not to propagate some form of xenophobic outrage over the loss of American jobs. I don’t have an agenda - I’m an artist/animation student and a life-long animation enthusiast. My aim is to appreciate the work of animators and digital effects practitioners, who are often highly-trained artists and not workers who can be easily replaced. Through the lens of offshore outsourcing, I hope to explore the relationship between studios and artist-employees as well as the general public perception of animators.

For more information, check out:

http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/2009/03/against-outsourcing.html

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/guest-commentary-the-life-of-an-indian-visual-effects-artist-78220.html

References

Amidi, Amid. "Guest Commentary: The Life of an Indian Digital Effects Artist." Cartoon Brew. N.p., 21 Feb. 2013. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

Fritz, Ben. "Visual Effects Industry Does a Disappearing Act." Wall Street Journal. N.p., 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

Van Citters, Darrell. The Art of Jay Ward Productions. N.p.: Oxberry, 2013. Print.