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.