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.
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.
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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.
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