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One studio, Madhouse, was recently accused of violating labor code: Employees were working nearly 400 hours per month and went 37 consecutive days without a single day off. Henry Thurlow, an American animator living and working in Japan, told BuzzFeed News he has been hospitalized multiple times due to illness brought on by exhaustion. Animators often fall asleep at their desks. … It’s a structural problem in the anime industry. “And even if your title is a huge hit, like Attack on Titan, you won’t make any of it. “Even if you move up the ladder and become a key-frame animator, you won’t earn much,” Adachi said. That’s not to mention anime’s meticulous attention to details that are by and large ignored by animation in the West, like food, architecture, and landscape, which can take four or five times longer than average to draw. That wouldn’t be so bad if each artist could crank out 200 drawings a day, but a single drawing can take more than an hour.

In-between animators earn around 200 yen per drawing - less than $2. They’re the ones who make all the individual drawings after the top-level directors come up with the storyboards and the middle-tier “key animators” draw the important frames in each scene. Instead, studios rely on a large pool of essentially unpaid freelancers who are passionate about anime.Īt the entry level are “in-between animators,” who are usually freelancers. Shingo Adachi, an animator and character designer for Sword Art Online, a popular anime TV series, said the talent shortage is a serious ongoing problem - with nearly 200 animated TV series alone made in Japan each year, there aren’t enough skilled animators to go around. It takes skill to create hand-drawn animation and experience to do it quickly. Anime’s slave labor problemĪnime is almost entirely drawn by hand. The tension between a ruthless industry structure and anime’s artistic idealism forces animators to suffer exploitation for the sake of art, with no solution in sight.

But anime’s outward success conceals a disturbing underlying economic reality: Many of the animators behind the onscreen magic are broke and face working conditions that can lead to burnout and even suicide.