Introduction
Do you have a favorite animated film or tv series? Maybe you’re into Disney movies like The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. These days, I tend to watch a lot of anime. Anime such as Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen are known for their beautifully high quality animation. If you like art and animation, this seems like a dream job right? Making all these stories come to life must be fun! And surely all of the hardworking staff are being compensated immensely for their efforts, right? If only that were the case.
Unfair Treatment
Animators have been speaking out about their treatment for years. Not only are they given impossible deadlines, but they also do get paid as much as you think they would. It’s quite likely slave labor. Animation studios in Japan are notorious for this. The most well known example would be studio MAPPA. For some background, MAPPA is responsible for animating popular shows such as: Jujutsu Kaisen, Yuri On Ice, Chainsaw Man, Attack On Titan, etc. They are known for their exceptional animation, but they’re also known for treating their staff horribly. It’s been a running joke between anime fans that the employees never get to see their family due to the workload, but it seems to be a reality. MAPPA employees have been given extremely unrealistic deadlines. It was revealed that the feature length film Jujustu Kaisen 0 was animated in just four months. It normally takes 2 to 3 years for a movie to be animated. Arai Kazuto, the director and storyboard of Jujutsu Kaisen season 2, has stated that the staff asked the higher ups to delay the production, but were denied. Episodes of the series were even being animated just hours before they aired. Some of the MAPPA employees have been speaking up about their mistreatment on Twitter (now unfortunately known as X). However, the mistreatment of animators isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, Walt Disney was known for mistreating his animators. In 1941, the Disney animators went on strike because Disney fired multiple animators for demanding a union. Eventually Disney became completely unionized, but Walt Disney was very bitter about the strike.
My Thoughts
This should be a given, but animators should be fairly compensated for all of their hard work. I’ve watched a few videos in my media class about animation, and there’s so much work that goes into making our favorite animated films and series come to life. It can take days just to animate one frame. Not to mention the fact that some animators work 23 hours a day and get no rest. The very least they can do is be paid fairly. I think that more animators should unionize, so that their human rights aren’t continuously being violated. At the end of the day, they’re just people, and should be treated as such. They aren’t robots.
