Dragonbums said:
Except the way the anime industry right now isn't healthy in the slightest. If studios aren't shutting down, they are horrendously underpaying their animators just to make ends meet in the hopes that they can make it to the end of a run and sell DVD's and figurines. That doesn't come off as remotely profitable, nor healthy.
It doesn't matter if it "comes off as profitable or healthy" to you, if it in fact is profitable.
You repeatedly appeal to unpleasantly low wages, but that is a social justice issue, not a matter of industrial economical failure.
Apple isn't "suffering", just because iPhones are manufactured in sweatshops. It's a curiosity of the local situations, that people are willing to work for so low wages, but evidently they ARE willing to work for it. Even if apple would be making twice as much money as it does now, the workers wouldn't earn twice as much, instead there would be twice as many of them employed.
The same principle is happening in the anime industry. You can see how in the past years as the industry's profits increased, so did the number of anime produced. The extra money was spent on more people, not on enriching the existing ones.
Wage size is not an indicator of the industry's success, it's an indicator of how much people are willing to work for.
Dragonbums said:
I'm not talking about just late night viewing. I'm talking about the fact that in less than an hour of any show going on air in Japan on television, the entire episode is available to watch on illegal streaming sites, and studios lose a huge chunk of money they would of otherwise gotten from television views.
And that's where you are wrong. The overwhelming majority of the series are late night anime in the first place. The money that they would have gotten from TV viewers, is ¥0.
In fact, it's less than that. Studios are PAYING to have their shows aired.
Yeah that's great. Doesn't do fuck all for them when they are trying to actually upstart their show. How can they make figures and DVD's if they barely have the money to pay their artists. The solution seems to be to pay the artists even shittier salaries.
Does it? I don't know about animator wages decreasing in the past decade. They have always been low.
The point being is that Evangelion and other similar animes still made money from television ads to support the show.
Evangelion was intended to be a daytime kiddie anime, but after a few episode it was moved to a late night spot, where it sired the modern otaku anime industry that relies on VHS and later disc sales rather than a mainstream viewerbase's ad support.
You can't make DVD's and anime figurines if your ass can't even afford to finish the show. Yet alone pay the animators.
Fortunately, anime studios can afford all of these by making solid profits. The fact that animator salaries are traditionally low, also helps.
Or maybe it's because many studios are suffering. Or are you just going to ignore the very real problem of horrendously underpaid animators even for POPULAR SHOWS that can barely afford to move out of their parents house while working full time.
Yes I am going to ignore it. It has nothing to do with the fact that anime studios are profitable, and even able to hire more people and make more shows per year.
As an industry, anime is healthy.
Maybe as a workplace culture, it has some unfortunate elements, but the solution to that is labor unions and minimum wage increases, not greater copyright enforcement for an already efficient and profitable industry's leaders' benefit.
