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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor...

For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai.

Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.

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There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term.

Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too.

With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.

Judging by what gets debuted in Netflix for American audiences, aren't a lot of anime these days also created with 3D CGI animation anyway?

Actual 2D animation has been dead everywhere for 20 years, yes. The death was pretty much simultaneous in the US and Japan with Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? & Astro Boy (2003) being the last shows fully animated on cels, in 2003.

Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013.

Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free.

Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted.

And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.

"actual 2D animation" being limited to pen/paper on animation cels is a narrow definition. Shows such as Primal are digitally animated using modern techniques, but it's still hand drawn rather than being fully puppeted like many other shows

https://youtu.be/2ZUWGoEbbSs?si=_RxP5RdoyHfXN4Dx

Yeah, there's a clear stylistic difference between anime that incorporate 3D-looking effects (as in many Netflix series) and ones that don't.

The question is how much is hand drawn? In the context of animators 20 years ago talking about "save 2d" they were talking about animation on twos (or even ones or threes).

Nowadays with hand drawn stuff you're mostly seeing keyframe work being done and the computer doing all of the heavy lifting with inbetweening with maybe some tweaking here and there by junior animators.

The tools are good enough now where it doesn't even look like shitty Flash animation anymore.

Also don't know what you're trying to show me with this 10 minute video. There's maybe 15 seconds of animation work being done this whole video? I see storyboarding and background painting and audio work but this shows shockingly little animation process...(and what I can see clearly is someone drawing keys...)

I agree it wasn't the best example for the point I was trying to make, but it was the best I could find in short notice. It just sounded to me like the "save 2D" people you described were more focused on preserving a very particular kind of 2D animation methodology, and saying because this methodology is dead the entire medium is dead. I was trying to propose that 2D animation that imitates the old style very well does exist in the modern era.

I'll admit, though, that while I know and have talked to some people in the animation industry it is not my area of expertise, so I could be completely off base with my observations.

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