Super Animation Catalogue 2.0

[jeffbr92]

How accurate is ANN? Cuz they project DBS costs ¥118,821,120 to produce per episode. That's just f**king nuts if true.

And how much is that in dollars?

[8bitdee]

How accurate is ANN? Cuz they project DBS costs ¥118,821,120 to produce per episode. That's just f**king nuts if true.

And how much is that in dollars?

Like 18million. Inaccurate numbers, otherwise DBS would be the best animated show in history.

[Ajay]

My dudes, budget has a negligible impact on a show's animation quality. That's all on the schedule and skill of the animators.

[8bitdee]

My dudes, budget has a negligible impact on a show's animation quality. That's all on the schedule and skill of the animators.

What?

Higher budget = more skilled animators hired, better overall skilled staff (directors, writers, etc) hired; less cheaply outsourced animation from overseas to save money.

[Ajay]

What?

Higher budget = more skilled animators hired, better overall skilled staff (directors, writers, etc) hired; less cheaply outsourced animation from overseas to save money.

That's the type of logic a lot of people go with because it totally makes sense in other industries, but it's not really true for anime. Here's a rundown from Sakugablog.

– Please, give me a cohesive response for the “lol dat BUDGET” meme.

Kevin: It comes down to a fairly simple ‘While production values and the scope of a project are limited by a bunch of factors including the production budget, that is not what viewers appreciate; the talent available is the defining factor, and in TV anime the bottleneck that causes things to go wrong is the schedule. Polished anime achieves its results through strong planning, and animation disasters happen when projects are given even less time than usual. Quality beyond that obviously comes down to the individual talent. Throwing lots of money to hire countless animators leads to really bad results.’ What you need isn’t this short paragraph though, it’s something capable of convincing people who still refuse to believe that when anime looks nice it’s not because they spent more money on it. Those are people who still believe that in a world where people like Erukin Kawabata have said KyoAni projects actually cost less than regular anime due to in-house production. They still believe that after One-Punch Man‘s chief animation director Chikashi Kubota explicitly said the show didn’t particularly cost more money, and confronted that exact fan attitude. There’s absolutely no way to convince them, since this has been a belief held for a long time and even supported by critics who didn’t have any idea how things worked. So… don’t worry about them, I suppose.

-

– I’ve heard it said that budget has little impact on the quality of animation or even a the show as a whole. What I don’t get is why? I understand that the quality of the team and their processes/workflow is what determines quality, not the amount of money thrown at a cut/show. But surely, if a team had a bigger budget, at the very least they’d be able to spend more time working on the show (after all, time is money, so it’d stand to reason that money also yields time), allowing them to plan better and put more effort into the production, resulting in a higher quality product. Is this not how things work? Are there other factors at play that negate the benefits of a larger budget?

Kevin: The issue with your train of thought is that it makes too much sense, and thus doesn’t apply to the anime industry. The idea that if time is money then conversely having money means you’ve got time is a wrong assumption I can’t blame people for making. The truth is that it’s not the case, and it can even be the exact opposite! The highest profile productions (mostly talking about TV anime here) are often accompanied by some sort of multimedia campaign, and cross promotion with big releases in other formats is quite the big deal. Take a project like Cinderella Girls, which as you can imagine wasn’t struggling for funding. But since Bandai wanted the anime to overlap with the rhythm game they were about to release, the show ended up airing prematurely; its chief animation director had wrapped up his previous project just weeks before deremas started airing, so it’s easy to see why it all crashed. In the end the second half of the series did get stealthily delayed, but Bandai at that point no longer cared because the game was out and on its way to become a big success. And you don’t even need circumstances this unfortunate, often you just have impatient committee members that want the fruits of their investment as soon as possible. Since studios themselves are often not in the committee and very rarely rank high within it, the people who care the most about the animation production environment don’t have much of a say even when a project could afford to pay the creators for a longer time. The latenight industry moves ridiculously fast so titles have small windows of relevance, and they don’t want to risk having to wait more seasons for them to air. The consequences to their thinking are often gross and deplorable, but if you disregard the actual human beings who suffer because of them it’s easy to understand why anime with high production budget doesn’t easily get to stay in production for a long time.

That said, budget doesn’t matter at all is a really funny strawman that popped up recently. No one has argued that and no one seriously will. For the longest time no one challenged the idea of money as the defining factor for production quality of TV anime, so when people suddenly started quoting industry members to disprove that some insecure fans felt personally attacked – you know how the internet is. Exaggerating the viewpoint they disagree with so that it sounds stupid is just their way to fight back, but pay them no mind. Pointing at one impressive scene animated by a particularly good animator and saying that cost more money is silly. Even doing so with entire episodes tends to be entirely off the mark. But projects with a higher production budget do fare better, assuming you’re comparing under similar circumstances. The effects tend to relate to fields that fans are really bad at perceiving though, and money obviously won’t make talent magically grow!

[AnimeNation101]

No offense but i really don’t feel like reading all that at the moment so can someone kindly summarize what Kevin said in the Sagukablog interview that Ajay posted?

[Ajay]

No offense but i really don’t feel like reading all that at the moment so can someone kindly summarize what Kevin said in the Sagukablog interview that Ajay posted?

The first Q&A is the most succinct answer. The second one's more a "but what about...?!" kind of follow-up.

[AnimeNation101]

No offense but i really don’t feel like reading all that at the moment so can someone kindly summarize what Kevin said in the Sagukablog interview that Ajay posted?

The first Q&A is the most succinct answer. The second one's more a "but what about...?!" kind of follow-up.

Thanks

[Baggie_Saiyan]

Well nevermind! Apparently ANN are way off! I was gonna say those figures are too nuts otherwise.

what's the real cost then?

According to Kvin on twitter:
"That might literally be 20x off, lol. We don't know specifics for this case but industry people have said kids/daytime shows in particularly can even dip around 5 million per ep. Might be more in Toei's case but that's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much."

[cuartas]

Snip

But he's discribing a problem that had nothing to do with budget, it was bandai directors making haste in a stupid way, so no matter what budged the show had, it was gonna be a clusterfuck anyway due to greedy bosses, that was a special circumnstance that isn't happening to each anime.

I can imagine a scenario with DBS or any weekly show: More budget gives them the possibility to hire more key animators, AD's, writters, directors, storyboarders and more TALENTED people.
With more talented people, the rotations can be more spaced, so instead of 6-7-8 weeks to make an episode, 10 weeks could be the norm, we'd forget about animators popping up surprisingly earlier in not corresponding episodes (tate, higashide, takahashi, etc) so they can focus on their own episodes.
Each team could have a bunch of extra key animators, that means less key frames drawn per animator and then just maybe we could get a boost in art quality and/or animation because they have more time to polish their drawings, that also means less wasted time for AD's correcting shots.

I mean, I don't see a disadvantage unless there's corruption, misuse of the budget, project mismanagment or something else, but this is not politics as far as I know

[8bitdee]

[spoiler]

What?

Higher budget = more skilled animators hired, better overall skilled staff (directors, writers, etc) hired; less cheaply outsourced animation from overseas to save money.

That's the type of logic a lot of people go with because it totally makes sense in other industries, but it's not really true for anime. Here's a rundown from Sakugablog.

– Please, give me a cohesive response for the “lol dat BUDGET” meme.

Kevin: It comes down to a fairly simple ‘While production values and the scope of a project are limited by a bunch of factors including the production budget, that is not what viewers appreciate; the talent available is the defining factor, and in TV anime the bottleneck that causes things to go wrong is the schedule. Polished anime achieves its results through strong planning, and animation disasters happen when projects are given even less time than usual. Quality beyond that obviously comes down to the individual talent. Throwing lots of money to hire countless animators leads to really bad results.’ What you need isn’t this short paragraph though, it’s something capable of convincing people who still refuse to believe that when anime looks nice it’s not because they spent more money on it. Those are people who still believe that in a world where people like Erukin Kawabata have said KyoAni projects actually cost less than regular anime due to in-house production. They still believe that after One-Punch Man‘s chief animation director Chikashi Kubota explicitly said the show didn’t particularly cost more money, and confronted that exact fan attitude. There’s absolutely no way to convince them, since this has been a belief held for a long time and even supported by critics who didn’t have any idea how things worked. So… don’t worry about them, I suppose.

-

– I’ve heard it said that budget has little impact on the quality of animation or even a the show as a whole. What I don’t get is why? I understand that the quality of the team and their processes/workflow is what determines quality, not the amount of money thrown at a cut/show. But surely, if a team had a bigger budget, at the very least they’d be able to spend more time working on the show (after all, time is money, so it’d stand to reason that money also yields time), allowing them to plan better and put more effort into the production, resulting in a higher quality product. Is this not how things work? Are there other factors at play that negate the benefits of a larger budget?

Kevin: The issue with your train of thought is that it makes too much sense, and thus doesn’t apply to the anime industry. The idea that if time is money then conversely having money means you’ve got time is a wrong assumption I can’t blame people for making. The truth is that it’s not the case, and it can even be the exact opposite! The highest profile productions (mostly talking about TV anime here) are often accompanied by some sort of multimedia campaign, and cross promotion with big releases in other formats is quite the big deal. Take a project like Cinderella Girls, which as you can imagine wasn’t struggling for funding. But since Bandai wanted the anime to overlap with the rhythm game they were about to release, the show ended up airing prematurely; its chief animation director had wrapped up his previous project just weeks before deremas started airing, so it’s easy to see why it all crashed. In the end the second half of the series did get stealthily delayed, but Bandai at that point no longer cared because the game was out and on its way to become a big success. And you don’t even need circumstances this unfortunate, often you just have impatient committee members that want the fruits of their investment as soon as possible. Since studios themselves are often not in the committee and very rarely rank high within it, the people who care the most about the animation production environment don’t have much of a say even when a project could afford to pay the creators for a longer time. The latenight industry moves ridiculously fast so titles have small windows of relevance, and they don’t want to risk having to wait more seasons for them to air. The consequences to their thinking are often gross and deplorable, but if you disregard the actual human beings who suffer because of them it’s easy to understand why anime with high production budget doesn’t easily get to stay in production for a long time.

That said, budget doesn’t matter at all is a really funny strawman that popped up recently. No one has argued that and no one seriously will. For the longest time no one challenged the idea of money as the defining factor for production quality of TV anime, so when people suddenly started quoting industry members to disprove that some insecure fans felt personally attacked – you know how the internet is. Exaggerating the viewpoint they disagree with so that it sounds stupid is just their way to fight back, but pay them no mind. Pointing at one impressive scene animated by a particularly good animator and saying that cost more money is silly. Even doing so with entire episodes tends to be entirely off the mark. But projects with a higher production budget do fare better, assuming you’re comparing under similar circumstances. The effects tend to relate to fields that fans are really bad at perceiving though, and money obviously won’t make talent magically grow![/spoiler]

That was really insightful, thanks. But that doesn't mean the budget is negligible to the quality of the show. Negligible means insignificant, and even if the anime industry plays by a different set of rules than say the film industry, I can't imagine a field in video entertainment where the budget has nothing to do with the quality of the product.

[Ajay]

But he's discribing a problem that had nothing to do with budget, it was bandai directors making haste in a stupid way, so no matter what budged the show had, it was gonna be a clusterfuck anyway due to greedy bosses, that was a special circumnstance that isn't happening to each anime.

I can imagine a scenario with DBS or any weekly show: More budget gives them the possibility to hire more key animators, AD's, writters, directors, storyboarders and more TALENTED people.
With more talented people, the rotations can be more spaced, so instead of 6-7-8 weeks to make an episode, 10 weeks could be the norm, we'd forget about animators popping up surprisingly earlier in not corresponding episodes (tate, higashide, takahashi, etc) so they can focus on their own episodes.
Each team could have a bunch of extra key animators, that means less key frames drawn per animator and then just maybe we could get a boost in art quality and/or animation because they have more time to polish their drawings, that also means less wasted time for AD's correcting shots.

I mean, I don't see a disadvantage unless there's corruption, misuse of the budget, project mismanagment or something else, but this is not politics as far as I know

Again, I get the logic, but you're thinking too much in terms of video games and Hollywood.

I think anyone who's ever worked in a group project is well aware that more people doesn't necessarily come out to better quality, and in many cases, it just backfires: too many cooks spoil the broth.

Money can't just magic up talent, which is why that always circles around to "who you know", and not "how much you have" (see the One Punch Man example). It doesn't make masses of difference to hire hundreds of people when only a tiny fraction of that pool is actually any good. You'll just bring yourself back around to zero again while the ADs and CADs are spending all their time fixing everything, and in the end, you're still only going to get one good episode here and there from the good staff in the rotation.

Again, it's primarily time, talent, and who you know. This is something that's a consistent explanation from industry folk. You gotta throw away those preconceptions from other industries.

That was really insightful, thanks. But that doesn't mean the budget is negligible to the quality of the show. Negligible means insignificant, and even if the anime industry plays by a different set of rules than say the film industry, I can't imagine a field in video entertainment where the budget has nothing to do with the quality of the product.

Absolutely! It definitely doesn't mean nothing at all. If you can't afford to pay the animators you've convinced to join the project, then it'll fall apart, but the point to take away is mostly just: having a bunch of money doesn't mean who you're paying is suddenly better, nor does it convince talents to join your project in the first place.

[ekrolo2]

I don't get how people can understand that budget does not magically make a video game or movie or TV show better but when it comes to anime, they act like it's the magic win button.

Yes, more money gives you more options but that doesn't mean it'll work out. Hell, even in the landscape of non-anime, it's a dumb "logic" to use as we've seen countless big budget TV shows or movies or video games suck shit in terms of quality because of either bad talent or bad decision making,.... more money was NOT gonna fix that there.

Never mind the fact Toei actually has dropped a lot of money on Super, more so then most anime gets and it has still not completely helped it's production problems. Hell, just to extra emphasize how not black and white this is, how many anime get perfectly fine budgets and productions and still end up failing financially or critically? How many have disastrous productions that you couldn't even tell while watching it. Attack on Titan fits the latter and I'm pretty sure Psycho-Pass was a problem child too.

[cuartas]

Again, I get the logic, but you're thinking too much in terms of video games and Hollywood.

Again, it's primarily time, talent, and who you know. This is something that's a consistent explanation from industry folk. You gotta throw away those preconceptions from other industries.

Time is sorted out with the scenario I presented so budget has a positive influence there, even if they can't hire the elite of Japan, it's not like DBS counts with the best of the best to even suggest more people at the same level of talent from the animators we have right now will not be helpful at all.

Talent and who you know, money can be definitely a factor to convince people, I get it, it's not the main factor, but it helps, the thing about 'who you know' has nothing to do with budget, that depends entirely on the person who has the good connections, so why don't you hire or outsource (why not) that person? you give him/her good money to work with as a plus to convince those talents, I mean, takahashi was convinced to return at the very end of the DBS without budget as a factor, I don't see it as an impossible task.

Just to be clear, I can care less about hollywood and all that northamerican BS and their ways to work but as a software developer, I perfectly know that a well managed project can do wonders, no matter how much people you add because at the end if the direction is strong enough they're self managed for the most part, and that's my point, good managment (including the budget managment) is universally proven to improve the performance of any project even if japan is formed by martians with their own ruleset.

Budget will not do the trick on it's own, it has to be complemented to work to help on many factors, and that's the thing you're apparently assuming, that there's always gonna be mismanagment when there's extra money involved, weird to see you have that negative position about this

[Ajay]

I really don't know what else to say to you other than just... what I'm saying has been laid out and explained countless times by people actually working within that industry. If you're going to ignore them and their explanations in favour of your personal view, then I guess I'll have to take Kevin's advice:

There’s absolutely no way to convince them, since this has been a belief held for a long time and even supported by critics who didn’t have any idea how things worked. So… don’t worry about them, I suppose.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[cuartas]

Amazing, now you're trolling instead of at least making a real counter-argument of the time part.
at least be consistent with your logic, because if the experts on that area have the word of god and can't be questioned, then why you hate on yamamuro's work if he has decades of more experience than me, you, or whoever else here?
I take your word, you wouldn't have the right to criticise or even give an opinion about it, and this thread would not have any reason to exist, because anyone who's working there is an expert, even kitano.
Ok, i'll stop this futile discussion then, I'm triggered

[VegettoEX]

I assure you that our moderation team is not out to troll you.

You have been presented with and pointed to succinct, comprehensive answers from individuals that actually work in the field and have the necessary experience to accurately answer your questions. This is what Kanzenshuu is all about. If you are not along for that ride, your contributions will not be welcome here.

[cuartas]

I assure you that our moderation team is not out to troll you.

You have been presented with and pointed to succinct, comprehensive answers from individuals that actually work in the field and have the necessary experience to accurately answer your questions. This is what Kanzenshuu is all about. If you are not along for that ride, your contributions will not be welcome here.

Ok, you convinced me, no way a noob like me can even have a valid point
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MrTennek]

If you are not along for that ride, your contributions will not be welcome here.

That was needlessly harsh.

[VegettoEX]

Ok, you convinced me, no way a noob like me can even have a valid point
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Indignant responses that attempt to mis-characterize our statements and mission are unacceptable.

It should be — and is — clear that we encourage all members to offer thoughts, theories, and scenarios in an attempt to learn new things. We say often that everyone should always be learning.

When you ask these questions and then are actually presented with the evidence and sources/citations to back them up... bingo! Mission accomplished. It may not line up with what you had in mind, but that just means you've learned something new. That is a good thing, and not something to be stubborn about.

That was needlessly harsh.

Every single community member agreed to a certain set of guidelines (twice) prior to registration. None of this should come as a surprise at any point. We simply do not have the capacity to babysit people who have no interest in being constructive community members in the first place, and we won't dance around that fact. That being said, thank you for your input.