Animeta! (volumes 1-5 ongoing)
Nov. 19th, 2024 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meteordustFor all my love of anime, I know surprisingly little about its production. Animeta! is a manga by former animator Yaso Hanamura, and provides an insider view of that industry.
Miyuki Sanada is an aspiring animator, whose passion for it awoke from a chance episode of Royal Girl Pannacotta. As a newbie, she takes the exam to join N2 Factory Studio, and she starts at entry level, where we learn along with her.
Animeta! goes into detail about the nitty gritty of what goes into making anime, particularly cleanup, inbetweening, and - the holy grail - raw key animation.
* Key animation - The process of drawing the images that become the key moments of motion. The raw keyframes are the basis of motion of a cut.
* Cleanup - The process of tracing lines on the keyframes to create a clean copy, ie combining (1) the raw keyframe with (2) the animation director's corrections to that raw keyframe on (3) a new sheet of paper to create the finalised frame.
* Inbetweening - The process of adding frames in between the keyframes, so that the motion becomes fluid, not choppy.
* Inbetween checking - The process of checking the cleaned and tweened frames, to make sure they are neat and the motion is smooth. This can sometimes involve fully correcting work, ie redrawing the work from scratch instead of just correcting portions of individual frames.
All the technical details are really fascinating, and what Miyuki needs to do to level up her skills. Animeta! shows the magic of making something come to life on the screen, conveying the sense of movement and weight and emotion, the joy of seeing the three cuts you did appear in the finished movie, and seeing audiences respond in a way that gets that you put your heart and soul into it.
But. Animeta! is upfront about how gruelling the working conditions are. There's no getting past the existing reality of long hours and low pay, which leads to high turnover. Cleanup and inbetweening is piecework, ie paid by the frame. And only completed frames, not ones that have to be redone.
Inbetween checker Fujiko tells Miyuki early on: "If it takes you one hour to draw one frame, then you can complete twelve frames a day if you work twelve hours. For a TV series, N2 pays about 210 yen per frame for inbetween and cleanup. So if you're working twelve hour days with no breaks, that's 2,520 yen a day, or about 75,000 yen a month. That's before taxes, of course." (Though she later adds that there are a handful of top-tier animators who make 10 million yen a year.) And to take the exam to become a key animator at N2, the requirement is to do 500 frames a month for three months in a row as an inbetweener, or work as an inbetweener for two years and take the exam in the third year.
It's kind of depressing, in a way that most manga about striving to excel in your field isn't. Even when Miyuki progresses beyond those beginner stages and wages, there are new struggles and setbacks to overcome. The counterargument is, if making animation is your passion, is walking away something you would regret? There's no good answer to the question, except - what option will leave you with the fewest regrets?
The most recent volume came out in 2020. Even though the series is not marked as concluded, Volume 5 does end in a reasonably satisfying place, with Miyuki having made a major decision about her future.
Miyuki Sanada is an aspiring animator, whose passion for it awoke from a chance episode of Royal Girl Pannacotta. As a newbie, she takes the exam to join N2 Factory Studio, and she starts at entry level, where we learn along with her.
Animeta! goes into detail about the nitty gritty of what goes into making anime, particularly cleanup, inbetweening, and - the holy grail - raw key animation.
* Key animation - The process of drawing the images that become the key moments of motion. The raw keyframes are the basis of motion of a cut.
* Cleanup - The process of tracing lines on the keyframes to create a clean copy, ie combining (1) the raw keyframe with (2) the animation director's corrections to that raw keyframe on (3) a new sheet of paper to create the finalised frame.
* Inbetweening - The process of adding frames in between the keyframes, so that the motion becomes fluid, not choppy.
* Inbetween checking - The process of checking the cleaned and tweened frames, to make sure they are neat and the motion is smooth. This can sometimes involve fully correcting work, ie redrawing the work from scratch instead of just correcting portions of individual frames.
All the technical details are really fascinating, and what Miyuki needs to do to level up her skills. Animeta! shows the magic of making something come to life on the screen, conveying the sense of movement and weight and emotion, the joy of seeing the three cuts you did appear in the finished movie, and seeing audiences respond in a way that gets that you put your heart and soul into it.
But. Animeta! is upfront about how gruelling the working conditions are. There's no getting past the existing reality of long hours and low pay, which leads to high turnover. Cleanup and inbetweening is piecework, ie paid by the frame. And only completed frames, not ones that have to be redone.
Inbetween checker Fujiko tells Miyuki early on: "If it takes you one hour to draw one frame, then you can complete twelve frames a day if you work twelve hours. For a TV series, N2 pays about 210 yen per frame for inbetween and cleanup. So if you're working twelve hour days with no breaks, that's 2,520 yen a day, or about 75,000 yen a month. That's before taxes, of course." (Though she later adds that there are a handful of top-tier animators who make 10 million yen a year.) And to take the exam to become a key animator at N2, the requirement is to do 500 frames a month for three months in a row as an inbetweener, or work as an inbetweener for two years and take the exam in the third year.
It's kind of depressing, in a way that most manga about striving to excel in your field isn't. Even when Miyuki progresses beyond those beginner stages and wages, there are new struggles and setbacks to overcome. The counterargument is, if making animation is your passion, is walking away something you would regret? There's no good answer to the question, except - what option will leave you with the fewest regrets?
The most recent volume came out in 2020. Even though the series is not marked as concluded, Volume 5 does end in a reasonably satisfying place, with Miyuki having made a major decision about her future.
