But in the mid-’60s, with unions pushing for higher wages and better benefits, the animation machine came under a great deal of strain, and costs soon became too unmanageable for the studios to bear. Hanna-Barbara, rather than bowing under the pressure, started sending its ink-and-paint work to Manila, where costs could be kept way down. Many animation artists at that time were furious, seeing it as a cheap money grab, designed to put them out of work, so that a few top executives at the studio could strike it rich. But the studio heads had a much different story, of production costs spinning out of control, and the business of making cartoons simply becoming impossible to manage successfully.

Either way, it was a gut-wrenching episode in animation history, and all the studios and animation artists felt the crunch. Several of the big studios shut right down, and productions were reduced drastically at others. And so began the mass layoffs, particularly of ink-and-paint departments, as studios either downsized, shut down, or started sending their ink-and-paint work overseas.

The first thing to go was the ink-and-paint departments, the lowest paid of all the animation slaves, (largely made up of women, working in a still relatively male-dominated industry) but it was only a matter of time before the studios started sending their in-betweens to be done overseas, and not long after that they started sending animation. By the early to mid-’70s, the outsourcing of Saturday morning cartoon productions was the norm. Studios that used to employ hundreds of animation artists, now employed handfuls of artists in comparison. Storyboards, location, character and effects design packs, scripts, sound recording, dialogue breakdown and layouts were often kept in-house, depending on the production. More and more, as little work as possible was done in-house, and the more that could be sent overseas to Asia or India, the better for cost control.

Now this is all written from an objective point of view, but as an artist entering into the industry in the mid-’70s, I definitely developed some pretty strong, far from objective opinions about the whole “outsourcing” approach to making animated films. Of course everybody knows that the actual quality of the animation, the design of the characters, the effects animation, the lip sync, everything suffered, and a lot of the shows being produced during this era are just horrible to look at. Many cartoon series during this regrettable era were reduced to talking heads, with a ridiculously low drawing count per foot.

I actually made a vow to myself at that time, not to ever work on a TV series, based on what I was seeing on the tube. I had gotten into the animation business because of films like Pinocchio and Fantasia. I regarded the big studios churning out this kind of animation as a bunch of money-grubbing parasites clinging to the neck of my beloved, magical animation culture. To me it was simply hideous work, with no creative integrity whatsoever, and it went against every reason I had to initially get into the animation industry.

However, legions of my closest friends in the industry worked their fingers to the bone to create these lack-luster, half-baked TV shows that nobody would ever want to put on a demo reel. After all, everyone has to make a living. It was all a lot of dedicated animation artists could do just to survive. I was fortunate enough to find work at places like the National Film Board of Canada in the late ‘70s, and into the ‘80s, on big budget feature films, television specials and television commercials that kept me going. And so I thankfully escaped the unspeakable horror of working in an uninspired, rubberstamp cartoon factory.

Canada was assigned outsourced service. Ren & Stimpy was produced by Bardel in Vancouver, and the entire show eventually was produced up to Canada. © Spike TV.

For a period of time in the ‘70s, many features and most television specials in the U.S. and in Canada. shows like Richard Williams’ Raggedy Ann & Andy, Nelavana’s The Cosmic Christmas and The Devil and Daniel Mouse, Walt Disney’s feature animation projects and Ralph Bakshi’s films, were still being produced entirely on domestic soil. (Much of Raggedy Ann & Andy being made in London.) This was largely because the Asian and Indian studios still weren’t really trusted to produce quality animation, so the lower budgeted television series work went overseas, but if the budget for a show allowed it, there was still enough incentive to produce these higher quality shows at home.

The outsourcing industry was always a prickly, difficult process. Revisions and re-doing scenes was hotly contested by the overseas studios, (and still are to this day) and shows would be held hostage until the deadline loomed large, and the producers would have to compromise and accept shabbily finished work in order to meet their broadcast dates. Studios typically sent directors and supervisors overseas in an effort to control the outcomes, but language and cultural barriers still made the process messy and problematic at best. Communication in a foreign language, and in an awkward time zone, was frequently next to impossible.

But the pros outweighed the cons from a financial point of view, and, arguably, if outsourcing hadn’t been a possibility, the animation industry may have tanked a lot worse than it did! And all the while too, the overseas studios slowly improved. Their animators matured and became more proficient. Native creative supervisors overseas learned their trade, and learned the language, and became more invested in caring about the quality of the animation they were producing.

A neat sidebar to all this was that Canada was able to get outsourced service work as well as Asia and India, as there was a lot of talent in Canada, and the Canadian dollar made good business sense to many Hollywood cartoon studios. When I was working on the pilot for Ren & Stimpy with John K. in Hollywood, the ink-and-paint work was all going up to Bardel Animation in Vancouver, and the entire show eventually was produced up in Canada, as were many shows during this period, which served to keep a few studios and animation artists up north alive, and ready to jump into the next phase of the animation industry’s metamorphosis.