It’s interesting to note that, while the first thing to go overseas back in the ‘60s was ink and paint. Today a studio like Mercury Filmworks, in Vancouver and Ottawa, is now doing brisk business intercepting animation done in overseas studios, and doing their digital ink-and-paint magic with it here at home, as well as doing an enormous amount of “Flash style” animation using Toon Boom’s Harmony. Quality has actually become a consideration again. What a concept! Some of the most simply designed, limited animation shows on television today are really quite good looking, clever and tight. Old school cartoon physics are reappearing more and more, and students coming out of schools all over North America are finding that there is actually a healthy, booming animation industry waiting for them.

So, what can we do to ensure that this work doesn’t wander overseas again? Studios are already starting to send Flash work overseas. At first, it was impossible. The service studios overseas only knew how to follow directions with a traditionally animated show, with all of its poses and lip sync previously worked out for them. Actually understanding the content of the show, following the story and being able to work as animation filmmakers was a foreign concept to most of them. But the learning curve is diminishing, and the desire to get the work that they have been losing back, has spurred them on. Studios in India and Asia are hungry to get back in on the enormous animation boom of the 21st century.

Here’s my idea, idealistic as I was back in the ‘70s, but it’s a plan where everybody wins. We need to help encourage the overseas studios to develop their own animation cultures, like Japan has done with such resounding success. Their dependence on North American animation needs to be diminished, as does our dependence on them. It’s not healthy. It’s fraught with difficulty, and it does nothing to honor and grow our respective cultures. Repatriation belongs everywhere. So I think we should continue to push the industry in that direction. Many people already are. The size and potential of the new Chinese market that is opening up is staggering. Should they be doing our low paid animation slave work for us, or developing their own culture? The answer is obvious. And leads to my final repatriation soapbox stand…

We all holler about Nike and Martha Stewart using sweatshops to produce their merchandise, but we have turned the other cheek while the animation industry does much the same. Perhaps to a far lesser scale on the slavery side of things, and there are artists overseas who enjoy their work, but at the end of the day it would be far more rewarding for them to decrease their dependency on foreign work and create their own animation culture. Who knows? They could probably teach us a thing or two, as Japan has with its risky, innovative, cutting edge style of animation storytelling, which has challenged our timid, politically correct, formula-based animation feature industry to rethink the way it makes movies.

We need to support the development of better, more fluid animation software as well, to ensure that production can still be kept here at home. Maybe even take a chance on investing in this development, taking a bit of a financial hit in order to shore up our businesses for the future. Is it such an idealistic leap of faith to suggest that we invest in the young animation artists who are pouring into and out of our animation schools? To ensure that they will find a robust and vitalized industry when they graduate? The digital revolution has created fantastic opportunities for us to flourish. Let’s take the bull by the horns and make this industry grow, rather than send it back overseas again, falling into an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Repatriation forever I say!

(Author’s note: This entire story could be transposed on the animation industry in Europe, where history took the same turns, within a slightly different timeframe. Outsourcing has zigzagged all over the planet, between countless nations, in an attempt to keep the costs of producing animation to a minimum.)

In his 30-year animation career, Joseph Gilland has worked with studios as diverse Walt Disney Feature Animation and the National Film Board of Canada. He has worked on all styles of animation, experimental films, television series, commercials, theatrical feature films, stop motion, title sequences, live-action films and documentaries. He is currently the head of the Classical and Digital Character Animation programs at the Vancouver Film School, and writing a passionate book about the art of animation.