No issue on politics would be complete without a nod to the politics we all deal with everyday--at our jobs. And no employment issue is more political than this--leaving your job.

Heraclitus once said, "Everything is in flux," and he certainly could have been referring to the animation industry. As the industry has grown, all sorts of changes and unexpected corporate couplings have happened. One of the unintended consequences of the rapid growth of the animation industry is the rampant job switching that has been going on for the last couple of years. Oddly enough, in all the articles that have been written on jobs in the animation industry, no one has written the article that could be the most useful to much of the industry--"Leaving."

Just to see what information I could find on the topic, I pretended that I was about to change my job, and went to three bookstores in search of a book that could give me some advice. Not advice on how to find a new job, but information on how to go about leaving the old one after I had already gotten the new one. Or how to handle the changes swirling around me. I found nothing, and therefore nothing to use as research for this article, except for personal experience, conversations, and the case studies of others. But upon mentioning job switching around the animation industry, everyone nodded in agreement. It was indeed something we had all been dealing with, either with our own change or with a co-worker's. As if on cue, as I started to write this piece, one of my closest colleagues at the animation studio I work with, changed jobs to go to a competitor. She conveniently became the final case study in my research.

Experiences are a little different between animators and what we can call animation executives (the development, production and network side of the industry), and I am going to discuss them separately.

Then and Now
Changing jobs, while an issue, has not been a big event for most animators, except for those who have been somewhere a long time. Most are used to moving wherever there was work, and leaving when production on a show or film was completed. Everyone knew they would be at a certain studio for a limited time, and then would be on to the next job. Most knew that the idea of being a studio for 50 years was a myth, and that their experience would be much like that of many of the animators of the 1930s and 40s, according to Tom Sito, head of Motion Pictures Screen Cartoonists, Local 839 IATSE, and an animator at DreamWorks. In addition, while the animation companies were competing for work or for shows to be picked up, they were not competing in the same way for artists. There was a feeling that animation was being judged as a genre, not so much studio by studio, and all shows and films depended on the success of all other shows and films. Companies would even collude in terms of salary, and were not glancing around on a regular basis to see whom they could steal.

But the industry is frenetic now. The recent successes in the industry and high profits derived from animated films, and the pressure to beat previous films, have caused a shift. The additions of DreamWorks, Warner Bros. Feature Animation, and Fox have changed the animation job landscape considerably. Animators right now are experiencing what successful college football players feel when the NFL comes scouting. And suddenly, the companies that are owned by giant corporations can double the salaries of animators from competing studios, offer giant bonuses, or make other over-the-top moves to staff their studios. Animators, many who worked (or didn't work) through the leaner times in the 1970s and 80s, now have their pick of projects. And their attitude is that animation in the past has been cyclical, so why not make as much money as possible while they can?