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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001
Down and Out in Toon Town:
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| Times ain't all that good in Los Angeles... |
Ah, those glory days. Are they gone for good?
Just six years ago, Disney's animated feature The Lion King grossed $300 million, making it the number one box-office hit for 1994 and one of the largest grossing films in history.
As a result, Simba wasn't the only one crowned king. The American Animator took his place on a new cinematic throne where he called the literal and figurative shots, reaped countless perks, garnered high salaries and enjoyed free lunches at DreamWorks. As a lowly executive at Turner Feature Animation during the height of the boom, I often found myself thinking, 'If only I could draw like those unbelievably talented animators…hell, if only I could draw…the world would be mine.'
But this is America, not El Dorado, and here everything that goes up must come down -- eventually. While the '90s signaled an animator's market, the Millennium, it would seem, favors the financial interests of the studios. This is, of course, bad news for the American Animator King.
According to Steve Hulett, business representative for M.P.S.C. Local 839 IATSE, the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Union, about 35 percent of their current 3,000 members are unemployed. Jeff Massie, the union's recording secretary, estimates that the union has approximately 1,000 fewer people working in union shops than they did three years ago.
According to a recent LA Times article, union president Tom Sito is baffled at the current statistics. Notes Sito, "This year, there are seven features being released, 10 new network television series, several prime-time series, more Internet work and cable than ever before, yet we've lost … a good third of our total jobs."
And who exactly is out-of-work? "The people who are unemployed right now would be, in the biggest market, clean-up artists who don't have CGI (computer-generated imagery) skills," says Hulett. "Board artists, more or less, are employed or at least partially employed. Television timing directors are underemployed but not unemployed."
When one looks at the big picture, it appears that the three main causes for this increase in unemployment are feature animation downsizing, overseas animation jobs, and, indirectly, the rise of computer animation.
Studio Downsizing
Hulett believes the animation industry is and has always been
cyclical. "The chronology of the industry was up and down, spotty
in the late '80s," remarks Hulett. "Then The Little Mermaid
hit, followed by Disney's other hit features including Beauty and
the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. Every
other studio decided they had to get into the animation business.
They couldn't ignore billion dollar, world-wide grosses.
"So the industry really heated up to unprecedented heights through the mid '90s," he continues. "Since 1997, we've had Fox Phoenix close. Warners has not gone away but has downsized considerably. DreamWorks has downsized and Disney has downsized, so you're faced with a thousand or more jobs that have been lost."
Apparently, the animation boom that exploded in the '90s was too good to last. Barry Weiss, senior vice president of animation production at Sony Pictures Imageworks attributes this fall to the normal fluctuations any industry faces. "Like any other business, the [animation] industry overbuilt and now there's a lot of vacancies," he explains. "People aren't buying as much as they were. But it's all relative. In other words, if the level of employment was a 2 in the beginning of the '90s, and the level of employment was a 10 in '96/'97, it's probably back down to a 7 or an 8. So it's still a helluva lot healthier than it was 10 years ago, but it's definitely come off its peak."
One reason why it might seem there are more people unemployed in the business is that schools have done a remarkable job of pumping out employable talent. So while a lot of these newcomers have been soaked into the system a number haven't been or have displaced people who have been employed for a long time.
Also, feature animation may have suffered from a case of too much too soon. With Disney releasing at least two animated features a year -- and every one touted as an "event" -- and other studios racing to deliver what they perceived as guaranteed moneymakers, the market became overly-saturated.
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Tom Sito, Union President,
has long fought for artist rights.
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A similar situation can be applied to television animation. Hulett believes that instead of focusing on producing quality American shows, the studios "want to make money as quickly as possible." It's easier and cheaper to purchase the Japanese-produced Pokémon than it is to do a show like Animaniacs.
"The studios, Warners and others, are more impatient with deficit financing than making a profit down the road," explains Hulett. "So hey if you could pick up Pokémon for $10,000 an episode and then spend $10,000 dubbing it and slightly editing it, that's 20,000 bucks and you're in the profits immediately."
Since most of our animation studios are branches of major corporations, profit margins are closely watched. After all, profits directly correlate to stock prices by which many executives live and die.
Animation veterans also point to another reason for the downsizing. Many television networks and feature film corporations rushed into animation, but when it came time to market the products to the public, they were baffled. So while animation artists created great products, they didn't catch on and make money. Confused by the needs of this new medium and surprised by the necessary commitment to generate a hit, many outlets decided to stop ordering animation, rather than spend the time and money needed to become experts in the field.
