NPO ANIMATOR SUPPORTERS INC
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Mission Statement
We’re Animator Supporters, a Japanese non-profit company founded in 2010. Our purpose is to improve the lives of animators and provide solutions to their low-wage problems! 10 years have passed since our founding. We started by giving underpaid animators a housing stipend of 6,000 thousand dollars per year. Then, in 2014, we opened The Animator Dormitory. Here, we provide direct housing assistance to underpaid animators. Located in Tokyo, animators can live at our dormitory for less than 300 dollars a month (utilities and internet included). You can learn more about The Animator Dormitory on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsLPWmJXcELI3QTuqzNqkVQ The Japanese anime industry which is responsible for many of your favorite works is valued at over 18 billion dollars. However, the animators responsible for this suffer under low wages, long work hours, and predatory subcontracting agreements that strip them of all employee benefits, all of which happen above-board in the industry. To call it cruel would be an understatement. The average monthly salary for an animator in their 20s is about 800 US dollars. There are even cases where first-year animators earn less than 300 dollars a month. The anime industry is currently suffering an extreme shortage of manpower due to high turnover rates caused by these low wages. This means that there's a lack of staff who can bring up newcomers and teach them proper technique. As a result, animation quality is declining across the industry, and cancelations are becoming more and more frequent. Actually, Chinese animation wages have exceeded those of Japan. There's concern that, due to poor wages and working conditions, Japan may lose its place in the animation industry. These conditions mean that Japanese talent is incentivized to take their skills elsewhere. This has already happened to the Japanese consumer electronics industry. Poor working conditions lead talent to flee to other countries, and the exact same thing is about to happen to the anime industry. Although foreign investment in anime has boosted animators' pay temporarily, we need long-term, sustainable solutions from Japan to keep the industry alive. The anime industry is in dire straits and we need help from the fans to fix it. Animators usually work under domestic outsourcing contracts instead of The Employment Standards Act -- which is meant to protect workers and is the standard at most Japanese companies. In addition to low pay, animators hired as contract workers may be forced to forgo entitlements like vacation pay, holiday pay, insurance, and retirement benefits. The root cause of animators’ financial struggles is low production budgets. To help these animators, we need to raise these as fast as possible. However, steps to remedy this issue have been very slow in coming from within the industry. (Wages for in-between and key animation have remained nearly stagnant for 10 years.) We don’t see a practical way to improve the situation from the inside, so we’re trying to create a new anime production system, completely separate from the framework of the current industry. As a simple, effective method to increase these budgets, we've started producing original anime through the power of worldwide funding. While there may be other efficient ways to increase production budgets, such as establishing an industry union, many of them aren't realistic in a Japanese context. We believe our approach is the path of least resistance and the most likely to bring substantial change to the industry. While all this may be the case now, things don’t have to be like this forever. We aspire to a higher standard of quality and ethics to fight for our colleagues, friends in studios all across Japan, and the fans themselves. We've been going to overseas anime events every year since 2014. This has given us some perspective about anime outside of Japan and garnered us a decent level of support overseas, making it possible for us to acquire funding from all around the world.
About This Cause
We run the Animator Dormitory, a dormitory designed for new animators where they can live despite the industry's horribly low pay. As mentioned in our introduction, this non-profit has been active for over 10 years. In the beginning, we gave new animators a housing stipend of 6,000 thousand dollars per year. Then in 2014, we opened The Animator Dormitory where we provide direct housing to underpaid animators, and now, The Animator Dormitory is finally up and running securely. Animators with less than 3 years of work experience tend to lead particularly difficult lives. Seeing this, we opted to establish these “safety nets” for new animators. We believe these programs have made a tangible difference in their lives. Many of our housing aid recipients have gone on to work as directors and chief animators. We see this as proof that our efforts have been able to nurture the talent of these young animators. However, The Animator Dormitory is just a bandaid over a deep wound. It helps animators who are struggling now, but we need to make more substantial improvements to animators’ wages before this wound can fully heal. What we’ve come to realize by attending overseas anime conventions yearly since 2014 is that anime is exclusively made to sell in Japan. There is little to no regard for overseas fans. In fact, even in the U.S., until sites like Crunchyroll and Netflix became standard, there was pretty much no way to watch anime legally, and they only came around recently, too. Over the next few years, we’ll be trying to produce a series of short-form music videos, gathering funds not only from Japan but from around the world. In doing so, we’ll create an environment where anime can be made properly with sufficient time and money. With this in mind, we’ve been lucky enough to cooperate with 23 major famous musicians on the music for this project including Mason Lieberman, composer for RWBY, and Kevin Penkin, composer for Made and Abyss and The Rising of a Shield Hero. We aim to create a new anime production system. One that allows animators to tackle their work with sufficient funding, completely separate from the limitations of the current industry.