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Animator Supporters Project Posts Toshio Okada's Criticisms of Production Committee System with English Subtitles

On Monday, the Animator Supporters non-profit organization began streaming an English-subtitled clip from former Gainax president Toshio Okada's YouTube channel. The clip details Okada's criticisms of the anime production committee system.

Okada claimed that animators are so poor even though the industry attracts more money than ever because the production committee caps the budgets on individual anime titles. This is apparently because of a culture of corporate collusion, where the lead investing company determines beforehand the highest amount every other company in the committee can spend proportionally.

Okada elaborated that because control over the copyright is proportional to the amount of investment, companies will bid to become the highest investor (this is usually 40%). Once they attain this status, they have the power to determine the budget. For example, if the lead investor spends $4 million, the budget would be capped at $10 million.

After the budget has been determined proportionally, production committees will not accept larger investments from outsider (usually foreign) companies. A large investment would be split into separate projects to keep those companies lower down in the production committee. For example, Okada said that if a Chinese company offered to pay for an entire $10 million budget, the production committee would turn their investment into $50,000 chunks across 20 different projects. In other words, to maintain control and profits, the Japanese companies on anime production committees are incentivized to use the surplus from foreign investment to fund other projects instead of increasing an individual title's budget.

Okada says in the video that his primary source was the controversial director Yutaka Yamamoto (or "Yamakan"). Yamakan has been public about his own troubles getting funding in recent years. In 2017, the two men appeared in an interview together, where they raised many of the same points about the production committee system.

Animator Supporters commented that Okada's video was "a wonderful, straightforward explanation." It then stated that the reason why the project uses crowdfunding as its funding model is so that it can fully make use of international support for anime. Animator Supporters released a music video last August, which claimed to pay animators "180 dollars per keyframe which is 2-4 times more than the industry standard."

The organization is now crowdfunding for a second music video featuring voice actress and singer Aya Hirano as the vocalist. The organization plans to produce at least one new short animation annually and scale the payment structure to a fixed salary rather than by piece rate. This new campaign is called "The New Anime Making System Project Phase 2."

Source: Animator Supporters YouTube channel